Mobile Marketing

Velti Rolls Out Mobile Marketing Platform 4.0 At Mobile World Congress

2008-03-09T22:58:00.000-05:00

Mobile Communities, M-Commerce and Personalised Marketing Are Key Enhancements To Class-Leading Mobile Marketing Technology

London, UK, Mar 5th 2008: Velti, (LSE-AIM: VEL), a mobile marketing and advertising technology service provider, launched version 4.0 of its Mobile Marketing Platform (MMP 4.0) at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.This latest version features enhanced advertising and marketing templates enabling Velti’s customers to reach consumers through new interactive mobile mediums including mobile communities, games and applications. Building on more than seven years of experience in mobile advertising technology development, MMP 4.0 allows advertisers and operators to create campaigns that offer consumers a unique mobile marketing experience rather than simply putting adverts in front of eyeballs. Loyalty schemes, mobile coupons, social networks and other interactive templates can now be easily designed, deployed and measured giving marketers new ways to reach customers through their mobile phones and other portable devices. “MMP 4.0 allows companies to bring the mobile phone into the wider marketing mix,” says Alexandros Moukas, CEO, Velti. “Rather than just experiment with mobile advertising and marketing, advertisers now have the technology platform to engage with customers in new ways to create brand awareness, build loyalty, offer new content and interact in ways that traditional advertising can not.” Velti’s founding principal for its technology platform is to offer enhanced interactivity with end users, taking mobile advertising and marketing beyond the banner ad and other Internet advertising staples. MMP 4.0 enables advertisers to develop more sophisticated SMS and MMS campaigns offering integration with online games and social networks that allow mobile communication. MMP 4.0 also includes a new version of the Personalization Engine, capable of retrieving and processing real time data from consumer behaviour resulting in real-time dynamic segmentation and user-targeting. This advanced facility results in phenomenal response rates to campaigns, such as in the campaign developed with mobile operator MTEL on a short code competition led to the country’s most successful mobile campaign with over 12.5m messages from a subscriber base of just 4.5m. Adds Moukas: “Our customer base of global brands, mobile operators and media companies want to reach out to consumers in new and exciting ways. They’re thinking way beyond the banner advert but need a technology and service partner that gives them the platform and the confidence to invest in new mobile campaigns. MMP 4.0 builds on the incredible success story of Velti as a company. As mobile advertising evolves into a crucial part of the marketing mix, Velti will continue to offer customers new and innovative ways to exploit the market to its full potential.” Velti is offering demonstrations of its innovative Mobile Marketing Platform at its booth 7C86 in Hall 7.

Google working on own-brand handset to grab share of $11bn mobile adverts

2007-08-03T11:08:00.000-05:00

Google is angling for a huge slice of the potential $11 billion (£5.4 billion) mobile advertising market with the launch of a “Google phone” especially tailored to its services.

The internet search giant is understood to be developing a handset that is customised to showcase its products, such as its search engine, e-mail and Google Maps.

The GPhone, about which the Californian group has already held talks with mobile operators, including Spain’s Telefónica, is aimed at helping it to secure a chunk of the rapidly growing mobile advertising market. It hopes to replicate its runaway success with internet advertising by acting as “broker” for mobile advertisements.

The failure of 3G services on mobile phones and a lack of “web friendly” handsets has held back the market for mobile advertising.

However, with phones becoming ever more sophisticated and mobile network speeds faster – more than 20 per cent of UK mobile subscribers are expected to have access to the mobile internet at broadband speeds by the end of this year – mobile is now seen as the next battleground for advertisers.

Sir Martin Sorrell, the chief executive of WPP, the marketing group, recently highlighted the growing importance of mobile. Figures compiled by WPP suggested that mobile phones will account for a 5 per cent share of all advertising spending in Britain by 2010. Research by Informa Telecoms & Media forecasts that the market for advertising on mobile phones is set to be worth more than $11.3 billion annually in 2011.

A Google-branded phone could go head-to-head with Apple’s iPhone, which is set to be launched in the UK before Christmas.

Mobile is deemed so valuable in part because of the targeting that the devices allow. Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, said recently that mobile phone ads are “twice as profitable or more than nonmobile phone ads because they are more personal”.

Google has already brokered deals with mobile phone companies, including Vodafone, the British operator.

Google’s search engine also comes preloaded on handsets made by companies including Samsung and LG.

However, some mobile companies are thought to have been reluctant to hand over too big a share of their revenues to Google.

This year some operators, including France Télécom, which owns Orange, held talks about creating a search engine to challenge the likes of Google and Yahoo!. Google is now hoping to create its own branded and designed handset and to develop more advanced services for phones.

Sources familar with Google said that any notion of a Google phone was “speculative”. A spokesman for Google in the UK said: “We are partnering with almost all the carriers and manufacturers to get Google search and other Google applications on to their devices and networks.”

Source: Times Online

CBS Plans to Sell Ads on Mobile Devices

2007-08-01T10:28:00.000-05:00

CBS Corp. plans to announce today a partnership with four mobile-advertising companies to sell ads on mobile devices for its entertainment, news and sports programming. Marketers will be able to buy text and banner ads for mobile Web sites as well as video commercials for mobile devices as part of CBS Mobile's partnership with AdMob, Millennial Media, Rhythm NewMedia and Third Screen Media. The deal is an effort by CBS to find new ad-revenue streams. The pact comes as media companies are offering more programming -- from weather and sports to news and prime-time shows -- through mobile devices. General Electric Co.'s NBC announced yesterday a deal with Verizon Wireless that makes short videos from nine channels available to subscribers of its V Cast service.

Source: WSJ

Cellphone penetration positions it for marketing success

2007-07-31T10:47:00.000-05:00

Cellphone penetration into the South African market and the advancement of mobile marketing means the cellphone will soon compete with traditional media head-on. The days of colourless cellphones screens with no graphics and tiny squeaky speakers are but a distant memory to most of us. We now carry devices with full multimedia functionality, stereo sound and high-speed connectivity to the Internet.

Furthermore, these devices have penetrated the market more effectively than any other medium. It's hard to say how many South African's carry a cellphone, but the three cellphone networks together total a combined base of over 36 million active SIM cards in 2007.

Comparing that to radio, TV and Internet stats, cellphones are now the dominant communications device in the market. The South African Advertising Research Foundation (SAARF) says in its AMPS (All Media and Products Survey) 2006 survey that there are around 28.5 million radio listeners and around 24.5 million TV adult viewers*. In addition, the ratio of cellphone users compared to Internet users and landlines is around 5:1.

Similar global trend

The trend globally is similar. Cellphones are in the majority with 2.5 billion active cellphones, compared to an estimated 900 million Internet users and a billion television sets.

And to add even more weight to these figures, most people's cellphones remain within two metres of them for the majority of the day, while TVs, radios and even the Internet are sampled sporadically.

Within this context, add the fact that we live instant lives. When I want to know something, I want to know it now. Not in five minutes time, now when I get to the office. Now.

Let's take a scenario or two: Bob is at his daughter's birthday party and there is no TV in sight, no radio to listen to and he certainly wasn't allowed to bring his laptop along. But the Springboks are playing their opening game against Samoa in the World Cup and he wants to know the score. If he could get the score off a .mobi site throughout the game, that would be great. Better yet, he'd like updates sent to him as the game progressed.

Jenny's sitting at a coffee shop with a friend, Liz, chatting about how she's going to surprise her husband for her anniversary. Liz remembers a great restaurant but can't remember where it is exactly or what the telephone number is. TV or radio won't help; neither will the newspaper at the front of the coffee shop. A cellphone will, particularly since this new restaurant has its own .mobi site with menu and contact details.

Harnessing the power of mobile

As a consumer you're already nervous when hearing words like “harnessing”. What am I going to get next on my phone? Searching for information like Bob or Jenny is one thing, having it sent to you is quite another.

At the same time, the cellphone has the power to deliver really worthwhile information to you, the consumer. For example, a retail store sends you a MMS with its latest specials and an extra 15% off your total bill if you present the MMS at the cashier.

Now who's going to complain about that? Or you're about to be eligible to upgrade your cellphone contract and your service provider sends you an MMS with a barcode saying if you take it in and upgrade your contract, you'll get a free Bluetooth headset.

Therefore communicating to consumers via their cellphones in a way that benefits them not only builds trust between consumers and companies but provides a mutually beneficial interaction.

Put together in days

And while the process of building a campaign to communicate with customers via the TV, radio or Internet can take weeks to months, a well-though- out mobile campaign can be put together in days.

But it's about being creative and capturing the consumers' attention and most importantly adding value.

*Importantly, these figures represent people who watched TV or listened to the radio once in the space of a week

Source: BizCommunity

Mobile Advertising: Easier Than You've Heard

2007-07-27T09:33:00.001-05:00

AS GOOGLE HAS SO SUCCESSFULLY shown, if you make media buying intuitive and easy, the advertisers will come. And not just the mom and pop retailers, but nearly every major marketer is now involved in some form of search marketing, if only to protect its own flanks from aggressive competitors. So, how does this translate to mobile advertising? There is still a nagging feeling out there that mobile advertising is hard to do. That it will require yet another agency specialist like search does or a fully mature mobile site, but it doesn't.

Let's start with a few facts and figures: there are three times more mobile handsets in the U.S. than PCs. In fact, 76% of U.S. households own at least one mobile phone. There are twice as many more mobile subscribers than there are Internet users. Data usage is doubling every year.

Simply put, the mobile phone has become an indispensable device giving marketers access to target audiences 24x7. It doesn't take an economist to project that marketers cannot afford to ignore this channel for long.

Mobile advertising campaigns have gone far beyond the voting campaigns we're all familiar with from American Idol. Ads delivered to mobile devices can have direct response mechanisms such as calling a 1-800 number or entering a telephone number or email to receive more information, or drive traffic to an existing mobile site.

Targeting can be set by language, country, category or by search behavior (and in some cases, combinations of various targeting parameters.) And, contrary to popular belief, a mobile site is not necessary to run a campaign. Running a campaign is exceedingly easy. With online self-service features, it takes only three online steps: entering or uploading ad creative, setting a maximum cost per click and determining the call to action required of users.

Rather than thinking of mobile as a "new, unapproachable" channel, think of ways to tie it in to your current online or search campaigns. Most companies whether brand or direct response have found ways to intelligently and easily incorporate the mobile channel into their marketing mix. Some use it as a call to action on TV, print or online to drive mobile brand interactivity while others are simply driving interested audiences who happen to be on their mobile phone to a core sales-driven action such as calling a 1-800 number, driving subscription to an online newsletter, or to a mobile alert.

While seemingly in a nascent stage, the fact is mobile advertising is projected to grow from $1.5 billion in 2006 to $13.9 billion by 2011 (eMarketer, January, 2007). The reasons are simple: mobile advertising that delivers relevant and useful ads gives users immediate answers that are regarded as valuable content; advertisers can influence their audience during the "last mile" at the moment just before a purchase in the real world. The level of targetability and reach that mobile advertising can provide will become points of success for marketers and we're well beyond the early adoption stage.

Don't be the advertiser left behind.

Source: MediaPost

Marketers optimistic on future of mobile ads

2007-07-26T10:26:00.000-05:00

The prevalence of cell phones has marketers seriously considering the future of mobile. There is already an 85 percent cell phone penetration in the United States, according to pay-per-call company Ingenio. That surpasses landlines, which have 72 percent penetration.

“There is a lot of hype about mobile marketing and where it is going,” said Neil Strother, an analyst at JupiterResearch, which estimates mobile reach will be at 2.9 billion by 2011. Today, mobile reach is at 171 million.

“The ad model will take off as soon as consumers don’t have to pay fees for the mobile Web,” said Marc Barach, chief marketing officer of Ingenio.

According to Barach, one of the most promising ad models will combine search with mobile.

David McCarthy, vice president of advertising and business at vertical search engine Miva, agrees with Barach.

“The mobile market has the advantage of learning from the online world,” he said. “That market has been dominated by search and I expect the same to be true of mobile.”

Some think the launch of Apple’s iPhone will speed up adoption of mobile marketing as a monetization channel, but not everyone agrees.

“Mobile-marketing adoption will increase but not because of the iPhone,” said Jeff Hassemer, director of product marketing at Responsys Inc., in a DM News blog post. “Even if the iPhone meets its astronomical projections, that is still less than 0.5 percent of the market.”

He also wrote that Blackberrys and other phones already match many iPhone functions.

Advertisers need to optimize their Web sites for small mobile screens. Mobile Ready Entertainment Corp. created a Web site development service to convert sites for use on mobile platforms.

“Our service helps businesses make their Web site accessible to the hundreds of millions of mobile surfers around the world,” said Mike Magolnick, co-CEO of Mobile Ready.

Source: DM News

The U.S. Mobile Search Market

2007-07-25T14:53:00.001-05:00

eMarketer estimates that by 2011, mobile search will account for about $715 million, or close to 15 percent of a total mobile advertising market worth $4.7 billion.

In April 2007, iCrossing reported that three-quarters of mobile Internet subscribers access mobile search services.

The U.S. mobile search market is expected to have some growing pains over the next two or three years as the major operators, portals and mobile search start-ups compete to be the mobile search leader.

eMarketer Senior Analyst John du Pre Gauntt said, "Mobile search in the US has all the right parts on the table: a huge online advertising ecosystem, the world's leading content industry, massive portal players, major league mobile operators and a host of VC-backed start-ups."

"In other words, it'll be a bloody mess over the next few years sorting out the center of gravity for mobile search, as each player tries to convince the others to follow its lead. The good news for marketers is that there's enough of a prize for the winner(s) that resolution will come."

Source: WebProNews

Back to School

2007-07-18T09:29:00.000-05:00

ONE OF THE REAL PROBLEMS with the major carriers throughout their content and marketing chains is their sheer scale. When multimillion-subscriber companies are going head to head for market share, it is difficult to focus on your own segments. Branding messages for the tier-1 companies have been hopelessly broad for years (more minutes, better network coverage, free phones), with little effort to target specific groups very effectively, even though a range of age and ethnic demos come at their phones very differently. There is a real need here for content and service companies to cultivate the segments. "At the end of the day, they are mass market providers," says Jim Ryan, newly minted president and CEO of MobileCampus, which targets mobile data and marketing services to college environments. "I was seeing an incremental opportunity to serve more niche markets and target segments." For years, Ryan enjoyed a unique vantage point, since he ran the data strategy at Cingular/AT&T and was a fixture in the fledgling mobile content industry. He left AT&T just as the iPhone was about to launch, and according to reports was involved in making that deal with Apple. But in placing his bets with the small startup we covered last year in this column, Ryan is signaling that it is time for mobile to get targeted, and for the nascent ad model to follow.

Ryan says that the early stages of mobile marketing may be a bit misguided in following the carriers' lead into the mass market mentality. "Most of the existing players are large media companies used to the mass market and mass media advertising. They want large volumes of people. So they talk about millions of users and page impressions."

MobileCampus partners with universities to deliver free messaging services to students who opt in. The SMS system can range campuswide -- from the administration to ticklers and scheduling notes from individual sports teams or clubs. The school and its groups get the service free, with ads and offers from local vendors underwriting the cost.

Ryan believes that ad-supported systems like MobileCampus can change the mobile marketing equation. If you have tightly targeted users and you know their needs and habits well enough, then you don't need to carpet-bomb the platform or the user with ads. He expects students to receive one marketing message a day -- but a message that relates to their immediate environment and their likely needs. "It's about the value of the message, not the volume," he says. "Mass media is about volume -- millions of WAP pages -- and it uses the same model as already exists . Our model is very different. Our approach is 180 degree different."

Charging 20 cents a message, a campaign for a tech vendor like Dell might spend less than $1,000 reaching all of the tech enthusiasts on a large campus. "If we can get 30% to 40% to check it out, that translates into a lot of activity" for a small cost relative to papering the local media with ads, Ryan says. He believes that while MobileCampus is focused on the universities right now, the model is portable to a host of different demographics and niches and that this is a more appropriate way to use mobile. "I think there is a huge opportunity to evolve this market. There will be a real revenue opportunity for the company that leads that charge. To do that, you have to start with specific content."

As with all highly targeted marketing ideas, the challenge is less in the effectiveness of the promotion when it hits its target, but in the scalability. Is it worth it in the end for the sponsor/client to segment the creative, the deals, the partners into all of these niches? Yes, there is a lot of waste in mass media, but there are also efficiencies of scale. We are already a decade into the ad model online, and how many of the targeting methods available are really being used? The technologies and their proposed business and marketing models always seem to be well ahead of the ad industry infrastructure.

Ryan is right. Mobile seems to be the medium that is best positioned to lead the charge into a lot of marketing models that have been more on the periphery of digital media for years. If marketing and media are moving from mass to me, from corralling eyeballs to finding the right customer with the right message, then mobile offers a necessary challenge to the entire chain of production. But to make messages that are highly relevant to these segments, the marketers themselves have to segment their efforts and their infrastructures. How do you address so many possible niches -- and what new processes and structures within organizations are necessary to make a post-mass media world work? These are all questions that fragmented media are raising across the board, not just mobile. Everybody is back in kindergarten now.

