IFRA

Every year someone say's this is the year of the mobile and somehow it never is but I'm going to say now that this is the Telegraph Media Group year of the mobile.....

At least none you can argue with that”. Maani Safa, head of mobile at the Telegraph began with a cheeky grin but his presentation about the Telegraph's mobile achievements gave weight to his assertion.
Safa took us on a short journey through time to the mobile news application of two years ago. He demonstrated the number of clicks it took to arrive at what was ultimately a very limited amount of content. Then he jumps to the current application and there is full (personalised) content, device detection, better navigation and perhaps most importantly there are banner adverts, pre-roll video ads, and tracking of level of engagement and time spent. Safa told us of lessons learnt on the way. Of the fact, for example that sponsors competed to brand the application but often didn't capitalise on it for example with a logo that was clickable but didn't go to a mobile specific page “They said there's no need for a microsite because it's a brand campaign and nobody is going to click on the logo. There was a 29 per cent clickthrough rate and it went to a Flash banner on their home page which showed up as nothing on the phone – a waste of time.”
The response was to shift to three levels of sponsorship (bronze, silver, gold) with the Telegraph creating microsites and content behind sponsors logos. One year and 250 thousand downloads later the application is well into break even and has been followed by a Formula 1 application and a version 2.0 of the app due in a week's time. According to Safa the biggest single change for that will be that “next week I expect the iPhone experience to be better than that on the desktop.” But if the iPhone is king this year, Safa foresees a big change in the future; “I think iPhone and Android will swap places – Android is already on thirty handsets and the apps will migrate to it”.