Wireless is the future of broadband
Mark Ashley-Wilson, Executive Producer at HotHouse Interactive.
As wireless slowly enters our lives it’s nice to know that ADSL, broadband and cable are not (yet) redundant.
Your purchase of a broadband product is a crucial choice in keeping up to date with the latest sites and more importantly with the technology that the latest sites and companies are delivering to your desktop every day. But can you sit on your couch, bed or veranda and browse the SMH without your partner tripping over wires? What about your local park, beach or favourite hidden corner? We are not talking Wi-Fi, but pure wireless broadband. Welcome to your next purchase Wi-Fi’s problem is that it requires users to alter their behaviour. Mobile workers cannot necessarily go to their favourite or nearest to log on, they must go to a specific location. Field service agents are more likely to want to access their intranet from their vehicle or their client’s premises” not from a McDonalds restaurant. Alternately, mobile phone networks offer data speeds that are too slow to be acceptable for many tasks. Unwired Australia launched in Sydney this week and claims to be the world’s largest wireless broadband provider. It’s simple plug-n-play makes perfect sense for renters who can’t get broadband because of building restrictions, for sales people who do off-site presentations, for the person who simply wants to work on the laptop in the sun in the back yard. Imagine the weekend house hunters sitting outside an open for inspection and taking a virtual walkthrough of the next house they want to see. The power is now firmly at the fingertips of the consumer.
Wireless broadband offers the same fast speeds as those offered by Cable or ADSL broadband technologies. However, the similarities stop there. Customers connect to high speed internet wirelessly over the air, rather than through a phone line or cable. This means that you get all the benefits of traditional broadband, plus the portability and freedom that only wireless broadband can offer.
Wireless is better than wired
It’s quicker to deploy, costs less to maintain, has less to go wrong and is far more flexible. Wherever there’s a choice between the two technologies, wireless wins.
This is definitely the future of broadband, and how you integrate your life with the internet. It’s now truly unescapable and advertisers will need to adjust their strategies to capture the attention of these roving surfers. Advertisers will need to fully take advantage of the medium’s characteristics: multimediality, immediacy, interactivity. Video can play a crucial role in enhancing the creativity level and also the quality of online ads. The point is we still need to connect with consumers from the very beginning of the relationship. But, at the same time, we need to “respect” our target, being polite with our advertising messages, asking for a sort of permission when presenting ads in unusual or intrusive formats.
Richer online advertising
New research by DoubleClick suggests that rich media usage continues to grow quarter by quarter, while larger ads have surpassed the smaller options in popularity. Large formats are getting more and more popular: for example, the leaderboard, a wide unit (728 x 90) that often appears at the top of web pages, is now the fastest growing size at 562% growth from Q2 2002. Half-page ads (550 x 480) had the second highest response rate at 90%. So the question you need to pose to your agency is “ How are you targeting my customers now the rules have changed? Wireless broadband is the future of the internet. Start getting your online strategies in place now because those roving surfers are already out there.
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