Source: MediaPost

The State of Mobile Marketing

2007-07-17T15:26:00.001-05:00

Our industry is an interesting one; it’s a complex marketplace of intent, monetization, and relative performance. Those in the direct marketing space either have traffic, e.g. via their website or email list or they have the ability to acquire it, e.g. through paid search. Any traffic revolves around users and in what users might have an interest. With search, users generally already express that intent. With email, the users haven’t generally expressed an intent so much as an offer catches their attention. In either event, an offer will capture, match, their intent, and it will focus on finding a way to make money off that expressed or latent intent, i.e. the monetization. Anyone who has traffic, leverages intent and then makes money, understands though that not all ads perform the same. This is where relative performance comes into play. An offer only continues to receive traffic if it can perform equal to or better than the other offers. For example, you don’t see Columbia House DVD among frequently promoted offers, because MP3 players have changed the intent landscape. One of those offers that currently out-competes Columbia, along with a large number of others are ringtones.

We don’t seem to talk about it often, but if you run offers from CPA networks, you know it. Perhaps we don’t talk about it that much because we don’t want to jinx it, as though we know the offers do too well to be true. Maybe we don’t talk about it because we don’t want to admit openly that, yes we run them. Whatever the reason, it does sound a little weird. If you run campaigns for Blockbuster or Netflix, when asked what you run, you can say the brand name or the generic DVD rental services. The same goes for online education or even credit cards. Those who do either of those tend to say so proudly, and perhaps it’s because those listening understand that market and/or implicitly approve of its promotion. The same rules do not really apply for those in the mobile marketing space, especially those in its most well-known incantation, ringtones. When asked what they promote, far too many people seem to say ringtones with a hesitance, as though bracing for some question or rebuke. Whatever the reason and despite the apparent stigma, mobile marketing, even ringtones, will not go away any time soon, not even with more iPhones. Similar to the incentive offers, it not only makes everyone in the chain far too much money, but users have yet to tire as their interest is based on culture not a one-time fad. They will, though struggle, morph, and, similar to incentive offers, adapt. This week, we look at this amazing mobile market and three of its more prominent segments.

Ringtones
The European company Jamster had the first major ringtone hit. Being from Europe, where cell phone usage far outpaced, both in technology and user comfort, Jamster had a natural advantage when it came to promoting to the US market. They had already weathered the learning curve and could apply those learnings here. They came to market with individual ringtones that users could purchase online and send to their phone. They did a great job especially considering that the phones of the time played simplistic tunes (not the true to life sounding ones of today) and that users had little familiarity with adding content to their phones, let alone content that didn’t seem to originate from within the phone. As the market progressed, others saw the potential and began to compete. Instead of offering individual songs, they went down another path, subscription services. In a subscription service, users do not pay a la carte, they pay monthly; as a result, these companies leveraged the same hook, “ringtones,” but could pay more to the marketer as they paid not a percentage of the initial sale but a percentage of the lifetime value. Today’s most prevalent ringtone offers don’t always have names that make sense, among them being Blinko, Thumbplay, Zapsters, Dada Mobile, Ringazaa, Flycell, and Rock Your Tones, but they all run off this basic model. The demographic of today’s online users combined with a) the companies’ paying a large percentage of the users’ lifetime value, along with b) the ease that a monetary transaction can occur, has created a perfect storm for these offers.

Text Services
On first glance, it almost makes sense that ringtones might do well. Users can get a variety of useful content, quicker, easier, and cheaper than they can if they try to do so through the phone menu. Text services, though, you might not expect to do as well, even though every handset can receive them. Yet, if you know the folks at Mobile Messenger, you find out that text can perform as well if not better. In fact, Mobile Messenger doesn’t do ringtones, they do but it’s far from their strength; they don’t really do text either. What they do is transfer the risk and the reward to the marketer. It took me a while to understand their role, but they basically have many of the same components as a Blinko or Dada. They have content and the ability to bill consumers. What they don’t do, though, is necessarily create an offer then take the payment risk by offering a flat CPA. Instead, Mobile Messenger, allows the marketer to come up with an offer (or run an existing concept), create the page, have full control, and act as the silent partner - doing billing and passing the lion’s share of the revenue to the marketer. It has pros and cons. The marketer must front the cash for expenditures, but they receive the full lifetime value of that customer not some percentage. It won’t work for everyone, but in a world where a top ringtone affiliate will do low four-figures per day, a top affiliate in this arena can do triple or more. This market, too, will undergo change, but it shows a different side to mobile marketing, one that has allowed a company to become the largest mobile marketing firm that few know.

Outside the Box
Perhaps the most exciting use of mobile and one that has existed in other countries for years comes in the form of mobile as a billing mechanism. Ringtones and text do use mobile as a billing mechanism, but they do so for content that comes to the phone. Soon, we’ll see billing as means for paying for items that typically require credit cards. Think of all the free trial offers, from dating to software to health programs, that today need a credit card. As mobile progresses, we will see these offers soon allowing users to bill it to their phone, or promoting a secondary, smaller test trial for the phone if the credit card option does not happen. The phone won’t solve everything, as phone companies will not feel good about users adding potentially a hundred or more dollars in non-mobile services to their phone bill, but it still hints at the future. If the subscription ringtone service does decrease, the way CD sales have, at least mobile as a whole will not go away. It will only thrive, and we should all look forward to this and other outside the box / outside the handset applications as it will increase our revenues.

Source: Adotas

Google Opens AdSense for Mobile Beta

2007-07-16T10:54:00.000-05:00

Following the roll-out of a revamped mobile search earlier this year, Google has begun testing a version of AdSense for mobile Web sites. In typical Google fashion, it ushered in the beta program not with an announcement, but by sending invites to AdSense users late last week.

Internet entrepreneur Scott Jones posted on his blog, Self Made Minds, that he received an invite to the Google beta. The news garnered attention throughout the blogosphere and SEO community.

A Google spokesperson confirmed the beta. "Google is committed to finding new and better ways to get users the information they need while on the go, and to opening up new revenue opportunities for our partners. We are currently conducting a limited beta to test AdSense for mobile, a monetization product for mobile publishers. We will continue to evaluate the beta and will refine the product based on feedback from our users, publishers, and advertisers."

"At present it just appears in my AdSense in the list of products and has not been tested," Jones told ClickZ News. He went on to say ad units include single and double ads, WAP 1.0 or 2.0 in the normal color palette for integration.

While positive about the move, industry analysts question the size of the market for contextually delivered mobile ads. "How big is mobile advertising at this time, and how much is Google coming into the space going to impact positively or negatively?" asked M:Metrics's vice president consulting and senior analyst Evan Neufeld.

Google's mobile AdSense limited beta may bring mobile one step closer to becoming a line item in advertisers' budgets, rather than an experimental entry.

"Google's AdSense is a very powerful product online, but it fits a particular niche for advertising. I don't think that niche is currently filled in mobile, but I don't know how big that niche is," said Lee Hancock, founder and CEO of go2 Wireless, pointing to Google's offering of standardized ads, contextually-based units, PPC and impression-based models.

"If you look at the way AdSense works online, typically associated with content that is relevant, it's typically displayed in extra areas on the page," Hancock said. "You're not going to have that flexibility and capability on the mobile phone, with its small screen."

Skepticism aside, Hancock said "Google will likely be successful; the question is the magnitude of that success."

The appearance of ads through AdSense has at least one potential benefit to the user experience. "It will probably assist in the discovery of information on a mobile phone," said Hancock. "But what will be really interesting to see is how monetizible mobile traffic is."

AdSense's inventory is one component of the mobile marketing platform, cautions Neufeld. "Is it strictly a banner ad-serving tool?" he said. If it ignores SMS and MMS messaging, he added, Google is "missing a big piece of it."

Source: ClickZ

It adds to add mobile to ads

2007-07-13T10:10:00.000-05:00

One of the mobile industry’s greatest power is its consistent ability to take seemingly mundane topics and turn them into exciting industry buzzwords by simply placing the word “mobile” in front of them: “mobile” messaging, “mobile” content and “mobile” commerce have all at one time been bandwagons which operators, software companies, manufacturers, media firms and investors have clamoured aboard. In fact, the word “mobile” is rivalled only by Apple’s letter “i” for achieving hype transformation (place both in front of the word “phone” and see which generates the most hysteria).

In the past year, “mobile” advertising has entered the industry vernacular and the bandwagon now has some decent momentum. However, we’re surprised to see both operator and media companies focusing on old-school advertising techniques borrowed from the online world, expecting these to perform just as effectively in a mobile context. Campaigns such as promotional text messages and mini-banner ads on WAP sites mirror the tried and tested banners and email marketing observed online.

Just as Google broke the traditional marketing models used by the print and broadcast media and reinvented advertising for the web, a similar level of innovation needs to occur in mobile which will give birth to campaigns capable of delivering response rates that will make the advertising industry sit up and take notice.

One such innovation we’ve seen are the idle screen applications which provide intelligent search & discovery functions to handset users. Vendors include Abaxia (Mobile Finder), Zi Corp. (Qix) and Tegic (T9 Discovery Tool). These tools work by indexing handset information like contacts, bookmarks, call logs, documents, messages and appointments, and providing a keystroke search facility on the home screen. For example, typing in the characters M-A-D would produce a shortlist of matching content on the device, such as the contact Madeline Smith, the song Hung Up by Madonna, a text message received from Maddox Williams or a photo saved with the filename “game at Madison gardens”. However, these applications allow operators to add other information to the indexing pool. Working with their content partners, an operator could add promotions which also match the “M-A-D” search string, like offering links for a 50% discount off a Mad Max DVD or a Madonna ringtone. Such ads are non-intrusive and their contextual nature can actually enhance the search and discovery user experience if implemented correctly.

The fact that a mobile phone is location aware (in theory) adds a powerful dimension to the advertising experience. The ability for restaurants, shops, cinemas and bars to actively promote their services to mobile subscribers in the immediate vicinity has long been touted and is seen as the natural extension of Google Maps, which now has a mobile version available for a wide range of handset models.

Any talk of location awareness is quickly followed by concerns about privacy and such fear is one reason location services are still not widely deployed, despite the technical capability being established. Privacy is often brandished as a major concern by 50 year-old industry executives and not by the millions of 18 year-olds who seem happy to broadcast every minutia of their daily lives on their FaceBook and MySpace accounts. The industry needs to recognise that privacy means different things to the different generations: a college student will react differently to a Vodafone executive, for example, were they both to receive an unsolicited marketing SMS triggered by walking past a McDonalds.

Looking at how mobile advertising is set to evolve, we cannot help but think that carriers are in the strongest position above any other stakeholder in the mobile advertising value chain – but they seem oblivious to this. Operators are sitting on a goldmine of consumer information which can be offered to a plethora of third parties; which can be packaged in such a way to mitigate privacy concerns. Operators know who their subscribers are, their age, where they live, how much they spend, how often they travel and where they travel to. With the rise of mobile TV, operators will know which shows their subscribers are watching and which radio stations they listen to. Fundamentally, operators know their subscribers’ geographical location at any given time and know in which locations they are most frequently based (home, office, gym etc.). As carriers continue to see their voice and data revenues suffer and handset makers and content owners re-assert their direct-to-consumer relationships, operators who have effective systems and tools in place allowing them to slice and dice their vast subscriber database into segments and group defined by specific characteristics will have an opportunity at a compelling new revenue stream.

Source: Arc Chart

Successful Results for Cellcom and innerActive Ad-Funded Mobile Games Service

2007-07-12T12:51:00.000-05:00

Israel's largest mobile operator Cellcom has announced today the completion of its first ad-funded mobile games service powered by innerActive technology. The new innovative service showed results of 44% Click-Through-Rate (CTR) and 19% Acquisition Rate for Mobile Advertising Campaigns, indicating a breakthrough in marketing via mobile phones.

The value-added infotainment service offers the subscribers free game downloads, sponsored by top brands such as: Tnuva, Nokia, McDonalds, Diadora, Samsung, Adidas and Walt Disney. Leading interactive advertising agencies such as McCann Digital, Saatchi & Saatchi, BBDO and nextin participated in the month-long pilot.

innerActive's Campaign Management system provided an end-to-end solution for both Cellcom and the advertisers. The solution, which can easily integrate to Cellcom’s system, dynamically inserted ads and marketing content for product placement within the games. With the system, mobile in-game ads were targeted and segmented in real-time according to each user’s profile, behavior and responses. In addition, mobile coupons and other incentives were offered for conversion and cross-over to other media channels like websites and point of sells.

“The new model used in the trial has proved to be effective and feasible to all the players. We succeeded to promote thousands of new users, that are not heavy gamers, to consumed and enjoyed games,” said Adi Cohen, VP Marketing of Cellcom. "The advertising-marketing stimulus trial confirms its effectiveness to all parties that took part in this project. This mobile advertising is working and shows far-reaching consequences for the mobile industry.”

The strong capabilities of innerActive innovative technology produce exceptional results. On average a trend of 10 times higher game downloads per user was observer, compared to pre-pilot download numbers. The Tetris game set a new record for as the number of download jumped by 14 times. The new business model, that this represents, motivated an untapped segment of mobile users to download mobile games as 24% of the participants did not download games in the six month period before the test and 54% did not do it in the three months prior to the pilot.

“The ad-funded model used in the trial has created a new dialog with the consumers while at the same time setting a new level of response and conversion to targeted and relevant marketing content," said Offer Yehudai, innerActive Co-manager. “The usage of in-content deliver within the games has become a great online media experience within various audiences, especial in the youth segment (9-20 year old) – 65% enjoying the benefits.

“These trends reveal the huge potential and highlight innerActive’s solution of in-content ad-funded mobile advertising and business model,” said Ziv Elul, innerActive Co-manager. “Driving from this successful pilot, innerActive is about to launch its new solution for live streaming advertising on both video and music channels.”

Source: OpenPR

Video Begins To Mobilize: Usage Still Small, But Growing Rapidly

2007-07-11T09:41:00.001-05:00

WHILE STILL A RELATIVELY SMALL base, the percentage of mobile device users who view video programming and advertising while on the go has increased dramatically. It has more or less doubled for people using hand-held devices (iPods and cell phones), and has jumped by more than 40% among people using laptop computers, according to results of the 2007 edition of "How People Use Mobile Video" from Knowledge Networks/SRI.

The study also found some marked differences emerging among various mobile platforms that suggest mobile video is not as homogenous as some people might think.

"Rather than think of mobile video as one big monolith, people are going to have to think about these as different platforms and [about] how consumers use them," suggests Dave Tice, vice president-managing director of Knowledge Networks/SRI.

For example, while the penetration of video usage is almost the same among iPod users (8%) and video cell phone users (6%), people view video differently on the two devices. On iPods, it's more like video behavior on laptop computers, which is to watch longer-form content, while cell phone users tend to watch shorter videos.

Nearly half (46%) of video cell phone users reported an average video viewing session of five minutes or less, versus 53% of iPod or laptop users who reported an average viewing session of 30 minutes or more.

Tice said the behavioral differences may be due to iPod users generally downloading content by connecting the device to a broadband computer, and thus using the iPod as an extension of the computer. "It might be more of a problem for someone trying to download a 30-minute video on a cell phone," said Tice, adding that the whole orientation of video cell phone users may be different than that of video iPod users--people get iPods to consume entertainment, whereas they get cell phones primarily to make phone calls.

In fact, viewing of feature-length movies has risen dramatically among consumers who utilize the video capabilities of their iPods, jumping from just 1% in last year's study to 54% this year.

Tice said it's too early to determine how new generations of mobile phone technologies--such as Apple's iPhone--might impact those behaviors over time.

One behavior that is becoming clear across all forms of mobile video is how consumers regard advertising. The good news for the ad industry is that four out of five consumers who watch mobile video say they are willing to view mobile advertising in order to get free video content. The bad news is that less than 30% of them feel that mobile ads are relevant to them.

As low as that percentage is, however, Tice doesn't necessarily think it's that bad, saying the percentage is about the same as those who feel TV commercials on regular television are relevant to them. "I think that it's a telling finding, because people don't see ads on mobile video as being any better than television," he said, "but if advertisers are able to use the one-to-one targeting nature of mobile to do a better job of making their marketing messages more relevant to them, then they can probably improve those perceptions over time."

Source: Media Post

How Mobile Are You?

2007-07-10T12:52:00.000-05:00

The latest figures by the Mobile Data Association suggest over 15 million people accessed the mobile web in March this year, a rise of nearly 1 million unique users on the previous month. 3, the UK network operator also recorded 118 million instant messages sent via MSN Mobile in May this year – that’s on one network in one month! The increase in mobile internet usage is yet another clear sign that mobile web browsing is here to stay and with the significant role interactive job search plays in our everyday lives, it is perhaps the right time for recruiters to understand how they can capitalise on the mobile opportunity.

