Do web marketers have it all wrong?

“I have been disappointed at the slow rate of development of the cellphone — both what the gadget can do and what marketers are doing with it.” Anja Merret: TechLeader
I don’t really have any qualms about the functionality of the mobile phone, but I am in 100% agreement with Anja in expressing my disappointment on what marketers are doing with it.
In her post on Techleader she mentions “Jan Chipchase, principle researcher for Nokia, [who have predicted that] there will be three billion people connected on cellphones by the end of 2007.
That is a fair chunk out of the approximately 6.3-billion people inhabiting the Earth. He also anticipates that within another two years, a further billion people will be connected.”
Anja continues with a wish list of features for mobile phones and applications she thought would be “run in the mill” for marketers by now. But it isn’t.
My question today is why? How is it possible that with such a global uptake in mobile connectivity that it seems the international marketing minds are so slow to respond? Ok, fair enough, they probably aren’t that slow.
Let’s scale it down a bit then. How is it possible that with 83% mobile penetration in South Africa and 11% internet penetration, our marketers are still fighting over internet stakes?
I’m willing to venture a guess. I think our marketers, and predominantly our web strategists, are trying so hard to keep up with international web trends, looking to duplicate innovative web solutions such as Facebook and Youtube, that they seem to have little time left to worry about the internet’s “poor cousin.”
Our web strategists are so consumed by creating / adopting video and audio into marketing strategies, even though it is evident that our bandwidth doesn’t allow it. We’re so blindly mesmerized by Web 2.0 that it seems any form of rationale is being chucked right out the window.
We build social interactive press material including video features through Youtube, bookmarked reference material through Del.icio.us and enabling the material to be pushed to various content aggregators like Amatomu, Digg and Stumble Upon, blissfully ignorant of the fact that our users don’t even comprehend the effect or mere existence of any of these tools.
We try to educate businesses and consumers when surely marketers should not be forcing adoption onto them, but rather devise strategies that complement their usage patterns.
We often boast about our latest web platforms that have evolved to be of similar, if not better quality than our US and European counterparts, yet we are totally oblivious to the fact that we lack the core ingredient…traffic.
No wonder Vinny Lingham doesn’t think Afrigator is worth investing in. It’s not because of a poorly built platform, it’s simply because there is no critical user mass to support the business model.
We’re trying to keep up with international internet innovations, but we seem to forget that we aren’t even in the same league as the US. We simply don’t have the capacity, the infrastructure or the critical mass to support this Web 2.0 phenomena.
We’re already evangelising the rise of Web 3.0 when most of our businesses are still in Web 1.0 phase. We continue to blog even though most of our readers are fellow bloggers.
I’m not disputing the importance of internet marketing in South Africa, but I was once told that if the internet penetration is 11% then 11% of your marketing budget should be spent online.
Does that mean 83% of your marketing budget should be spent on mobile?

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