Wireless Net phones hit by waplash

Deafening hype for instant information via mobile devices raised consumers' expectations before many people even got their hands on a phone using wireless application protocol, or WAP. When those phones, with their rudimentary ability to tap into the Internet, finally hit the market, their performance was so far below consumers' expectations that the industry created what skeptics call waplash.

Now the question among wireless-industry executives is how to dig themselves out of the hole they have created. "We only have a few chances to convince people of the utility of mobile advertising," warns David Eastman, vice president of mobile business at Agency.com, an Internet consultancy minority-owned by Omnicom Group Inc., New York. "And we may have already blown it."

Indeed, "if the first bottle of Coke tasted like road tar, and your advertisement was that the next bottle would taste better, do you think that would be effective?" asks David King, director of digital JWT, the interactive arm of the J. Walter Thompson ad agency, part of WPP Group PLC.

But there are still believers in this technology, and last week some of them gathered here to discuss the possibilities and limitations of wireless business and marketing at a conference called Mobile Business Forum 2000.

Despite all the hype, the wireless-advertising industry is still in its infancy. According to Forrester Research, $890 million will be spent world-wide on mobile advertising by 2005.

That is only about 5% of the estimates for the total to be spent on interactive advertising, itself a tiny fraction of all ad spending. Compared with the level of consumers' expectations, "there is an inevitable disconnect" between what is offered and what people want, King says.

But among the skeptics were some small companies that had launched successful campaigns using mobile phones and were pressing ahead with plans for expansion.

Just ask Annicka Jarnehammer, the chief marketing officer of MobilePosition AB (www.mobileposition.com), a company that helps people use their mobile phones as navigational tools.

The Stockholm company offers services such as YachtPosition, to help boats find harbors and marinas; BikePosition, to help bikers find gas stations and fellow travelers, and DatePosition, which searches for people with a certain profile and matches potential partners with beeps as they walk past one another.

MobilePosition had just 20,000 subscribers as of July and two million page impressions that month, but Jarnehammer was hopeful that the company's focus would help it find a niche in the mobile-communications market.

"Successful advertising on mobile devices takes advantage of time and place," says Agency.com's Eastman. "Those are the strengths of these devices, not their ability to deliver compelling content." Too much advertising for these services has created inflated expectations, he says.

For example, a recent ad for British Telecommunications PLC's Cellnet service urges consumers to "surf the Net" and shows a man on a surfboard heading straight for a mobile-phone screen.

"The problem with something like that is expectations," says JWT's King. "No one should promise the Internet when they are talking about wireless communications, because they won't be able to deliver it."