The additions the mobile device has acquired over the last few years in MP3 and camera functionality is a testament to the devices importance in the everyday lives of UK consumers. Never before has an electronic device had such an impact on the way people communicate and manage their lives and it is this personalised element that recruiters can really take advantage of.

Peter Holsgrove of asap.mobi, the leading mobile developer of classified advertising and mobile job search functionality suggests "the mobile phone is more important to us than any other device and it has made a huge impact on the way we stay in touch with friends and colleagues, store photographic memories and organise our favourite music and other personal data. With the restrictions now imposed by many employers on internet activity at work and the privacy benefits mobile provides, if integrated correctly, mobile will have a significant impact on the way recruiters and their brands engage with potential candidates. We recommend enabling job seekers with a 'cross media' solution and integrating print, web and mobile to provide the ultimate job seeking experience.”

Source: On Rec

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Enpocket Powers Mobile Advertising for The N in Promotion of The Best Years, the Network’s First College-Based, One-Hour Drama

2007-07-10T11:17:00.000-05:00

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Enpocket, the Intelligent Mobile Marketing^™ company, today announced that it has been chosen by The N, the nighttime network for teens and a programming arm of MTV Networks, to power its mobile advertising and mobile Internet experience for the network’s new series, The Best Years. The Best Years is The N’s first college-based, one-hour drama, which airs every Friday at 8:30 p.m. (ET) on The N.

“Teens communicate with each other and live their lives on a multi-platform level, making mobile the perfect advertising medium for us,” said Jeff Swierk, Vice President of Marketing, The N. “With Enpocket, we are able to offer our teen viewers a multi-faceted mobile Web experience exposing our audience to everything The N has to offer on the heals of our premiere series, The Best Years.”

The campaign features mobile Internet ads promoting awareness; a mobile Internet site offering consumers a range of innovative engagement experiences, like a quiz for viewers to find which character they are most similar to; mobile show alerts; a channel finder mechanic; and character biographies.

“We are pleased to be working with forward-thinking networks like The N to drive tune-in through the mobile channel,” said Mike Baker, Enpocket President and CEO. “The program we have developed for The Best Years speaks to youth and young adults in their own language on the channel that belongs to their generation.”

The mobile advertising program went live Friday, June 15, and will continue to run for 13 weeks coinciding with a premiere episode every Friday at 8:30 p.m. (ET). The show follows orphaned and full-ride scholar, Samantha Best (Charity Shea, “Alpha Dog”) as she starts her freshman year at prestigious Charles University in Massachusetts.

Samantha has been shuffled through the foster care system her entire life and is finally looking forward to a future of new opportunities and friendships. She’ll have to contend with the ins and outs of college and mingle with a new world of ‘frenemies’ as she struggles to find her own identity. Along the way, she will meet new roommate Kathryn Klarner (Jennifer Miller), a rich socialite from one of the most prominent families in the Mid-West, Dawn Vargas (Athena Karkanis), a child actor who trades in Hollywood for college, and Devon Sylver (Brandon Jay McLaren “She’s The Man”), a fellow scholarship recipient and star basketball player who has caught her eye. With her new dysfunctional family and a part-time job at Boston’s hot spot Colony, Samantha will find herself juggling a lot more than just academics.

Source: Business Wire

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Text ads favored by U.K. users

2007-07-09T14:43:00.000-05:00

Women are more inclined to click on text-based mobile ads while men are more likely to be lured by video marketing messages, according to a study of U.K. users from Tickbox, a London-based market research firm.

The survey, which was commissioned by mobile media publisher MoMac, found that text ads are the most effective mobile advertising format, favored by 56% of wireless users. Sixty percent of women preferred text ads, according to the study, while only 47% of men opted for the links.

Picture or banner ads were the second-most popular format, favored by 29% of all users, while nearly one-quarter of males cited video advertising as the favorite method. Only 12% of females preferred video ads. Unsurprisingly, 16- to 24-year-olds preferred video by a nearly two-to-one ration over users older than 55.

Younger users also preferred to view ads in exchange for content, while more than half of users 45 and older opting to buy content a la carte. And 54% of females preferred the pay-per-download mode compared to 41% of men, who were more accepting of mobile ads.

Tickbox surveyed 1,400 U.K. mobile phone users for the study.

“The research shows that brands and media companies must think carefully about who their primary targets are before they decide how to deliver both their content and advertising campaigns,” said MoMac executive Sham Careem. “Different demographics will respond better to different methods of advertising, and the key to a successful campaign will be ensuring that the format matches the target audience.”

Source: RCR Wireless News

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Virgin Mobile: Time Is Wireless Minutes

2007-07-09T14:00:00.000-05:00

The cell-phone operator's Sugar Mama program compensates subscribers with free call time for interacting with ads on their phones

Much has been made of the Web-like marketing dollars to be earned by shooting ads to cell phones. But there's been little agreement so far over how to get mobile subscribers to put up with what many see as a mobile version of spam on a device they already pay plenty to use. One proposed solution for persuading them to embrace this wireless intrusion appears to be gaining traction: pay them.

On July 9, Virgin Mobile USA reported that it signed up roughly 330,000 of its 4.8 million subscribers for its Sugar Mama program, which "pays" them one minute of free call time for every 45 seconds they spend interacting with an ad on their phones or the company's Web site. Since the program was launched about a year ago, Virgin has given away 9 million minutes of mobile talk time.

For marketers, the popularity of the program offers some proof that the mobile phone may not be so different from other types of media. Just as cable TV, newspapers, magazines, and many Web services profit from a combination of subscriptions and ad revenue, the cellular industry is seen as ripe for supplementing its monthly service fees with marketing dollars.

"When we started talking to people, they said, 'Don't sully my wireless experience with your advertising,'" says Howard Handler, Virgin Mobile USA's chief marketing officer. "But when we started talking about it a little further, we heard, 'My time is one of the most valuable commodities that I have, and if you are asking me to spend time looking at a message, I want to be compensated for it.'"

Targeting the Cash-Strapped

Marketers say the key to mobile ads, usually delivered to the phone with a text or picture message, is getting users to agree to receive them by offering a clear reward. It also helps if they're in their late teens and twenties, an age group that dominates Virgin's customer base. The reason this audience is more receptive? Cash, for one. College students and entry-level workers typically don't have much of it. As a result, they're more willing to trade their personal time for free services, says John du Pre Gauntt, a wireless industry analyst for eMarketer. Second, younger people have grown up with ad-supported Web services, making them less averse to sales pitches.

But why would marketers want to bother with people so cash-strapped that they'd be willing to spend nearly a minute of their time just to get free air time? After all, a person who doesn't want to part with the 18¢ Virgin charges for an extra 60 seconds on its pay-by-the-minute plan can't have much spare change to spend shopping. Marketers counter that those who make up the 34-and-under market typically have more disposable income than older individuals with mortgages and dependents. And, says du Pre Gauntt, people in their late teens and twenties are less price-conscious when they do spend their money.

Virgin's data also shows some success in getting this audience to respond to what's being advertised. On average, Sugar Mama participants clicked on offers in the ads they viewed more than 5% of the time. The 5%-plus response rate echoes the results seen in similar studies (see BusinessWeek.com, 4/23/07, "The Sell-Phone Revolution"). Though 5% may not sound like much, it's significantly higher than the average response rate to online ads, which is less than 1%. One especially successful ad campaign in Virgin's program managed to produce a 21% click-through response, says Handler, who declined to identify the advertiser. Response rates like that are one reason the market for mobile advertising is expected to grow from less than $2 billion this year to more than $11 billion in 2011, according to a 2006 study by Informa Telecoms & Media.

Planting Seeds

Another reason to pay attention to younger, less-wealthy consumers is that they eventually become older, wealthier consumers, says du Pre Gauntt. It's better for marketers to reach them now, when they are forming their impressions about brands and the kinds of products they value. "The 2007 college senior could take a job with [consulting firm] Accenture (ACN) next year," says du Pre Gauntt.

But while mobile ads may help seed future tastes, it's unclear whether this audience, as it ages, will continue to respond to mobile ads with the same fervor. Du Pre Gauntt expects they will, particularly as more people get smartphones with speedier Internet access and better Web browsers that can display multimedia ads (see BusinessWeek.com, 11/7/06, "Yahoo's Grand Mobile Ad Experiment"). After all, the mobile phone is the most personal of devices, enabling more precise targeting of ads than a television. It also doesn't hurt that these devices travel with people when they're out and about, primed to make a purchase (see BusinessWeek.com, 11/28/06, "Ads Migrate to Mobile Handsets").

However, advertisers probably shouldn't expect to see 5% response rates forever. Mobile marketing is still a novelty, so it grabs a user's attention more easily. Online ads enjoyed similar response rates when they first started appearing, says du Pre Gauntt. As more ads appear on phones, marketers will have to do more to stand out—more, perhaps, than simply bandying about the word "free."

Source: Business Week

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Mobile Payments to Generate Almost $22 Billion of Transactions by 2011 and be Adopted by 204 Million Mobile Phone Users

2007-07-09T13:07:00.000-05:00

Juniper Research predicts that P2P fund transfers and mobile payments in the developing world, together with the commercialization in 2009 of NFC (Near Field Communications) based mPayments will generate transactions worth approximately $22bn.

(PRWEB) July 9, 2007 -- There is much to be positive about with mPayments; the ecosystem is evolving into one where cooperation between the major stakeholders is creating an atmosphere that is incubating intelligent ways in which we can use the mobile phone for payment.

There is still much to do, resolving the business model and the revenue share issues are a priority; but much of the technology is available and there is a genuine willingness from the major stakeholders to resolve their differences and cooperate.

Greater availability of NFC devices, for physical mobile payments, coupled with secure and easy-to-use applications, backed by the large credit card organisations and financial institutions, will create the foundation for a healthy alternative to cash and other mainstream payment applications.

Report author Alan Goode said: "The technology is available now to enable secure and fast payments to be initiated on the mobile phone. The business model stills needs some work but there are positive signals emanating from the industry that will create considerable revenue for all parts of the ecosystem. I am cautiously optimistic for the future success of mPayments."

Juniper Research illustrates the current and near-future status of mobile payments with interviews, case studies and analysis from representatives of some of the leading organisations in the growing mobile payment industry.

Highlights from the report include:

The value of mobile transactions will grow to nearly $22bn by 2011.
SMS based Person2Person (P2P) fund transfers and payments will drive the developing world m-payment market.
Adequate supply of contactless chip enabled devices, NFC and Felica, to enable over 52m mobile phone users to make physical payments 2011.
Retailers benefit with potentially lower transaction fees and increased basket size
Forecasts for NFC enabled devices.

Source: eMedia Wire

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Netpreneur Host Delivers New SMS Marketing Service

2007-07-05T09:49:00.000-05:00

July 5, 2007 - (TopHosts News Brief) - Netpreneur Host partnered with Mobile SMS Marketing for an innovative, new service.

Through the new service, users can achieve more intimate marketing relationships with customers, thanks to cell phone text messaging.

The service enables businesses to use the Mobile SMS Marketing phone number, together with a special text string. When end-users send a company’s unique text string to the phone number provided by Mobile SMS Marketing, they are added to that company’s list, and can be sent special offers and updates from the company. For instance, sending the word CLUB to 41513 from a cell phone demonstrates how a night club or disco might use the service.

“This new service allows businesses to quickly build large lists of opt-in cell phone users, which provides a captive audience of people with whom businesses can build deeper, more intimate relationships than with traditional marketing,” Netpreneur Host CEO, Daniel J. Briere, stated in a PRWeb release. “The Mobile SMS Marketing service is a very exciting addition to our existing services that we are very happy to be able to provide to our users, and which will further differentiate us from other Web hosting providers.”

Source: Top Hosts

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Case Study - House of Blues

2007-07-04T10:49:00.000-05:00

Challenge
In response to the emergence of mobile technology as a mass-market medium, in late 2005, House of Blues in partnership with Motorola, became interested in offering new and existing customers novel types of interactive campaigns as a means to incentivize and reward its youth demographic. Soapbox Mobile fulfilled the company's needs with a complete, full-service mobile solution using the Soapbox Anywhere platform to power interactive mobile campaigns including triggered and personalized SMS-based quizzes, contests, and alerts. These mobile campaigns were aimed at drawing attention to upcoming music events specific to each of House of Blues' nationwide locations.

Mobile Solution

Enhance Image: Cutting edge of new media adoption
Leverage Mobile: Usage for target demographic
Build Database: Mobile subscribers for follow-up campaigns
Promotions of promote bands, mobile ticket sales

House of Blues has built a nationwide presence as a trendy venue for music, food and nightlife. Customers recognize House of Blues as the premier branded entertainment venue, attracting a wide variety of demographic audience segments with locations across America's hippest cities. Its target demographic is young professionals.

House of Blues, presently using the Web for consumer interactivity in addition to other more traditional means of marketing, decided to leverage the mobile channel to deepen ints relationship with its existing and new customers. Recognizing mobile as a personal, one-to-one mass market medium that is 'always on', House of Blues tapped Soapbox Mobile to create it mobile campaigns. The Soapbox Anywhere platform provided personalized mobile interaction in addition to a valuable database of mobile users. The House of Blues mobile trivia campaign placed a 'call-to-action' across in-house TV screens and person-to-person street team interaction by means of unique short codes assigned to House of Blues venues across the U.S. The Soapbox Mobile solution empowered House of Blues to track and report, in real-time, the effectiveness of its mobile campaigns for each of its nationwide locations.

Mobile Campaign: Key Features

Location-based campaign tracking and reporting
Interactive, 2-way SMS trivia campaign
Mobile coupon codes: redeem prizes
Cross-carrier: House of Blues SMS campaign's work across all carriers and handsets in North America

In addition to building an interactive mobile trivia campaign, Soapbox Mobile also established an managed relationships with network operators in North America and the operator's terms for multiple, unique vanity (custom) short codes for each House of Blues location. As a result House of Blues customers can now engage in opt-in mobile contests regardless of their carrier.

Results

Build mobile database for future use in promotion and sales
Unrivaled distribution in leveraging mobile channel and customer reach
Enhanced image as vanguard of new media and digital entertainment
Precision ability to track, monitor and report marketing effectiveness in real-time

Soapbox Mobile helped House of Blues enhance its loyal customer base by extending and diversifying its marketing program to include the mobile channel. Owing to the valuable database of mobile users House of Blues has been able collect through the Soapbox Anywhere platform, the company now has an indispensable asset in targeting an audience for its future mobile initiatives. House of Blues has been able to create a stronger relationship with its customers, enhance the visibility of its brand, and has also delivered value to its mobile partner, Motorola.

Source: Mobile Marketing Association

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Welcome to the iFuture of Mobile Marketing

2007-07-04T10:20:00.000-05:00

Greetings from the past! I'm writing this column on June 26, about a week in advance of you reading it. Normally, I wouldn't point this out. However, we're on the cusp of the next pop-culture technology revolution.

By the time you read this, you'll likely be recovering from your (or an annoying friend's) iPhone hangover, as I'm sure every major media outlet has inundated you with iPhone launch minutiae: from early adopters standing in line, pending riots (let's hope not), eBay auction mania, and possible scarcity issues. Or you may still be rejoicing over the winnings you realized. Regardless of the outcome, let's remember this was an important weekend. Our industry has a lot riding on the so-called "Jesus" (or maybe "Moses") phone.

Sometimes it takes pop culture to kick-start an emerging industry or media category. It seems like only a few years ago when Eiger Labs launched the MPMan F10 portable music player as the industry's first digital music player in 1998. When it was first announced, it appealed to a small community of digital enthusiasts. It wasn't until the fall of 2001 when Apple introduced the first iPod as the ultimate conclusion of Apple's "rip, mix, burn" digital music strategy. Apple carefully led American consumers through the new digital music ecosystem, ending with the iPod's powerful crescendo. Before this, only a handful of people understood what an MP3 player was. Now, you wouldn't be caught dead with a CD (unless you burned it yourself), and Apple is the number three music retailer in the United States. Go figure.

At the end of the day, the one thing we can rely on the iPhone to do is to wake up American mobile consumers and get them to realize what their phones can do. Hopefully, this awareness will finally transform the mobile platform into a true media channel. While writing this, I asked my friend Greg Clayman, general manager of mobile media at MTV Networks, what he hopes the iPhone will do for the millions of mobile phone users in the United States.

"It will teach people what a mobile phone can do -- from the oversized touch screen to the music and video player integration to the Web browser," Clayman told me. "The iPhone isn't the first phone to have these features, but it's certainly the most exciting presentation of them. I expect its release will lead to any number of people reexamining their current phones and discovering that they, too, can do many of these things as well. MTV is the largest provider of mobile video content in the world, so we're thrilled about all the general mobile media excitement that this launch is generating. And we're working ever-closer with our brand partners to help them engage consumers in this space."

