Google helps Publicis with its digital ads

When David Kenny decided in the early 1990s to throw himself into the Internet, he came to Paris to learn from the master – the Minitel, at that time the only successful national digital network for commerce.

Now, Kenny, the chief executive of the digital advertising agency Digitas, comes to Paris to learn from another master: Maurice L©vy, the chairman of Publicis, which bought Kenny’s company for $1.3 billion a year ago.

For L©vy, who runs one of the world’s biggest advertising conglomerates, mobile phones are the next big thing in advertising.

At a press meeting in Paris this week with Kenny, he said Publicis was exploring investments in Asia and the United States to build its mobile ad expertise. That would come on top of L©vy’s acquisition of Phonevalley, a French start-up, in September.

Mobile phones have four main attributes that make it what will soon be “probably the most important medium” for advertisers, L©vy said: They are global, personal and immediate, and there are billions of them.

“We already have close to three billion subscribers around the world,” he said. “It is already the largest medium in China, with 600 million phones. And if you want to target someone individually, we will know how to get access to that person.”

While the notion of commercials interrupting phone conversations and inserting themselves into text messages may be alarming to many consumers, L©vy was reassuring.

“If we look at mobile phones, it will not be so much advertising,” he said. “It will be much more ‘marketing services,’ ” a gentler way of combining what the seller and the buyer want at a particular time.

“This is money that is mostly going elsewhere now and which will be channeled to a new medium, and with a measurement that will be immediate.”

But as with Internet advertising, he said, those metrics need to be better. That is why L©vy is joining with Google, the Internet search company, to inject some of its programming rigor into how ads are targeted.

“There are some limitations in the development of online and mobile advertising due to the difficulty of some of our clients to understand how exactly to get to the right audience, the right measurement and the best return on their investment,” L©vy said.

Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, joined L©vy in Paris to explain their cooperation. The two said they would develop an approach to digital advertising that was both creative and technologically savvy, a combination they said was lacking in the business world today.

Some of the real-world experience, though minimal so far, appears to support the experts’ contentions.

BuzzCity, a Singapore company that operates a mobile phone social networking site with two million members in several countries, found in a recent survey of its users that 35 percent have made a purchase over the phone. Rich media content – games, ring tones, wallpaper images, etc. – are the most popular.

Of all the factors influencing mobile purchases, a “special offer” from a merchant persuaded most of the members. Other influences were need (10 percent), friends (9 percent) and direct ads (7 percent).

Despite consumer resistance, there is another growing need for advertising on phones: Some mobile operators are relying on ads to increase their “rich media” content offerings beyond ring tones.

Vodafone’s mobile video service, which it began in Italy this week following rollouts in Spain, Greece and the Czech Republic, is advertising-funded, for example, allowing it to be free for its customers. Vodafone has also started ad-funded texting and games services.

With an increasing need for mobile ads targeted to different countries, carriers and customers, the technical measurements need to keep up.

“We all carry around the notion that advertising is a television ad or a print,” Schmidt said. “But in fact, there are millions of ads distributed in very sophisticated ways. Maurice’s message is, ‘Eric, you’re missing the opportunity in mobile. You have to get an integrated mobile strategy so we can give a mobile offer to our advertisers.’ ”

Digitas, for example, has “clients with 3,000 campaigns going on at the same time in the digital marketplace,” Kenny said.

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