Counting the cost of falling in love with mobile

As the week of the FT Digital media conference, the mGaming and mSports Summits draw to a close, the word of mobile lies in an interesting position. After years of anticipation of this year being the “year of mobile”, it seems that the backlash, to some degree, has started.

Its like a newly dating couple: the worlds of media, retail, commerce, sport, gambling and gaming have all blurted out “I love you” on the second date and now they are suddenly having second thoughts. And like many relationships, that real problem is cost and getting on with each others friends.

Let me explain. One of the key messages coming out of the crop of mobile events this week is that mobile is the key to not just delivering a new sales channel, but rather it is the tool to gather vast amounts of data on consumers and use that to personalize down to an almost individual level.

But with this comes the problem that every vertical market looking to use mobile in some way is now looking in very realistic terms at how much all this is going to cost.  And its not a good look.

The thing about using mobile to gather data and to slice and dice and expertly market and control consumer behaviour is that it requires so much work – not least to connect all the databases for all the other channels these companies already use.  To achieve any meaningful results from doing this, compared to the level of extra business it might deliver, delivers no real ROI.

I go to a lot of these mobile conferences – heck, I chair most of them – and the message is getting ever more frenzied from the mobile technology community, showing cornucopia of things that can be done with mobile, data and CRM. The problem is that no one is listening to what the customers of this tech are saying. They want a cheap, new way to sell more stuff and they don’t want to spend much to achieve it.

Two years ago, the argument to get an app or m-website (or both) was reasonably clear and the cost relatively minor. Extending this first foray into mobile into actually trying to create omni-channel businesses and use the data and technology to any great end is a very different proposition.

One thing that has become clear to me over the past month is that what is going to happen is that ‘digital’ companies – the Amazons, the online games and gaming firms, eBay and so on – are all going to steal a march. They are starting from a digital standpoint. An established bricks and mortar business will struggle.

As one wag at mGaming Summit put it to me, its like Europe after World War Two. The countries that were bombed to oblivion now have super fast railways and highways as they basically got to build them in straight lines over the ruins. In the UK – analagous here to traditional businesses – we can never achieve that as we have to build our roads and railways and airports around thousands of years of history and sacred monuments.

This is what is happening in the mobile world. Long on promise, but to deliver it, it is going to take a lot more than the likes of, say, Weve, claiming to have 50million opted in mobile users to market to. That is immaterial. Making it happen is too expensive for the results it can, currently, yield. Maybe this year is the year that mobile starts looking online for a new lover?