So now that the iPhone has launched, what should we expect? There are two categories of customers you should think about: the haves and the have-nots.

The Haves

Who they are: The haves are a lucky bunch. They've shelled out about $500 to $600 dollars for the iPhone and basically committed themselves to AT&T and Apple for the next two years for approximately $1,974.76 (not including taxes). The haves will be power users who will wrap their iPhones around their lives. They'll take and share photos and use optimized Web sites and consumer content. They'll exhaust this phone for the next few weeks and show everyone what they have.

What they want: The haves want access and content. Whether they admit it or not, they want to show off their new toy.

What you can do: Why not take advantage of this Trojan horse? Provide these users with branded content. If they think it's relevant, they'll use it on the iPhone. Consider optimizing your Web site and Web services for the iPhone. Syndicate your podcasts via iTunes. Develop Web applications for these users. Ride the wave. And if you don't know how, find developers who can help you by attending the various development conferences that are popping up across the country.

The Have-nots

Who they are: The have-nots aren't as lucky. Some wanted an iPhone and couldn't get it. Others, like John Dvorak, feel the iPhone isn't up to snuff. They want to wait for the next version or for the price to come down. Some are locked into agreements with rival carriers, others are content with what they have.

What they want: They know they don't have an iPhone, but they'd like the next best thing. The have-nots will look at what they currently own and want to get the most out of it. They may secretly envy iPhone features and try to emulate them: "You know, my phone can play music."

What you can do: The one thing the iPhone will do for everyone is finally convince them you can do more on your phone than talk and text. There's never been a better time to launch new mobile services. Have you considered optimizing your site for mobile Web readers? Have you explored sponsorship of mobile content offerings? Launched a smart SMS (define) campaign that supports an in-market program with mobile reminders?

Like it or not, the iPhone is a good thing. Personally, I'm disappointed by the lack of exchange support, a tactile keyboard, and a 3G connection. However, I'm willing to trade all of that for the possibility that the mobile marketplace will heat up with innovation and consumer interest.

Source: Chad Stoller, ClickZ

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Advertising Formats as the Key to Audience Response

2007-07-04T09:37:00.000-05:00

MoMac's research, conducted by independent research agency Tickbox, clearly emphasises the need for mobile advertising to match specific audience requirements. Results from different demographics indicate that responsiveness to different kinds of advertising changes according to
age and gender, giving brands and marketers valuable guidelines around
which to design their mobile advertising campaigns.

MoMac's GoSell platform has been developed to help publishers easily integrate and manage the inclusion of mobile banners and sponsored content within editorial and branded environments and will be available as part of MoMac's integrated mobile publishing platform, GoMedia.

The Mobile Advertising Attitudes Report surveyed a cross section of 1,400 UK mobile phone users during May 2007.

Advertising Formats

Despite the fact that mobile advertising is in its infancy, the report reveals that as many as 13% of 16-24s have already responded to or clicked-on a mobile advert. Given the limited inventory currently available for mobile advertising, and the relative rarity of mobile users being served mobile ads, the figures show the potential for a significant future take-up - if the communication is delivered in the right way.

When it comes to mobile advertising formats, MoMac's research shows clear differences in the preferences of men and women and the different demographic groups. When on mobile sites, text based advertising links are the most popular (56%) with a clear female bias of 60% compared to just 47% of men. Picture or banner-based advertising was the second most popular option, favoured by 29% overall and just under one in three 25-34 year olds. Interestingly, video based advertising has a strong male bias with 22% of men compared to just 12% of women stating they would be most likely to respond to a video advert. Video formats were also more popular with younger mobile users selected by 23% of 16-24s but only 12% of the over 55s.

Payment Models

The research results also indicate that content providers will need to consider a number of payment models to appeal to the diverse groups of mobile users in the UK looking for content. The ad-funded model could become dominant with younger mobile users, with 47% of 16 to 24s preferring to access content for free in exchange for viewing advertising. Only 32% of this group opted for a pay-as-you-download (PAYD) model and only 3.9% stated they would want to pay for content via a subscription. In contrast the PAYD method is more popular with older mobile users, with 55% of those aged 45 and older opting to pay for content on demand, and also appeals more to women, with 54% choosing PAYD compared to 41% of men who are more open to advertising.

Sham Careem, MD of MoMac UK, omments: "The research shows that brands and media companies must think carefully about who their primary targets are before they decide how to deliver both their content and advertising campaigns. Different demographics will respond better to different methods of advertising and the key to a successful campaign will be ensuring that the format matches the target audience."

Source: Turk.Internet

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Case Study - HBO for Entourage

2007-07-03T15:28:00.001-05:00

Objective: HBO wanted to raise awareness of the second season of the orginal series "Entourage," by promoting the show's popular catchphrase, "Let's Hug It Out Bitch" (LHIOB).

Solution: HBO's media agency, OMD, contacted Kikucall to craft a campaign to drive traffic to the LHIOB website, and drive consumers to download Entourage-branded mobile content.

In order to achieve the client's goal, Kikucall designed a campaign to promote a series of exclusive "Let's Hug It Out Bitch" ringtones available exclusively at www.LHIOB.com.

Kikucall developed an online ringtone interface that was integrated into the www.LHIOB.com website.
The interface collected consumer mobile phone information, and sent free LHIOB ringtones directly to consumer mobile phones.
Kikucall also sent a text message blast to a targeted list of 50,000 opt-in consumers in New York and Los Angeles. The messages contained a link to a Kikucall-developed WAP site where consumers could download the free LHIOB ringtones.

Results: In the six months following the launch of the campaign, consumers listened to more than 180,600 LHIOB ringtones via the Kikucall web interface, and more than 19,600 LHIOB website visitors requested to download a ringtone. To deliver the ringtone to consumers, Kikucall sent a text message with a WAP link to download the ringtone to consumer mobile phones. More than 15,500 consumers successfully downloaded the LHIOB ringtones from the Kikucall-designed WAP site.

Source: Mobile Marketing Association

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Survey: Growing Opportunities for Mobile Advertising

2007-07-03T14:09:00.000-05:00

More than four out of five U.S. adults (85%) own a mobile phone, compared with seven in ten (71%) who have a landline or home phone - and nearly two-thirds of mobile phone owners (63%) agreed that their phone is very personal to them, according to a poll conducted by Harris Interactive and commissioned by Ingenio, MarketingCharts reports.

Less than a third of mobile phone owners (30%) recall seeing or hearing an advertisement on a mobile phone in the past year, suggesting that a dominant advertising model to reach the growing demographic of mobile phone users has yet to emerge, Ingenio said.

Ad-related findings:

Regarding the kind of mobile ads they find acceptable, respondents were most favorably disposed toward sponsored text links that appear as a result of internet searches (26%).
Close behind were audio ads that play instead of ringing when waiting for someone to answer a call (21%), and a text message from a company (20%).
Among those who have ever called 411 from their mobile phones, commercial (74%) and restaurant (72%) phone and address listings are the most frequently sought-after types of information.
When asked about their current and anticipated cell phone use, about half of mobile phone owners (49%) said they are already using their phones for more than just calls, including sending and receiving text messages (36%), and taking, sending and receiving photos (24%).

"An inherent difference between the mobile and PC environments is that mobile searchers want to find information and then immediately act on it," said Marc Barach, chief marketing officer, Ingenio.

"The mobile environment lets advertisers reach consumers at the point of decision, and an advertising model that connects the two when intent is at its highest will do for mobile what clicks did for the web."

Source: Marketing Vox

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One in Five Users Gives Mobile Search and Audio Ads Thumbs Up

2007-07-03T13:11:00.001-05:00

More than a quarter of the people responding to a new survey said sponsored text links that appear as a result of Web searches would be their preferred form of mobile phone advertising.

The research, commissioned by mobile pay-per-call ad provider Ingenio, found that 26 percent of the 4,123 adult respondents reacted favorably to the idea of search-based mobile marketing. However, there was also some approval of audio ads that would play while the caller is waiting for another party to answer, said Ingenio. It said 21 percent of those surveyed had a positive response to that idea.

Text messages from an advertiser were the least-supported form, according to the report. Twenty percent of those surveyed said text message offers were deemed "at least somewhat acceptable."

The study, conducted by Harris Interactive, confirmed prior Ingenio data that showed most mobile phone searches are for local businesses such as restaurants, hotels and entertainment services. In the new study, Ingenio found 74 percent of people who have dialed 411 on their cell phones were looking for a business, and that "phone and address listings are the most frequently sought-after types of services."

Just 30 percent of the mobile phone owners surveyed could recall seeing or hearing an advertisement on their device during the past year. "That says to us there's a giant opportunity… a greenfield opportunity for businesses to place themselves in front of a huge audience," said Ingenio Chief Marketing Officer Marc Barach.

The movement to ad-supported mobile phone service is likely to begin with information services. Whereas service providers now charge users fees for 411 searches, this structure is likely to give way to searches that are free but serve up advertising, said Barach. "You listen to an ad that is relevant to your query," he said. "Then you have a choice of following that advertiser path or staying on the phone and getting the listing you asked for."

Jingle Networks also provides a free information service under the Free411 name.

Barach said he was most surprised by the study's findings relating to mobile phone ownership. "The finding that mobile phones now exceed landlines for all age groups is pretty powerful stuff," said Barach.

The survey showed that more than four out of five adults in the U.S. own a cell phone while 71 percent have a land-line or home phone. It also found that 89 percent of those 18 to 34 years old own cell phones or smartphones, but only 57 percent of that group have a land-line phone.

The key to successful search-based mobile advertising is accurate targeting, said Barach. That's because, unlike a PC's Web browser, "the tolerance for error is that much smaller on the small screen."

He believes mobile advertising is going to blossom quickly, particularly if phones with larger screens and better Web browsing follow the iPhone's lead and become commonplace. Eventually, wireless carriers will drastically reduce their fees for data plans as the space becomes monetized by advertising, Barach predicted.

"That's really the silver lining to bringing more advertising to mobile [from a consumer point of view]," he said. "It will make the cost come down and ultimately be free."

Source: ClickZ

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Text marketing enters the fray

2007-07-03T10:45:00.000-05:00

An online company believes paying people to receive ads is the key to marketing by text message without irritating consumers or phone companies.

Mobile phone users registered with HooHaa list their name age, location and buying interests on a database and allow themselves to be reached by advertisers by text.

In return, they get a 10 cent credit for each advertiser text which is accumulated into lots of $2.50 and deducted from their mobile accounts.

The scheme started in January after chief executive Brian Hawker and his partners - Jason King and Kerry Emerson - happened on the idea.

Hawker - who has a background in sales and marketing at FMCG company Masterfoods - says it is early days yet.

But HooHaa signed up 43,000 people and last month began its move into the Australian market. "We've been surprised by the swift uptake and to be honest there is an element of our touching wood," he said.

"But we think that we might have happened on a business model for marketers to reach mobile customers with tailored messages."

Mobile phones are enticing for marketers because it gives them direct one-to-one access to consumers.

HooHaa answers a problem that has ensured mobile marketing is heavily self-regulated by the phone companies.

"Quite frankly, people just really hate it, says Michael Carney, the media strategist at ad agency G2.

But permission-based marketing is allowed by phone companies and HooHaa says it lets advertisers reach mobile users without becoming a nuisance.

HooHaa advertised through mainstream media and registered people in an online survey giving their interests and buying habits. As a result they got approaches only on things they wanted to hear about.

"I don't want to get messages from a fashion store like Max, but I do want to know there is a special deal for golf club members at a local golf store or if my favourite beer was selling at $15 a dozen at a local supermarket," he said.

Hawker said traditional direct marketing would see companies sending out 100,000 pamphlets or messages trying to reach 1000 customers.

Direct marketing executive Robert Limb, of Rapp Collins Limb Walker, said the type of service offered by HooHaa was more likely to be attractive for promotional advertising than for discounting.

He said the appeal of mobile marketing was based on the close relationship that could be forged and had to be built on permission to communicate.

Consumers had to be in control of the messages they were receiving.

Hawker confirmed the HooHaa had "some challenges" with one of the phone companies but declined to give details of this, the allocation of ad revenue or profitability.

He said the HooHaa database had a broad cross-section of consumers, but was strongest in the demographic for people aged 18-30.

Source: New Zealand Herald

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Many Now Find Dates Using their Cell Phone

2007-07-03T10:28:00.001-05:00

Recently, Jeff Blum was out buying a sandwich when his mind wandered toward his social life. So he got out his cell phone and sent a text message with his work ZIP Code to MeetMoi, a new mobile-dating service. Within minutes, his phone received the profile of a woman who worked nearby, and the two began exchanging messages about where they worked, their professions — and meeting up for a drink.

"I liked the fact that we were talking right then and not waiting for e-mails to go back and forth," says Blum, who is 24 years old. "It all happened right away."

Millions of consumers have begun prowling for a date on their cell phones, thanks to new mobile-dating services that enable "real-time" dating — that is, letting users connect on the spot with the people they pick out. Designed to be instant versions of Internet dating, many of the new services have capabilities that online-dating services haven't offered — such as letting you search for a date in a location you can update as you move around, and letting you chat with other people seeking a date while you're out and about.

Match.com will soon launch a new mobile-dating service that will allow its 15 million members to access their profiles and send messages to potential matches from their phones. Match.com is also planning to launch some dating features on Ask Mobile GPS, a software application that lets users of phones with built-in Global Positioning System chips search for local businesses near their location. While the service is still being designed, it could allow users to search for other daters nearby. "We want to take mobile dating to the next step," says Match's chief executive, Thomas Enraght-Moony.

MeetMoi's recently launched dating service helps users identify people who are nearby and looking for dates. Registered users can indicate that they are available by text-messaging a ZIP Code or street address to the service. MeetMoi then searches for other members who have indicated they're looking for a date in the area and sends back the profiles of people who match the user's criteria. The service is free to register and costs 99 cents for 10 anonymous text messages.

Zogo was launched late last year and connects users who want to talk by phone. Users who log in through the browser in their mobile phone will see a list of matches based on information they have provided about their preferences. If one of the matches sparks a member's interest, he can request a phone conversation, prompting Zogo to send a text message to the match's phone. If the recipient consents, Zogo calls both phones simultaneously, without disclosing either member's phone number. Zogo is now free but may soon start charging a monthly subscription fee for some features.

Jumbuck Entertainment's Fast Flirting service is a mobile version of speed dating. For about $3 a month, it allows users to sign into a virtual "lobby" where they can select a flirting partner based on factors such as age and location. They can then have private text conversations of up to 10 minutes — a twist on real-world speed dating in which users try to meet a lot of new people in a short period of time.

While consumers who would rather flirt from afar are skittish, the new features are starting to gain steam among a new generation of mobile daters who want to do everything on the go. The services are already driving strong growth for the mobile-dating market — and helping to entice consumers to sign up for the mobile data plans that are necessary to browse the Web from their phones. An average of 3.6 million U.S. cell-phone users accessed a dating service from their mobile phone in March, according to M:Metrics, a mobile research firm, up from 2.8 million in March 2006.

Dating is in many ways made for mobile phones, says Mark Donovan, an analyst with M:Metrics, because people are often most eager for a date when they are "out and about." But the services, particularly those based on location, are likely to appeal most to users in dense urban areas, where the dating pool is likely to be larger and more concentrated.

Mobile-dating services also face pressure to prove that they are safe for users and can't be exploited by stalkers posing as daters. To address such concerns, MeetMoi makes its matches without divulging members' locations to each other, and it automatically logs users out of the location they put in after two hours. "You tell us when you want to become available," says MeetMoi's founder and CEO, Andrew Weinreich. He adds that the service is safer than other dating services because a user can have only one account pegged to his or her phone number (unlike Internet dating sites where users can register under multiple aliases).

Still, some worry that location-based features might be misused. "Right now the application would become a stalking application if you added GPS," says Ted Verani, senior vice president of sales and marketing for Trilibis Mobile, creator of mobile-dating service Webdate Mobile. He adds that GPS may be appropriate when technology improves to enable users to better regulate who sees what.

Other hurdles for potential miscreants include a complicated sign-up process. While many services will work across most phones, they often require the users to sign up for a mobile Internet data plan. Some carriers may block some services like sending profile pictures, because they consume too much traffic. And pricing plans still vary widely, with some services charging per text message and others charging monthly subscription fees.

By Jessica E. Vascellaro

The Wall Street Journal

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Case Study - Enpocket Powers On-Pack Mobile Promotion for Pepsi

2007-06-20T14:46:00.000-05:00

Background:
In April 2006 Pepsi launched one of the most high profile text-2-win campaigns to date in the UK - the "What's In Your Locker?" Xbox 360 promotion. The on-pack promotion, backed by a major TV campaign featuring England soccer stars old and new, gave customers the chance to win an Xbox 360 every 90 minutes of every day over a two month period leading up to and during World Cup.

