Where should mobile sit in your business?

MobiThinking was a trifle surprised to read on the site of UK-based Marketing Week yesterday, 14 October 2008, that News International had shut its mobile division. High profile… for mobile web… mobile strategy boss, Andrew Bagguley has left and there was talk of redundancies for his staff (the latter airbrushed from later versions of the story).

Why the raise of eyebrow? Because News International – the arm of Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire (the same happy family as Sky, Fox, WSJ and The Australian) – owns some of Britain’s biggest circulation newspapers The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun and The News of the World – had led the charge to mobile, with thesun.mobi, particularly.

The Sun was the first mainstream UK paper to launch a .mobi, almost a year ago to the day. Surprise subsided as it was pointed out that much of the tabloid’s working-class readership weren’t desk bound, so were more likely to access the web by mobile, if at all.

Two months later the Sun was trying out Quick Response [QR] codes, bar codes in the Newspaper, that when scanned by a phone took the reader to a mobile site, worth reading in The Sun’s words.

Two weeks back thesun.mobi was also announced Association of Online Publishers’ mobile site for 2008.

Curiosity made us check the story with News International’s London HQ, who were none too pleased with it and planning to have a quiet word with Marketing Week.

The line from News International was that Andrew Bagguley’s job – setting up the group’s mobile strategy – had been completed “successfully”, and the mobile team, rather than being shut down had been merged into mainstream digital, with no redundancies.

We also received some stats – hooray: thesun.mobi averages 1.5m page impressions a month from 300,000 plus visits. Thesun.mobi accounts for half of page views across the News International mobile network.

So mobile at The Sun and The Times will now be integrated into an overall marketing, multi-platform, strategy? You’ve got to wonder why mobile web wasn’t part of a wider digital strategy from the start.

Coincidentally, mobiThinking will be attending The Great Mobile Debate in London tomorrow 16 October 2008, where the panel includes BSkyB’s David Gibbs and BBC’s Matthew Postgate. The event poses the following question: “Mobile is the key to the digital world. So what do you need to know to make it work?”

MobiThinking’s first question will be “Where should mobile sit in your business in terms of responsibility, budget, strategy etc? Where do they physically sit? Who’s the boss (and the boss’s boss)?”
The answer from News International’s sister company, BSkyB, should be particularly interesting.

What’s your opinion: standalone division or Integrated? What’s the reporting line?