I attended mobileYouth's semiar last week. It didn't really cover the topics I was interested in - namely teens and their relationship with mobile phones - because it primarly focused on the relationship between young people and network opertors.
The basic challenge could be summarised as this: "why do young people trust Nokia and Apple, but have little time for O2 or Vodafone?".
There are countless arguments that could come out of that question, but mobileYouth gave us at least a couple of answers:
- With young people, you have to invest in order to gain their trust - and that's not simply about freebies - it could be about creating events for them (Red Bull)
- Maybe content is not king in mobile - operators have been banking on content revenue to pick up from where voice and sms have left it, but it hasn't paid back yet
We talked of Red Bull and Nike as brands that have managed to remain relevant to teens, to maintain their trust. So what about brands who made content pay?
Well, the first one that came to mind is Sky.
They could have been just a pipe, competing with other pipes on coverage, customer service, features (see Sky+) and of course price. But Sky are also the home of football, and through that they certaily have a different connection with millions of consumers compared to NTL/Virgin or BT. Just to keep the parallel going a bit further, it is interesting to note that Sky channels are also available on most other 'pipes' .
The conclusion may be that operators should or should have run their content operations with more conviction and focus than they have done: use their pipes and expertise as a beach head, but build an independant content business that can feed from direct billing and advertising.