Objectives:

Drive sales of Pepsi Max, Pepsi Max Twist, Pepsi Regular and Diet Pepsi (across all pack sizes)
Tap into Pepsi's association with soccer figureheads like David Beckham and Ronaldinho, and leverage the hype created by the 2006 World Cup Finals in Germany

Solution:
Unique codes were printed on approximately 95 million units of Pepsi Max, Pepsi Max Twist, Pepsi Regular, Diet Pepsi across 7 different pack variants. The promotional packs invited consumers to take part in the competition to win one of a thousand Xbox 360s that were up for grabs.

With a draw every 90 minutes consumers simply had to text their unique code from the packaging to short code 60360. Savvy entrants referred to the graph on the Pepsi website measuring the number of entries for each 90 minute period, so they could calculate the best drawing to enter. Thousands texted in their codes in the middle of the night to maximize their chances of winning!

The Enpocket Marketing Engine ensured each code was entered into the correct draw depending on the time the text message was received and then informed the winner of the Xbox 360 by text. All entrants were also sent a return site where they could download free soccer content for their phones.

The campaign was supported through the line with TV advertising and with a major presence at point of sale across a range of retail outlets.

Results:

There were almost a million entries in the first phase of the competition
The campaign highlighted Pepsi's affiliation with soccer during a key period - the World Cup
A soccer promotion via mobile enabled Pepsi to connect with their key youth demographics
The text 2 win promotion brought customers closer to the brand, and by driving customers to the Pepsi mobile internet site it established an even deeper dialogue

Source: Mobile Marketing Association

Read study here

The Real Thing in Mobile Marketing

2007-06-20T09:17:00.001-05:00

Coca-Cola announced in 2006 that it was working towards allocating over 50% of its marketing budget to mobile marketing. On Friday, 22 June 2007, we will see the launch in the US of its first mobile digital community linked to the Sprite brand, called Sprite Yard. What is the marketing model and is it relevant to the South African market?

The launch of Sprite Yard is aimed at being a real time “on the go” community. It will allow its members to network with each other and to download various types of content 24/7. In order to register to join Yard, users simply SMS the keyword “Yard” to a short code. They will then be linked to the Yard portal and will be able to download a browser application on their mobile phones.

The Yard user is registered with a tag name and password, has the ability to select various preferences relating to content and can invite friends to join their community. In short, the Yard is a classic mobile digital community with the significant difference that it is consumer-brand driven.

Changing dynamics

Up to now we have seen web-based digital communities such as Myspace, Facebook and mobile digital communities such as Mxit in SA. They have dominated the market based on first entry. I foresee that vertical social network services offered by consumer brands will drastically change the dynamics in digital communities. There is a new game coming to town.

What, from a technical point of view, is Sprite Yard offering its consumers in its mobile digital community?

A tag name and password for access giving a form of security
The ability to create your own community by inviting others to join
Photo sharing
A message board for sending messages to individuals or groups
Showcasing a snapshot of your activities
Digital downloads of content for free
Exclusive content such as visitones (music with ringtones) and mobisodes (animated shorts) linked to PIN activation under a Sprite bottle cap.

Linking mobile content to product sales will become the new marketing dynamite of the next five years.

The mobile marketing perspective

Taken from a mobile marketing perspective, Sprite Yard is an example of a brand combining with technology to communicate with its consumers in the most personal way via their mobile phones. As I have mentioned before, the mobile is personal, portable and pedestrian. It is also offers the most complete way in which to communicate a message to someone since Eve offered the apple of temptation to Adam.

“We know that when it comes to reaching teens, mobile is the medium. This program will enable us to connect with teens by putting Sprite both in their hand and in their phone,” says Denis Sison, Sprite global brand director.

The mobile imperative for teens

Looking at recent global research by Mobilitec (www.mobilitec.com/) on Mobile Marketing and Teens, the principal points are confirmed once again. These are that

teens are highly responsive to mobile marketing techniques and mobile branding
this group anticipates receiving advertising and special offers on their mobile phones telling them about new products and good deals.

This is hardly surprising when you think about it. This group is probably the most connected to the world wide web where they are constantly exposed to similar offers.

A similar research project, conducted by Q Research, amongst the 11 – 20 age group in the UK, has come up with results that rank their preferences when receiving mobile marketing communications as follows:

32% – willing to receive “general” ads to mobile
71% – willing to receive ads only on things I am interested in
76% – willing to receive ads in exchange for discounts/ special offers
82% – willing to receive ads in exchange for top-up credit

The research further showed that young people preferred picture advertising messages to video and text/sms ads. This is probably due to the current cost of downloading video in the UK. As SA presently has amongst the cheapest rates in the world it would not surprise me to find that SA teens would be quite prepared to download video ads on their mobiles.

Mind the gap

But what of the generation gap and the old timers in SA? Anything from 35 years and up could be considered “old” in the mobile digital age. Will they use their mobile phones to join communities and to access information? What of the digital divide in this country?

One has to spend only 30 minutes in the company of Brian Richardson of Wizzit Bank to realize that when one offers a valued service on a mobile phone, no matter what the age, gender or ethnic group, the user will learn to use and adopt that service. In the case of Wizzit, this is a banking product that has been enthusiastically adopted by the previously unbanked population sector of SA.

Bite the apple

There are two things that you can do about this opportunity that is being offered to you:

You can relax, soak up the sun and have it pass you by. At least, make it a conscious decision to ignore the proferred ‘apple' without testing the fruit.
You can decide to investigate it and determine whether or not a mobile digital community suits your brand strategy. At least then you will test the fruit and decide whether or not to take a bite of the apple.

And by the way, do it in 2007, because in 2008 you will be banished from the Garden of Eden.

Source: Biz Community

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Case Study - Stolichnaya

2007-06-19T14:56:00.000-05:00

Goals:
Reinforce brand loyalty by engaging Stolichnaya enthusiasts. Generate awareness of new products and promotions using cross-mobile media. Leverage SMS and PDA to connect with qualified consumers at key lifestyle moments

Solution:
Zingy launched the "Stoli Insider" SMS program, with a Zingy-hosted opt-in on Stoli.com and via the shortcode STOLI. The nearly year-long program offered consumers new product updates like the launch of AStoli Blueberi, timely alerts such as July 4th party recipes and raised awareness of promotions like the "Create your own signature cocktail" contest.

Zingy launched the "Genuine Russian Vodka" brand campaign by incorporating Stoli as exclusive sponsor of the Vindigo City Guide on PDAs for the month of July. Stoli 'owned' the PDA city guide, with no other brand appearing, and used this format to reach 21+ influential lifestyle enthusiasts at point of purchase. The sponsorship served as a key point-of-sale brand reminder, while also promoting the SMS program. Email and calendar opt-ins further engaged consumers by enabling them to sign up for exclusive brand info.

Results:
The "Stoli Insider" SMS program has generated a higher than expected number of opt-ins. Another clear indicator of success is the extremely low opt-out rate throughout the 9 month program. Consumers found value in being a brand "Insider" and want to continue to receive text messages from Stoli.

The Vindigo City Guide sponsorship generated strong interest in the Stoli brand, with tap-through rates as high as 1.60% and consistently high email opt-in rates, which generated valuable leads.

According to Adam Rosen, Senior Brand Manager, Stolichnaya Vodka, at Pernod Ricard USA, "Mobile presents for us the unique opportunity to effectively reach our consumers at appropriate times, which is key. This was our first mobile initiative and, as a brand that's about being genuine and authentic, it was critical to partner with a company with a lot of integrity and insight. Zingy delivered a successful program; they made it easy and turnkey, guiding us throughout the process."

Source: Mobile Marketing Association

Read full study here

Mobile Content: Keeping a Wireless Industry Growth Engine On Track

2007-06-19T11:21:00.001-05:00

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way, with consumer-facing content driving the growth of non-voice wireless services. When CTIA took over the management of the Wireless Data Forum in 1998, the expectation of the wireless community was that enterprise applications would drive market adoption of data products and services. Even the name of the organization was IT oriented.

Then, a funny thing happened on the way to the development of the enterprise market: ringtones… along with a cascade of other non-productivity, consumer-oriented… stuff. Stuff that could no longer be stuffily called “wireless data,” but acquired the more user-friendly term of “mobile content.”

Today, non-voice services are the fastest growing segment of the wireless industry, comprising 13.5% of total ARPU as of December 2006, according to the latest figures from CTIA’s semi-annual wireless industry survey, or $15.2 billion in dollar terms, up 77% from the year earlier. Of that total amount, CTIA estimates that “mobile content” (including downloadable and streaming content, as well as information services) accounts for approximately two-thirds, with messaging services making up the remainder. By any and all measures, mobile content is making a substantial and growing contribution to wireless service providers’ bottom lines.

But at times it seems as if mobile content is succeeding in spite of the industry’s efforts, not because of them. Many of the problems associated with market adoption of mobile content are related to the limitations associated with the platform itself: a device with limited screen space, operating in an often harsh environment and expected to perform as if it were on a desk in a living room connected to a fat pipe. Other issues seem self-inflicted: When a representative of one of the first major carriers to roll out ringtones bragged of the service, a group of us handed him a phone and told him to download one from his Web site. Thirty-one clicks later, having not yet succeeded, he gave up. Things have improved significantly since then, but a number of issues still remain.

One of the issues that has plagued content providers from the beginning has been the discoverability of mobile content. In the beginning especially, content providers that were not at the top of the carrier decks were often doomed to product oblivion, no matter how good the content. The fact of the matter is that not being at the top of the deck means that content is buried just too deep for a normal consumer (someone who must find something in four or five clicks, maximum) to locate it. In order to address that problem, and unlock the potential of mobile content to add to their bottom lines, the carriers (begrudgingly in some cases) came to realize that they would have to allow more distribution channels than just their decks and Web sites. In the last year and a half, carriers have been providing billing-on-behalf-of services to an ever-growing universe of content providers who assume responsibility for marketing and delivering the content to subscribers. Among carriers, the willingness to facilitate these providers has been based on the belief that a rising tide will lift all boats, albeit with a healthy concern that their customer-service departments would be on the hook for providers that failed to live up to their claims, from delivering the right content type and to living up to the terms of service.

Not long after significantly increasing the number of third-party content providers that it would bill-on-behalf-of, a representative of one of the major carriers who had responsibility for developing their consumer products approached CTIA with a problem. While he was convinced of the value of allowing third-party providers onto his network, he was concerned that the actions of some of them could potentially set the industry back to the time when content was available only via the carrier deck (or for purchase via credit card… and we all know how unsuccessful that approach is in getting the consumer to complete the transaction). He was getting complaints from subscribers about getting content that was not ordered, was ordered and not delivered, that was charged for when it was supposed to be free, etc. In response to customer complaints, the carrier was simply refunding the subscriber, often after paying the content provider, resulting in a substantial leak of revenues. Not to mention that he had been called into the offices of several states’ attorneys general who were contemplating class-action lawsuits against his company (thank goodness Elliott Spitzer got a new job). His complaints were echoed by his counterpart at another major carrier who was going much more slowly in allowing third parties on their network, but who had grown so frustrated he told me he was about to “pull the plug on the whole thing.”

To be sure, the industry has developed best practices around much of this content, which mostly comprises premium-priced, short code-based subscription services, and the industry is doing its best to educate content providers and consumers about those best practices. However, the competitive pressures among providers to get their content noticed is growing unabated, and a number of providers are turning to anonymous affinity marketing groups, who are incented only to get click-throughs, and so are sometimes less concerned about the problems caused by failing to follow the industry guidelines.

To help the industry address this problem, CTIA has launched an Off Portal Content Monitoring initiative, and has hired the telecommunications research firm Telephia to help implement the program. Since January, Telephia has been testing each of the applications registered in the Common Short Code registry for adherence to the industry best-practices guidelines. The results have been mixed. While most programs are in some form of violation of the guidelines, many of the violations are technical in nature and say as much about detailed nature of the guidelines as they do about the overall compliance of the industry. (For example, applications that drop the dollar sign from the message stating the terms of the service are in technical violation, even when they meet the rest of the requirement for clearly stating service terms.) Some of the violations, however, are egregious and are of the type sure to generate calls to carrier customer-service departments, a significant cost to the carrier (e.g. not stopping the service despite repeated attempts to get the service stopped).

At this point in time, we are just starting to report our findings to the carriers, and they are beginning to assess how best to deal with the results. As we get out the word to the providers of the importance of adhering to the guidelines, and present them with evidence of where they are not in compliance, we expect better and better performance, which should lead to more opportunity for them with the carriers. This is a distribution channel of enormous potential for the carriers and of enormous importance for the content providers. But for it to be successful, all members of the value chain are going to have to meet their responsibilities and adhere to the industry’s voluntary code of best practices. If not, the industry will put itself in the position of having legislators and regulators, not to mention state attorneys general, impose responsibility on us.

Source: RCR News

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Case Study - Dove

2007-06-18T15:03:00.000-05:00

Objective:
Dove wanted to introduce an interactive mobile element to their traditional marketing effort when they launched the "Campaign for Real Beauty."

Overview:
In Fall 2004, OgilvyOne teamed with Mobile 365 to offer the first-ever outdoor mobile marketing campaign in the U.S. to promote the Dove "Campaign for Real Beauty." Dove wanted to extend their traditional marketing mix to include an interactive mobile element, while encouraging consumers to think about what "real beauty" means to them.

Mobile 365 provided two short codes (across all major U.S. carriers) to enable consumers to participate in the campaign by voting on individual graphics on mobile billboards being driven throughout New York City and Los Angeles.

Mobile 365 tabulated and transmitted live bicoastal voting results to a large stationary billboard (with an LED display) located in Times Square in New York City. After casting his or her vote for a particular image, a participant received an acknowledgement on his/her mobile phone. The message provided real-time voting results, and encouraged the participant to visit the campaign Website to engage in discussion groups on the topic of real beauty.

The live voting results billboard is the first fully-interactive billboard in Times Square, and the campaign was the first-ever outdoor mobile marketing event in the U.S. The OgilvyOne campaign extended Dove's traditional marketing mix to include an interactive mobile element, enabling the brand to easily interact with mobile subscribers at the consumer's choice.

We believe that "invitational mobile marketing" is the next wave for brands to reach target audiences. With this mobile messaging component; we have been able to add a real-time, interactive element to the Campaign for Real Beauty. - Gary Towning, Senior Partner, OgilvyOne.

Results:
The "Campaign for Real Beauty" garnered extensive media coverage for the Times Square and Los Angeles billboards and the accompanying interactive mobile element.

Source: Mobile Marketing Association

Read study here

It's Getting Easier to Access E-Mail on your Mobile Phone

2007-06-18T09:58:00.000-05:00

Consumers' obsession with sending and receiving e-mail is quickly migrating onto mobile phones.

Numerous companies are making it easier for anyone to send and receive e-mail on their cell phones without splurging on a high-end device or a premium data plan. While the services are generally less sophisticated than the wireless e-mail services offered by BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd., Microsoft Corp. and other wireless e-mail providers, they are starting to appeal to those who use e-mail more for fun than business.

Consilient Technologies Corp. has begun selling mobile software that allows users to send and receive mail from multiple personal e-mail accounts on some 400 different cell phones. The software communicates with the Consilient server, which is checking a user's e-mail account for them. When it receives notice that users have received mail at their personal account, it pulls the messages and delivers them to the user's phone.

Emoze Ltd., owned by Emblaze Ltd., launched an e-mail service that will configure a user's phone to receive mail it routes from personal and work e-mail accounts. The software, which can be downloaded to most cell phones, is currently free and will deliver e-mails to the inbox built in on the device, eliminating the need for users to open a separate application every time they want to check e-mail.

Teleflip Inc. is taking a different approach with its flipMail service, which allows cell-phone users to read and reply to e-mails they receive from users they have in their address book. The service reformats users' e-mails so they can be sent over the operator's text-messaging channel but show up on the device resembling regular mail. FlipMail is now free but will soon begin to include advertisements in addition to offering a premium version for a few dollars a month.

The services are starting to catch on among users interested in staying on top of their e-mail on the go. While checking his e-mail via Teleflip on his phone, Paul Brown, a 34-year-old software engineer, received a message from a friend telling him that NBA playoff tickets had just gone on sale. He called to purchase some instantly.

"It's nice to get your e-mails right when they come up," says Brown, of Austin, Texas. He says he doesn't want to pay for an additional data plan since he is usually near his computer.

Others have begun using them in lieu of higher-priced services geared toward professionals. Paul Adams, a 35-year-old manager for a rock band who lives in New York City, recently bought a BlackJack smart phone from AT&T but chose not to pay for the wireless e-mail service that would have cost him an additional $60 a month. Instead he uses Consilient for $60 a year along with a data plan that's about $30 a month. He says the service stalls every few months or so and forces him to reboot, but he doesn't mind the glitch.

"That probably doesn't happen with a BlackBerry," says Adams. "But I don't care."

Leading Web-mail companies are also improving the mobile mail experience. Yahoo Inc. has been expanding the availability of its Yahoo Go mobile service that allows users to receive Yahoo mail in real time on their phones instead of logging into a mobile Web site. Late last year, Google Inc. launched a mobile Gmail application that is faster and easier to use than logging into its mobile Web site, and it says it might develop technology that would tell users they have received mail without having to refresh their inbox.

The new services are aiming for a piece of the mobile e-mail market that is dominated by corporate users. But that is forecast to change as handsets improve, the price of data plans drops and younger consumers rely on their phones as multipurpose communications hubs. The number of U.S. consumers who access personal e-mail accounts on a mobile device is forecast to rise 55 percent to 17.4 million in 2007, up from 11.2 million in 2006, according to Strategy Analytics Inc., a market-research firm.

"There is some latent demand on the part of consumers to get e-mail on their phones," says Charles Golvin, principal analyst at Forrester Research, whose surveys show that only 11 percent of adults with cell phones use mobile e-mail. "There is room for more players."

Source: Orlando Sentinel

Case Study - ANWB

2007-06-15T14:03:00.000-05:00

Goals:
Mobile ticketing improves customer service and helps to generate new revenue streams through new and existing customers.

Idea:
ANWB, the tourist organization for drivers, bicyclists and walkers/hikers in the Netherlands, implemented the VS2300M reading solution to control admission to the Efteling amusement park. In summer 2003, the tourist organization ANWB started a mobile ticketing pilot project on behalf of the Efteling recreation and Adventure Park in Holland. Instead of buying entrance tickets at the counter, customers could purchase them online from the ANWB website and get a discount when using their mobile phone as the entrance ticket. Once the tickets were ordered from the ANWB website and payment completed, the customer was sent a text message containing a two-dimensional code (Data Matrix) to his mobile phone.

Results:
At the Efteling park entrance, the customer needed only to present his mobile phone with the Data Matrix entry code displayed to the VS2300M scanners that were in place at some control points. The VS2300M reading systems first decoded the Data Matrix code, checked it for validity against the ANWB databse via a GPRS connection and then granted entrance to the park.

Source: Mobile Marketing Association

Social Networking Conference - Courtyard Marriott Downtown

2007-06-15T09:57:00.000-05:00

This event will focus solely on mobile markets for the Social Networking business. Many have suggested that the mobile usage of the internet will eclipse computers and laptop usage. For the social networking and online personals industry, this technology represents the road to the future. Mobile social networking and mobile personals is strongest in Europe and is growing significantly in the Far East. North American mobile usage of web-based applications has grown significantly over the last 12 to 18 months.

Description: Many have suggested that the mobile usage of the internet will eclipse computers and laptop useage. For the social networking and online personals industry, this technology represents the road to the future. Mobile social networking and mobile personals is strongest in Europe and is growing significantly in the Far East. North American mobile useage of web-based applications has grown significantly over the last 12 to 18 months.

This event will focus solely on mobile markets for the Social Networking business. It is for dating/social networking executives that have an interest in learning about new technologies, marketing strategies, business management, networks and mobile telecom. Attending will be:

# Social networking business executives
# Online personals industry business executives
# Software & mobile technology executives
# Venture Capitalists
# Mobile device and PDA manifacturers
# Mobile telecommunication executives
# Mobile/Wireless marketing executives
# Media executives
# Mobile payment processing executives
# Affiliate managers
# Affiliates and portal webmasters of social networking related sites.

Experts in management, mobile technology and marketing for social networking with experience with the mobile/wireless market will present. For example, we plan on having a 90 minute workshop covering business models for mobile. Also we will have a workshop on the latest software for mobile devices for the social networking and online personals marketplace: How to plan and implement software, which types of software (ex: WAP, JAVA) to use, how to install and distribute for various wireless phones. We will also cover the mobile dating market in specific regions and countries as well.

Source: Social Computing Magazine

Case Study - Snapple (Mobile Marketing)

2007-06-14T15:22:00.000-05:00

Goals:
1) Increase campaign awareness of Snapple's SNAFFLE promotion

2) Keep Snapple on consumer's mind during peak purchase hours

3) Gather market intelligence and build mobile database for future re-marketing efforts

Solution:
Snapple's mobile marketing program was built around "Snaffle", Snapple's main promotion for the critical summer months. Snapple printed numbers on 225 million bottle caps that the public could then match with winning Snaffle numbers. The winning Snaffle numbers were announced on TV, on the web and delivered via text message (SMS), and allowed participants to win prizes. Throughout the summer, twelve drawings were held and three prizes were offered at each drawing. SMS alerts with the winning Snaffle numbers were sent out during lunchtime and peak purchase times of the day - maximizing on the strength of mobile communication.

Results:
Ninety three percent of all consumers who received the SMS alerts read them, and 24% were more positive about Snapple as a result of receiving the messages. 33% of those who participated bought additional Snapple products as a result.

Source: Mobile Marketing Association

The ABC's of Mobile Marketing

2007-06-14T12:39:00.001-05:00

If you're unfamiliar with the mobile space's players and ecosystem, selecting the ideal mobile partner can be daunting. This column will explain the mobile value chain and provides some questions for you -- the brand or agency -- to ask your prospective mobile partners, prior to making any selection decisions.

Although many players in the space are integrating across the value chain, there are four main elements:

* Products and services. Includes brands, agencies, and third-party content providers. These are the companies seeking collaboration and partnership with others within the value chain. We also see the emergence of mobile agencies and the creation of mobile divisions within larger agencies, which help with the end-to-end decisions around the mobile campaign. Depending on your needs, the mobile agencies may be what you're looking for.

* Mobile ASPs (define). Includes application and technology providers, along with the MASP. The MASP is the mobile partner that can provide a complete, one-stop solution for a mobile campaign, including mobile storefronts, campaign planning, and connectivity.

* Connection. Includes aggregators and wireless operators. Many players in the mobile space are focused on connection only. Many MASPs are partnered with these companies, and thus connection players don't need to be contacted directly (although, again, it depends on your needs).

* Media and retail. Includes brick-and-mortar, e-tail, and so on.

Many brands are baffled. With so many companies to choose from and so many differences between the companies, how can you possibly find the right partner? It's best to first determine the capabilities you're looking for, then develop a checklist so you can narrow the selections and determine the partner that's right for you. According to Nihal Mehta, CEO of ipsh!, finding the right partner is one of the most important decisions you can make when choosing to integrate mobile into your cross media campaign. "Finding the right partner in the mobile marketing space makes the difference between a successful campaign and a complete flop," says Nihal.

Develop a checklist that includes the elements important to you and your company. Also ensure you include the following:

* How many campaigns has your mobile company launched? With which companies and brands? The number of campaigns and the size of the brands a company's worked with helps you understand its level of expertise. A partner should provide you with a list of contact companies and brands it's worked with, along with references.

* What are your company's customer care resources? Do I receive a dedicated account manager or support person? This should include number of support individuals, response times, levels of care (SLAs), and so forth. For those who appreciate personalized service, understanding if the same individual will be involved throughout your campaign may be important.

* Does your company provide proactive monitoring and reporting on my campaign? For example, does the company provide statistics and information throughout the campaign, or only at the end? Is this information available via a client extranet or must you depend on the agency to supply this data? Answers to these questions are important as ongoing feedback will help you understand and tweak the campaign throughout (iterative feedback and refinement).

* To what extent is the mobile company focused on your particular niche? If you're a player in the business-to-business (B2B) space, does the mobile partner understand how you do business? If you're a nonprofit, does your mobile partner understand the intricate nature of grassroots fundraising and donor management? If you're a large brand marketer, does your mobile partner understand all the channels you speak through and can it help augment them with a mobile program that works in concert?

* What types of services are offered? Is the partner company a mobile agency, an aggregator, other? Can you provide Web-related development that brings a mobile program to life or help to guide this process? How does its services match to your specific needs? For example, will you look to the partner company to execute creative and strategic direction in addition to connectivity?

In this case, developing a needs checklist is important in assessing a potential partner company. Be honest about which services you need and which you don't. If you're looking for creative input, ensure you pick a company that values creativity and personalization.

* Can the mobile partner help determine the campaign objectives through an ROI (define) calculation or other quantitative or qualitative means? This will help you determine if your mobile partner understands what your needs and priorities are prior to the campaign launch. Some mobile companies specialize in certain vertical segments. If you're looking for expertise for your vertical, ask around.

* What wireless carriers do you have direct or indirect connectivity to? Depending on your campaign, this is an important question if you're planning to launch nationwide or global campaigns across all carriers, or only with one carrier, standard or premium rate.

* How stable is the partner company? What are the funding and employee count, and how long has the company been in operation? What's its core focus and competencies (e.g., aggregation, licensing, creative, etc.)? If you're considering a long-term partnership for your mobile initiatives, these are important questions to ask. There are a large number of both established and new entrants in the space.

Source: ClickZ

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Case Study - Sprite 3G Mobile Content Downloads (Mobile Marketing)

2007-06-13T14:56:00.000-05:00

Goals:
Increase brand awareness for 'a new member of the Sprite family...'

Idea:
Sponge were requested by UK interactive agency, Weapon 7, to fulfill the mobile part of their interactive TV campaign for Sprite 3G. The TV advertisement featured an elf-like creature alongside a can of Sprite 3G offering viewers to get 'both sprites for free.'

The can of Sprite 3G was made available to viewers pressing their blue button via interactive TV, to order a postal coupon to redeem their free can of drink.

Viewers texting in the SPRITE keyword to the 5-digit shortcode promoted during the TV ad received a video download of a dancing elf-like 'sprite 3G' to their mobile by wap push.

The elf-like Sprite 3G arrived as a video download of the dancing creature, delivered to viewer's mobile phones by wap push as a result of the viewer texting in the SPRITE keyword to the shortcode promoted during the TV advertisement.

Sponge worked with Weapon 7 to ensure the content was of highest quality and compatible with a maximum number of mobile handsets, and managed the content delivery.

Results:
Higher than expected response rate: "we've almost surpassed our target number of interactions for the whole campaign with a week still to go...!" - Joanna Moynihan, 'Sprite' Brand Manager, UK

Source: Mobile Marketing Association

Read article here

Mobile Marketing WAP

2007-06-13T09:27:00.001-05:00

I’m finding myself scurrying just to keep up with the wave of recent research and metrics regarding mobile usage. As long as I’ve been covering the mobile field, I have had trouble getting a handle on how much and how often U.S. mobilistas fire up the data channel on their phones. For activities like gaming and mobile search, I have seen wildly inflated figures passed around -- 30% to 40% penetration rates that don’t even pass a simple eyeball check on the street.

Unscientific as the sample might be, I spend a lot of time in airports, on lines, and in waiting rooms checking out the mobile activity around me, and the share of people peering into their phones to do more than speed-dial a friend remains visibly small. Shifting my location reorients my sample, so sitting in Starbucks at the local university reveals what some college-based mobile marketers have been telling me for months: the 18-to-24 demo is now starting to use their phones as portable PCs. You really do see a lot of these kids peering into their flip phones and two-thumb keyboarding.

I learned to trust my gut on these eyeball checks a few years ago when covering the gaming industry. Being a parent of a ten-year-old brought me into the living rooms of a lot of houses with kids, and invariably the main TV was running a video game, not TV programming. When the metrics companies finally caught up, they formalized what any parent already knew: the game console was eroding TV’s time share.

For the upcoming OMMA Mobile conference on June 29 in New York, we have asked some of the leading keepers of the numbers to come in and report more scientifically on our current knowledge of mobile metrics. I already anticipate hearing about a spike in mobile Web usage this year. Again, I use the subjective measure of my own patterns. In just the last six months, while at conferences, on commutes, etc., I have come to identify the phone as a medium. I have amassed a reliable collection of media alerts, feeds, and WAP bookmarks that I now consult habitually in a few spare moments.

M:Metrics reports that about 9.6% of mobile users accessed news or information on phones in March, which is not much different from the 10% they reported about the same activity in March 2006. On the other hand, content provider and m-commerce enabler Bango says it saw a threefold increase in mobile Web traffic coming from the U.S. So I still have no idea how much more WAP usage is going on, but my gut tells me that if I am doing more of it, then others are, too. In almost every case, however, it is a third-party publisher pulling me into the data channel, not the deck itself.

Now, more than ever, I have come to see that it is the third-party content providers that will be the real change agents in the mobile eco-system. They are the ones who will dial up mobile content for their users, not the carriers. As I talk to more and more content providers, the story is the same. The users of their WAP sites, wallpapers, ringtones, etc. all tell them that they are relatively new to using phones in these ways. “We didn’t know we could do this with our phones,” customers tell the publishers again and again. They are being drawn to the new platform by the third-party channel, not the carriers.

Once again, the carriers seem to be out of the media loop they themselves are building. They are terrible educators. At the sales level, they are not showing customers what they can do with their phone, and on the merchandising level, they are not teasing the user with enough demos, pre-loaded applications and bookmarks, to encourage using the data channel. And on the partnership level, they are not working with many publishers to encourage general use of the phone as an everyday media platform.

OMMA Mobile’s Short Code Theater

The one metric no one seems to question is the use of SMS messaging. Well over a third of mobile users sent a text message in March -- almost 70 million, according to M:Metrics. By any measure, that is a critical mass. And here is another example of a phone habit proliferating because of users, not the carriers. Apparently, the teens who first embraced SMS actually taught their parents how to use it by texting them. Again, I go to personal metrics. I know I can more effectively communicate with my 15-year-old daughter when she is out and about via SMS than by voice.

As a marketing channel, SMS has become much more reliable in just the last year. I test just about every short code a marketer tosses at me, just to see where they lead, and just six months ago I was appalled at the failure rate. So many short code queries went unanswered I started asking around about failure rate metrics in the industry. No one had any to share. This year, again using my gut metrics, the SMS situation seems much improved. And at OMMA Mobile we hope to show off just how well SMS marketing is doing.

We invite mobile marketers and brands to submit entries in our own OMMA Mobile Short Code Theater. Submit to us your best campaign that is initiated by a short code. It can be any mobile marketing campaign (video, WAP push, etc) so long as the consumer initiates the exchange with an SMS code. We will ask all entrants to put their prompt and a visual explanation for the campaign on a single PowerPoint slide that attendees can view and activate for themselves on their own phones during the show. Attendees will be able to vote on their favorite campaign via our own SMS voting system at OMMA Mobile.

Source: Media Post

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Case Study - Pepsi Super Bowl

2007-06-12T14:06:00.000-05:00

Background:
In the run up to the 2007 Super Bowl, Pepsi unveiled 15 new can designs and created a range of promotions as part of a major new branding initiative. Its Super Can contest gave fans the chance to win Super Bowl tickets for life and a jewel-encrusted can valued at $100,000. Alongside traditional and online promotions, Pepsi also became the latest brand to deploy a mobile advertising program on the Sprint Mobile Media Network, and one of the first to incorporate video into its campaign.

Objectives:

Expand the promotion of its Super Can contest
Increase awareness of the 15 new Pepsi can designs
Drive traffic to its mobile web site
Increase video and wallpaper downloads

Solution:
Sprint Nextel has been defining a highly sophisticated new advertising channel on its mobile web browsing pages through the Sprint Mobile Media Network. It offers brands a direct, powerful and interactive way to reach mobile consumers. Pepsi was able to cut through the noise around the Super Bowl as the exclusive advertiser on the Sprint Mobile Media Network's homepage in the days leading up to the big game. And, as a result, drove consumers from four different banner display ads to Pepsi's branded mobile web site, where consumers engaged in a variety of actions.

Pepsi enabled users to download a custom wallpaper of the "blinged-out" Pepsi can, click to see the video spots featuring the new Pepsi can designs, and click through to Sprint Power View -- the only made-for-mobile video programming network in the United States with original sports and entertainment shows -- where they could view live Super Bowl video clips sponsored by Pepsi.

Sprint's mobile web ad serving vendor, Enpocket, and Sprint Power View delivery partner, IMG, assisted in the execution of this multi-faceted campaign.

Results

9 million impressions
An average click through rate of 4.5 percent, with the most popular creative achieving an 11.5 percent average
175,000 Pepsi wallpaper downloads

The program was one of the first to integrate several engagement mechanics, including content downloads, click-to-view a video ad, and click to see a live TV broadcast. At a time when advertisers are vying for consumers' attention across multiple media channels, Pepsi built awareness and engagement for a major marketing initiative using the Sprint Mobile Media Network - leaving a lasting impression with the 175,000 people that now see the Pepsi wallpaper every time they look at their Sprint mobile phone.

Study published on May 30, 2007

Source: Mobile Marketing Association

Read study here

The Agility of Mobile Marketing

2007-06-12T09:33:00.001-05:00

Mobile marketing is having a profound impact on the way in which companies think about, approach and implement marketing campaigns.

The immediacy in generating the content and the personal attachment people have with their phones facilitates fast moving, high impact campaigns.

Consider the time it takes to generate a TV or print campaign. First one needs an agency to create the campaign; then there is the conceptual work, the creation of the specific content and the booking of airtime, or space in print/online publications. The process of start to finish can take anything from weeks to months. Furthermore, the company has to align its business with the campaign, particularly for retail companies who use their marketing to move stock.

However, mobile marketing is far more direct and agile because a company communicates with consumers through their cellphone.

So for example, if a retailer at the start of a week wanted to have a sale that Saturday, using broadcasting or print mediums to publicise the sale would be impossible. Online advertising could be a possibility but high volume Sites would most likely have already sold their advertising space for that week.

However, the same experience as a TV, radio or print campaign could be created using MMS. In contrast to other mediums, an interactive MMS campaign with voice over, graphics and text can be created within two working days. Distribution to a base of say 200,000 MMS enabled handsets (registered handsets are verified first) could be done in a further two days and by the weekend over 90 percent of the base would most likely have been exposed to the campaign with an added knock-on effect given the viral nature of mobile marketing.

Mobile marketing can therefore be used to have a direct, immediate impact whereas other mediums need time for the message to get out into the market given people's intermittent use of those media types.

In addition, unlike other forms of marketing, a medium like MMS gives power to both the sender and receiver. Advertisers can deliver a content rich message including video, sounds, pictures and text to specific consumers, while the consumer has the choice of whether to accept or reject an incoming MMS and should be able to unsubscribe from the service at any time.

And because mobile marketing is measurable, companies can see real time reporting including when the MMS are delivered, who opens them, which numbers fail to receive the MMS and which recipients reject the message.

Along with looking at mobile marketing's ability to deliver content quickly, companies need to take cognisance of the number of phones in the market. It is difficult to say how many people have cellphones, but the three cellphone networks together claim to have a combined base of over 36-million subscribers in 2007.

Compare that to TV and radio audiences. According to the South African Advertising Research Foundation (SAARF), its 2006 AMPS (All Media and Products Survey) estimated there to be over 24.5-million adult viewers, while there were over 28.5-million radio listeners. Importantly, these figures represent people who watched TV or listened to the radio once in the space of a week. Running campaigns to this group of people takes time for the message to saturate the market.

Mobile is more direct because you're going straight to the person. Given that there are likely more cellphone users than adult TV viewers, the strength of mobile channel to deliver marketing is becoming significant. Globally cellphones clearly have the greatest penetration of devices. There are close to 2.5-billion active cellphones, compared to an estimated 900-million internet users and a billion television sets.

Mobile marketing is therefore poised to become the most powerful marketing medium in the world. It is therefore vital that companies begin to think about mobile marketing as a means of reaching out to their target market.

Source: Marketing Web

Full article here

Case Study - Chinese New Year Campaign

2007-06-11T15:02:00.000-05:00

Date: March 19th, 2007

Company: Madhouse

Client: PepsiCo China

Background:
Pepsi is always looking for innovative ways to not just reach out to but interact with their target audience. Thus, for Pepsi's Chinese New Year campaign featuring the ever popular pop star Jolin Tsai, Pepsi turned to Madhouse to reach the young demographic which consumes more and more mobile media everyday.

Goals:
1) Drive the greatese viewership of the CNY TVC Nationwide

2) Reach China's young mobile user base who spends more of their time consuming new versus traditional media

3) Users on the move can experience Pepsi's digital content and share with friends anytime anywhere

Solution:
In cooperation with Pepsi, Madhouse built the Pepsi CNY WAP campaign site hosting downloadable content such as the Chinese New Year TV commercial and many behind-the-scenes videos

To ensure the premium presentation of content and delivering the best brand image possible, Madhouse automatically tailors content for each of the 1000's of handset models in China

Capitalizing on the customary practice of sending greetings for CNY, Pepsi CNY mobile greeting cards increased the viral effectiveness of the campaign

To drive traffic to the site, ads were served by Madhouse across a breadth of large protal and entertainment sites on Madhouse's ad network, MadNetwork

Result:
During the 2 weeks of mobile media promotion, the ads served by MadServing achieved over 8,000,000 total impressions resulting in over 3.6% click-through rate generating over 140,000 unique visitors to the Pepsi CNY WAP site

Source: Mobile Marketing Association

Full study here

Mobile Web Growth

2007-06-11T13:42:00.001-05:00

Bango published statistics which confirm that the United States is at the forefront of a mobile web growth with a three fold increase in usage over the last year. This rapid rise, taking the US to second position behind the UK, is being fuelled by the increasing popularity of mobile search as a way of finding new content and services. By working as a “global exchange” for the mobile web, Bango is able to provide a unique insight into where users are coming from world-wide and what handsets they are using. The top five countries accessing the mobile web via Bango* in April 2007 were the UK at 27%, the US at 21%, South Africa at 11%, India at 9% and Indonesia at 3%. In total, Bango detects mobile web users from over 190 countries.

Source: Lets Go Mobile

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Mobile Marketing's Day has Come

2007-06-11T12:47:00.000-05:00

Mobile marketing may have come of age, if last week’s Mobile Marketing Forum 2007 was any indication. Organized by the Mobile Marketing Association, the New York show is said to have attracted more than 650 delegates from the marketer and vendor sides. Compare that to 400 attendees last year, 200 in 2005 and a mere 20 in 2004. Take the potential of this medium seriously.

The sheer ubiquity of mobile usage makes this market unavoidable. The GSM Association claims there are 2.4 billion mobile phone subscribers worldwide, way more than landline users. The Yankee Group estimates that more than 350 billion text messages are exchanged monthly across the world’s mobile networks. More than 15 percent of these messages are classified as marketing or commercial communications.

Expectations are that mobile marketing will this year become a $1 billion industry, according to Laura Marriott, president of the MMA. The market for premium mobile content alone is estimated at $274 million for the first quarter.

The mobile channel, like the Internet, has several applications: communications, marketing, organizing, recording and commerce. The communications, organizing and recording aspects are in full use by consumers. It is marketing and commerce where advertisers and retailers need to put their shoulders to the wheel.

The mobile handset is the most personal electronic gadget a consumer has. To change that equation requires much convincing. Mobile has begun to catch on in the entertainment industry. Text messaging has played a critical role in the success of television shows such as “American Idol” and “Deal or No Deal.” The consumer felt sufficiently engaged in the process to text in votes or choices. The value proposition was simple: you engage with the brand or show and, in return, you influence the outcome of that effort. The consumer feels in charge and the brand gets the feedback desired.

The Mobile Marketing Forum last week attracted executives from organizations such as Coca-Cola, Walt Disney, ABC News, Major League Baseball, Clear Channel, Columbia Records, The Weather Channel, Hearst Magazines, Hachette Filipacchi, Procter & Gamble and The Associated Press. They presented case studies, ideas and tips and even announced new marketing campaigns to an audience hungry for a roadmap to effective execution.

What was heartening was that these major corporations didn’t hesitate to share knowledge. They sent their top mobile marketing, content and commerce executives. The MMA is also doing its bit. The Denver, CO-based organization will collaborate with the GSM Association to distribute a set of standards, guidelines, formats, inventory types and commercial and measurement models for mobile advertising and marketing. A new participation TV committee has been formed to create guidelines and best practices for all aspects of the interactive TV supply chain.

In terms of education, the association released an invaluable glossary of industry terms.

While there are plenty of opportunities for direct and interactive marketers to include mobile in their marketing plans, they must be fully aware of the challenges. Familiarity with technical jargon is by no means universal.

Consumers may balk at texting charges. They may also resent marketing messages on their phones. The clutter, when it eventually occurs, may not help an advertising brand's cause unless the value proposition is clear.

On the equipment side, issues like screen size and resolution and battery power need to be addressed. Pricing packages, fixed or a la carte, may be prohibitive. Lack of standard mobile advertising and measurement guidelines may slow advertiser adoption. Also, the CPMs are way too high at the moment, -- $80, by some estimates. And don’t forget the doorkeeper. No matter what the mobile marketer and vendor do, it won’t matter if there’s no signoff from the big four carriers: Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint.

Still, make the right call. Include mobile marketing in your plans.

Source: DM News

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Nielsen Measuring Mobile Phone Usage

2007-06-11T11:06:00.000-05:00

NEW YORK (AP) — More than 33 million people have used mobile phones to access the Internet this year, according to Nielsen Media Research, which on Wednesday announced its new effort to measure such use.

With Nielsen known primarily for its ratings system for television viewing, the announcement is another indication of how it is trying to keep up with rapidly changing entertainment options.

At first, Nielsen is simply offering information culled from interviews of the 30,000 people included in its television sample. Besides the people who have used their phones for Internet access, Nielsen estimated that 8 million people viewed video on their phones during the first three months of the year.

One-quarter of all people aged 18 to 34 use their phones to access the Internet, Nielsen said.

The mobile video audience actually skews older and male: nearly half (46 percent) of this audience is aged 35 and up, and 54 percent are men, Nielsen said.

Nielsen is still unable to specifically measure what videos are hottest on cell phones. The company is working to develop technology that would accomplish this, either through a tiny meter attached to a phone or a docking station that can record how the phone was used, said Karen Gyimesi, company spokeswoman.

Source: Nola

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Way2SMS Starts Off New Era in Mobile Advertising Through Mobitisements

2007-06-11T10:05:00.001-05:00

India's Largest Mobile Data Solutions Company Through its Unlimited Free SMS exchange platform "Way2SMS.COM" now Brings Unique and innovative Mobile advertising and branding Opportunities in the form of “Mobitisements".

Way2SMS.com provides its users text messaging absolutely free of cost. The text messages are appended with ads which can be geo-targeted. Users get this free text messaging service in exchange for opting in to have targeted ads appended to their message.

Out of the 160 characters of a standard SMS, Way2SMS offers only 92 characters to the User to send out their personal SMS. The rest of the characters are reserved for geo-targeted advertisement or Mobitisement. The smaller the users sends the message the larger the ads content will be pushed with it. Way2SMS Dynamic Ad platform allows advertisers to insert ads in 120,85 and 55 characters depending on the users personal message length.

Mr. Raju, CEO Way2SMS.com says “Mobile is the last remaining medium in which the user bears the full weight of payment – a situation that will ultimately stifle growth. Ad-funding SMS has the potential to create new measurable advertising channel for brands and provide mobile users the ability to communicate more for nothing”. Also Mr. Raju adds “For advertisers this could be the smart way to reach out to a large audience without the hassle of sending out unsolicited SMS or having to worry about mobile number database. Because, each User acts as a brand ambassador for advertisers”.

Currently, Way2SMS has nearly half million users and is expected to grow up to 1 million in next 3 months.Way2SMS intends to reach out every mobile subscriber at least once in a month. Thus Building a strong Platform for both Way2SMS users and advertisers, through an innovative concept “Mobitisements- ad supported messages”

Source: Newswire

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Case Study - Hennes & Mauritz Mobile Couponing

2007-06-08T14:48:00.001-05:00

Campaign - Hennes & Mauritz Mobile Couponing

Company - Gavitec

Goals:
The campaign focused on mobile couponing and the interaction between the targeted audience and the brand H&M with the use of mobile phones.

Idea:
Initiated by YOC AG, one of the leading suppliers of mobile marketing and e-mail services in Europe, the campaign focused on mobile couponing and the interaction between the targeted audience and the brand H&M with the use of mobile phones. 120,000 registered members of the YOC.de community received a mobile coupon as one picture message (SMS) with a 2D code (Data Matrix) to their mobile phone, offering them a free H&M T-shirt upon presentation of the code to the EXIO scanner at the new H&M shops in Berlin, Hamburg, and Cologne.

Using Smart Messaging (i.e. Nokia Picture), MMS or EMS technology, the mobile coupons were sent as a unique and encrypted 2D code (Data Matrix) on the user's mobile phone. Information like store name, opening date and coupon value were not only encrypted in the Data Matrix code but also displayed on the mobile phone screen as information for the mobile phone's user. To support this special time-limited marketing campaign, the 2D code also contained an expiry date.

At the cashiers of the new H&M shop in Berlin, customers presented their mobile coupon to the EXIO scanner. Connected to the YOC database via GPRS communication, the Gavitec solution decoded the mobile coupon and checked its validity. Once the code was validated, EXIO printed out a voucher permitting customers to receive their free T-shirt.

Results:
Within 48 hours, for example, 78% of the addressed members reacted to the sent push-SMS. More than 100 customers were queuing in front of the store before operating. Two hours after the shop opened, all 2,000 T-shirts had been given away.

Study was published on October 20, 2006

Source: Mobile Marketing Association

Read study here

Moosejaw Mountaineering takes on new mobile adventure

2007-06-08T10:56:00.001-05:00

NEW YORK — Moosejaw Mountaineering, the irreverant outdoor gear and apparel retailer, recently launched a mobile-shopping site that lets customers browse, price compare and shop for their favorite gear using any mobile phone or device.

A representative from Madison Heights, MI-based Moosejaw offered this information at the 2007 Mobile Marketing Forum here at the Marriott Marquis.

The MMF is sponsored by the Boulder, CO-based Mobile Marketing Association, whose members include agencies, advertisers, hand-held device manufacturers, wireless operators and service providers, retailers and any company focused on the potential of marketing through the mobile channel.

Moosejaw operates six locations in Michigan and Illinois and several Web sites, which are responsible for 60 percent of total sales, according to Indy Bishop, director of marketing at Moosejaw. The company also has a catalog. Its Web sites include TheJaw.com, ThaLowdown.com, MoosejawRewards.com, AdventureWatches.com and CampMoosejaw.com.

The company was formed in 1992 and has grown 50 percent to 70 percent every year since, Mr. Bishop said.

To fulfill its m-commerce technology needs, Moosejaw selected Seattle-based mPoria Inc.'s GoMobile solution. Designed specifically for the retail industry, GoMobile is a cost-effective service that lets merchants establish their own mobile-shopping site without the need for in-house development resources.

The site, which went live April 11, offers more than 40,000 outdoor gear and apparel products.

To make a purchase, consumers simply enter www.Moosejaw.mobi in their mobile Web browser to get immediate access to the company's product catalog. With mPoria's technology, mobile-shopping sites including Moosejaw's offer convenient browsing and product search. Once consumers are ready to make a purchase, they simply enter their credit card information into mPoria's secure platform, choose a preferred method of delivery and place their order.

“The site complements our existing marketing strategy — not just being multichannel but being cross-channel within a multichannel marketing strategy," Mr. Wohlfeill said. "For example, we can push our catalog on the mobile phone or push testing through our e-mail blasts and on the Web site.”

For example, the company recently sent out an e-mail to its opt-in list that asked recipients to text them back about their least favorite movie, and then Moosejaw texted them back with a 20-percent-off coupon code on merchandise.

“We got a really good response on it," Mr. Wohlfeill said.

Mr. Wohlfeill admitted that a key reason Moosejaw is focusing on mobile marketing is that the company is already reaching the right demographic for mobile applications —people age 18 to 34 who regularly use mobile devices and text messaging.

“We are really excited about [our mobile marketing initiatives] and we think it is going to expand and become a really important part of what we do in our marketing in the future," Mr. Wohfeill said.

The GoMobile platform also allows retailers to expand sales and marketing efforts like SMS campaigns and special promotions to their mobile customers.

Also during the session, Mark Kaplan, founder and chief marketing officer of ShopText Inc., a New York-based mobile-commerce and promotions company, explained his company’s service and offered some examples.

To use the service, a consumer must first place a phone call to ShopText to set up an account, specifying a shipping address and card account.

Then, when these consumers see the ShopText logo in their favorite magazines, newspapers, concerts, posters or on TV, they can shop, sample or donate from their mobile phones. When ShopText receives text messages about donations or products, it charges the credit card it has on file for the buyer. Then it sends the product from one of its warehouses around the country to the consumer.

Mr. Kaplan said a New York City nightclub, the Knitting Factory, is currently selling tickets through text messages. Here, an ad appearing in The Village Voice newspaper currently includes a keyword that consumers can text in and purchase a ticket. The ticket shows up at the "Will Call" window and purchasers can pick up the ticket there as if they purchased it online.

The Knitting Factory is also looking at other ways to use the feature, like encouraging audience members to text-message to join an online discussion about the concert that night.

Source: DM News

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Live from the Mobile Marketing Forum: Consumer Engagement is Key

2007-06-08T10:17:00.000-05:00

Mobile marketing is hot. And more and more brands are leveraging the technology through promotions to stay relevant and hip with their audience.

Take NBC’s popular game show “Deal or No Deal.” Viewers can play a text messaging game for a chance to win $10,000 each night the show airs. Consumers choose the case they believe contains the cash prize and text it to short code 59595.

“We felt confident that Americans would want to participate,” said Jon Vlassopulos, vice president, business development, digital media & strategic planning, Endemol USA, the company handling the campaign. “They like to participate in a program in an interactive way.”

During the second season of the show, the promotion received 130,000 interacts via text messages and online entries, Vlassopulos said.

Why is mobile marketing so popular? One of its benefits is instant action, panelists said.

“You can offer immediate gratification and get an immediate response you otherwise won’t get,” Robert Thurner, commercial director, Incentivate, said.

AKQA Mobile, for example, ran a mobile campaign in the U.K. for Coca-Cola during the Christmas holidays in which consumers sent Coke-branded m-cards to their friends and family. People could customize the card by choosing a design and adding a personalized message.

The campaign was an instant hit. A total of 120,000 m-cards were sent out, with the average user sending 1.7 cards.

The key to any mobile campaign is to make it special, panelists said.

“Mobile has to be unique,” Thurner said.

While the popularity of mobile marketing is growing, challenges still abound. Every carrier has different rules and regulations to follow.

“The time is now,” said Trish Halamandaris, vice president, marketing & Carrier sales, mDisney and Starwave Mobile, Walt Disney Internet Group. “The opportunity is here. But understanding how to execute [a campaign]…is key.”

“We are just at the tip of the iceberg for how we work with brand partners,” Vlassosulos added. “It’s a good time to get involved.”

Sessions at the Mobile Marketing Forum continue through today at the Marriott Marquis in New York. Attendance at the event has more than doubled over last year to about 600 people.

Source: Promo Magazine

Read article here

Case Study - McDonald's RUMAC

2007-06-07T16:18:00.000-05:00

One of the biggest opportunities for mobile marketing is consumer packaged goods. ipsh has pioneered such campaigns with a few major brands in the summer of 2005 but none had the metrics to really influence Madison Avenue like McDonald's House of Blues promotion.

ipsh interactive was used for this House of Blues McDonald's sweepstakes with unique "Mac" codes printed on 50 million BigMac boxes nationwide. Users texted in to the shortcode RUMAC to win. They also had the option to sign up online at www.playatMcD.com

This campaign was a great experiment in showing how there is an increasing number of users who, given a chance, will interact with an advertising campaign on the spot, via their handsets.

We didn't anticipate such a great response but we saw 40% of entries were made through the shortcode vs. the web demonstrating that people want to interact on the go.

Supporting material - Vital Stats
50 million boxes
3% increase in sales of Big Macs
13.41% sms to opt-in
40% of entries via txt

Takeaways
McDonalds and ipsh was cited in Advertising Age based on the remarkable results. Reps from McDonalds credit this House of Blues mobile campaign with 3% increases in sales of Big Mac sandwiches. This is a tremendous ROI in the world of consumer goods. Also, 40% of the entries were made via text message, twice the figures McDonald expected. Conversion rates for SMS to opt-in is over 13%. This helps to build a solid opt-in list of users for future McDonald promotions.

Study was published on March 22, 2006

Source: Mobile Marketing Association

Full study here

UK Mobile Content Market Worth $1.3 Billion in 2006

2007-06-07T15:44:00.000-05:00

The UK mobile content and services market is on the verge of becoming a multi-billion dollar industry provided the sector can tap into an addressable market approaching 50% of UK mobile users, a report shows this week.

Results from the Survey reveal that the UK mobile content market was worth £661 million (US$1.3 billion) in 2006, with 50% of revenues coming from the "mobile cash rich" 25-34 year olds. Those revenues look set to skyrocket should the wireless industry generate a more consistent spending behaviour.

"Today, the regular buyers of mobile content, those who purchase a minimum of one item of content every three months, represent one-fifth of mobile users," said Nick Lane, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, and author of the report. "However, the survey uncovers a further 30 percent of occasional consumers that will purchase at least one item of content per year. If the wireless industry can encourage these occasional spenders to regularly consume content, the addressable mobile-content-market spend over a three-month period will expand by 150%."

While 50% of respondents said mobile content prices were too high, the survey revealed £5 (US$9.50) as the optimum figure consumers are willing to spend per month on top of their voice and messaging fees. Services and content priced above the £5 monthly threshold will appeal to less than 5% of UK mobile users.

"This is presenting the industry with a dilemma: as premium rate pricing for services such as mobile TV could potentially cannibalise revenues from other services within the mobile content ecosystem," says Lane. "The door is now wide open for mobile advertising to subsidise mobile content and inflate the mobile content user base."

However, one key trend to emerge from the Survey results is that of User-Adapted Content.

"By side-loading songs from their PC on to their mobile and using as a ringtone, or taking a picture on the device and using as wallpaper, users are repurposing existing forms of content to perform numerous tasks on their mobile," says Lane. "There are no confusing rights issues to negotiate and no costs, so it's highly appealing to the consumer."

But while much is being made of content available on mobile phones, the UK consumers are using existing services and demanding more practical services. While 35% of respondents claim to have used the mobile Internet (including WAP browsing) - location-based services and mobile banking topped the poll asking respondents to outline the service they would most like to see on their mobile phone.

Gavin Forth, Head of Entertainment at Orange UK, said: "Over the last few years, the mobile Internet has grown from a slow and clumsy monochrome experience into an essential consumer and business tool for news, entertainment and other services on the move. As an industry we now need to eliminate the barriers still facing our customers to ensure the mobile internet eco-system thrives by driving smart pricing, innovative partnerships and allowing the phone to become an extension of our customers own personalities."

The study analyzes the results of a survey by Informa Telecoms & Media ? in association with Orange UK and fieldwork partner Starcom Mediavest exploring mobile content behaviour in which almost 2,000 mobile subscribers in the UK participated.

Source: Cellular-News

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Folk Rocker Goes Straight To Mobile

2007-06-07T14:42:00.000-05:00

Up And Coming Artist Launches New WAP Site

Funk folk rocker, Julia Harris, is one of the first artists in the UK to take her marketing campaigns straight to mobile, with the support of interactive mobile specialist, Dialogue Communications.

Dialogue worked with creative agency Sonaa, providing them with a toolset to create a mobile content site for the up and coming artist from Cardiff, as she looks to build her fan base and promote her latest single through the mobile medium. The new mobile site went live last week before a gig in Cardiff and Dialogue is also looking to launch other marketing campaigns later in the year, as Julia tours the UK.

Paul Griffiths, Dialogue's MD explains why Julia's approach to marketing is a good one and how Dialogue is supporting her marketing strategy: "Julia has recognised the growing mobile market as the primary means to reach her fans; this is an area that many artists initially overlook, but Julia wanted to do something different to raise her profile. We have created and host her mobile site and by utilizing our Text 2 Browse service through our Mobile Applications Portal (MAP), users are driven to the site through an advertised short code by texting "Julia" to 80010. We are also providing a database builder, so that Julia can communicate with her fan base, promoting relevant information and content."

Julia has had an incredible start to her career, supporting artists such as Damien Rice, receiving rave reviews and regular airplay. The Welsh singer/songwriter is now looking to increase her profile further through mobile campaigns. Dialogue has designed a site for the artist where fans can buy wallpapers, read the latest news from Julia and download her newest music tracks.

Bal Takhar, Development Director at Sonaa explains: "Our company has the creative skills to develop the look and feel of the site and Dialogue's platform makes it's easy for us to deliver premium mobile content and other text marketing campaigns to the customer."

The growing mobile market is becoming a popular channel for many artists looking to raise awareness of their music, along with providing a platform to generate extra revenues through premium downloads. As with most up and coming artists, Julia also has a MySpace site but over the coming months is focusing her marketing efforts on mobile campaigns.

Julia Harris explains why she has taken the mobile route to market: "The entertainment market is growing way beyond fans just buying CD's and the mobile market is now a key growth area. Fans want to buy ringtones and photos and interact with their favorite artists. Dialogue has provided me with different avenues to reach my fan base and help raise my profile and awareness of my songs.

"I'm really excited about being able to interact with those who're interested in me and what I do. I think mobile sites will open a whole new world for artists like me who want to interact with their fans"

Later in the year, Julia is hoping to expand her mobile campaigns with the help of Dialogue and offer her fans Text to Screen services at gigs and user generated content features so fans can share their content on Julia's WAP site.

Source: Search by Headlines

Read article here

China's mobile content market to top $21 billion by 2012, says Juniper Research

2007-06-07T10:26:00.000-05:00

Findings from a new study by Juniper Research reveal that the Chinese market for Wireless Value Added Services (W-VAS) will expand from $15bn in 2008 to $21bn in 2012 boosted by the launch of 3G Services. Currently W-VAS revenues in China are primarily being generated from SMS and ring-back tone services operating on 2G and 2.5G platforms, but the forthcoming launch of 3G will see new areas of growth with particular emphasis on music, games and streamed video.

The report also suggests that by 2012 3G will account for some 19% of total W-VAS services.

This emerging sector offers both new and existing players with a significant opportunity and an eventual large pool of potential users. However, identifying where these opportunities actually exist in the value chain and how to access them is vitally important. Foreign participants need to know the best routes to market including who to partner and which portals to use as well as the appropriate business models to deploy. The fundamentals of Intellectual Property protection are also key, as well as an understanding of the various processes and procedures necessary to navigate through the regulatory system.

The report author, sector analyst Dr. Elisa Kuang, said that "Providers of 3G applications and content have a unique opportunity to tap into this vast new market but are advised to carefully craft coherent market entry and development strategies -- ones that appreciate China’s unique economic culture and business systems, an emerging economy in transition."

About this study

The Juniper Research study, "China 3G: Mobile Content Strategies and Forecasts, 2007-2012", offers market sizing and forecasts, targeted advice and guidance for those with interests in the sector.

Source: Tekrati

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InsightExpress Launches Mobile AdInsights; Ad Infuse First to Provide New Standardized Media Measurement Offering to Mobile Industry

2007-06-07T09:40:00.001-05:00

STAMFORD, Conn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--InsightExpress, a leading online market research firm, and Ad Infuse, a leader in enabling personalized mobile advertising, announced today that InsightExpress will provide access to its new mobile media measurement solution, Mobile AdInsights, to Ad Infuse’s client base. This groundbreaking offer marks a new and much-needed movement towards standardization of mobile media measurement.

The burgeoning mobile advertising market is expected to explode over the next five years. eMarketer estimates that worldwide spending on mobile advertising will jump from $1.5 billion in 2006 to $13.9 billion in 2011. In the US alone, spending is expected to grow from $421 million to $4.8 billion during this time.¹

By providing the mobile industry with access to Mobile AdInsights, a best-in-class research solution, Ad Infuse and InsightExpress will help advertisers, publishers and carriers determine essential success metrics for their advertising campaigns. This innovative approach will allow industry players to better measure and understand ROI, resulting in more powerful and effective campaigns and the smarter allocation of advertising dollars.

Building upon its powerful online media measurement methodology, Mobile AdInsights offers a recruitment technique for the mobile device which provides clean control/unexposed and test/exposed groups for measurement. Both the control and test groups are delivered a brief questionnaire on their mobile device and responses are gathered and processed via the InsightExpress research platform. Weighting the data ensures that the control and test groups are identical, thus attributing any differences between the two groups as a direct correlation to the advertising experience.

“Mobile AdInsights allows companies to truly understand the impact and potential of their mobile campaigns, and will provide the industry with much-needed benchmarking,” said Drew Lipner, VP, Group Director, Online Media Measurement at InsightExpress. “The mobile space is obviously one of the most exciting places in the advertising world right now, and we expect demand for Mobile AdInsights to reflect this momentum. We are happy to be working with such a dynamic company as Ad Infuse in bringing Mobile AdInsights to market.”

“We all know the potential of mobile advertising,” said Brian Cowley, CEO and President of Ad Infuse, “but the truth is that in an era of digital media measurement, advertisers and agencies must be able to see the impact and value of their mobile test campaigns before we start seeing major shifts in the media mix.”

Read article here

Case Study - Heineken (Mobile Dreams Factory)

2007-06-06T15:04:00.000-05:00

Company - Mobile Dreams Factory

Client - Heineken

Background:
Heineken is one of the most sold beer companies in Spain. Champions league is the European soccer championship.

Goals:
Heineken is one of the official sponsors of the Champions League. For that reason they wanted to tie their brand with the championship.

Objectives:
1) Associate Heineken brand with the "Soccer's Champions League."

2) Reward consumers' loyalty instantly

Idea:
Heineken distributed scratch-cards to bar customers. All the scratch-cards have a code that needs to be sent by text message. Each code participates in a draw to win different prizes. No matter if the customer won or not, he/she will receive a WAP push instantly with Heineken mobile agenda.

The mobile agenda is based in Mobile Dreams' proprietary technology called-Microeditions. With this microedition the user can browse off-line Champions league's agenda.

Also the user can ask the agenda via Heineken's web page.

Results:
The Campaign is not over since the soccer season is not over. The last 2 months redemption rate of the agenda were 68% of the participations.

Study was published November 18, 2006.

Source: Mobile Marketing Association

See study here

‘Sprite Yard’ now part of mobile marketing playground

2007-06-06T14:55:00.001-05:00

NEW YORK—Coca-Cola Co. is moving aggressively onto the mobile marketing playground with a kind of mobile MySpace centered on the company’s Sprite brand.

The soft drink titan plans to launch a worldwide community allowing users to create profiles and exchange photos and messages, executive Mark Greatrex said during the keynote address at the Mobile Marketing Forum in New York. The free downloadable application, dubbed “Sprite Yard,” will be available via a short code and also offer wallpapers, games and video clips.

The effort launched in China last week and is set to launch in the United States beginning June 22. To access the application, U.S. consumers can text “YARD” to 59666 and receive a reply with a WAP link to access the Sprite Yard for the fist time.

Coca-Cola hopes to offer the application in “many more countries” next year, Greatrex said.

“Sprite will be our pioneer in the fast-moving world of mobile marketing,” Greatrex told the audience. “We believe Sprite Yard is the most comprehensive mobile marketing effort on the planet.”

Read article here

MMA Updates Mobile Ad Guidelines

2007-06-06T13:14:00.000-05:00

IN ADVANCE OF TODAY'S START of the Mobile Marketing Forum in New York, the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) has released an update to its Mobile Advertising Guidelines.

Much like the Interactive Advertising Bureau's universally recognized ad formats, the Mobile Advertising Guidelines provide advertisers with technical specifications and standard WAP ad units (such as banners). Marketers also get detailed explanations of various click-through capabilities, including email opt-in and click-to-call, as well as specific best practices with regard to ad content.

This fourth version of the guidelines includes provisions for mobile Web and downloadable content (such as ring tones and ad-based games), as well as an overview of multimedia messaging services.

Wireless carriers, tech firms, agencies, and content providers comprise the MMA's Mobile Advertising Committee, and they collaborate on the guidelines as a source of standardization in the rapidly growing industry.

"The guidelines are an example of how the MMA leads the worldwide mobile marketing industry by bringing all players in the ecosystem together," said Pete Distler, general manager, Sprint Mobile Media Network.

Later this year, the MMA will deploy a usability lab to evaluate the efficacy of the guidelines, and update them again if necessary. The organization has been working toward developing industry best practices, innovation, and standardization since 2000.

Mobile Marketing Association Announces Formation of Participation TV Committee

2007-06-06T11:15:00.001-05:00

MMA Will Focus Key TV and Mobile Media Membership to Ensure Best Practices Continue to “Uphold Public Trust and Positive Consumer Experience”

New York (June 6, 2007) - The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), which represents more than 400 companies across the mobile ecosystem, today announced the formation of the first industry-wide committee to focus on the growth of TV’s mobile participation. The MMA, which launched the first version of its interactive TV guidelines in June 2005, appointed a committee, represented by all key industry sectors, that will enable U.S. TV viewers to engage with their favorite shows in a consistent manner. The Participation TV (PTV) Committee includes TV broadcasters, producers, mobile operators, mobile gateway providers and application specialists.

The MMA PTV Committee will continue to develop industry guidelines that protect the long-term viability of the industry by setting standards across all key elements of the interactive TV supply chain. The guidelines will be integrated into the MMA’s Consumer Best Practices guidelines
(www.mmaglobal.com/bestpractices.pdf ) and reinforces the MMA’s commitment to the development of the mobile content industry. The Committee will be co-chaired by Telescope, Inc. and Granada USA. The MMA continues to demonstrate its leadership in the field of participation TV, which delivers a specific experience for TV viewers, enabling them to vote, integrate play-at-home versions into TV formats, and enable home viewers to appear on their favorite TV game shows through their mobile devices.

“The formation of the Participation TV Interest Group occurs at a key juncture in the history of consumer-TV interaction, given the numerous and growing successes of reality, text-to-vote and mobile TV programming across the industry,” said Troy Sample, chief executive officer of Telescope and chairman of the MMA PTV Group. “The MMA is taking the leadership reins in its development of common guidelines upon which the entire industry can build their campaigns. The MMA has helped galvanize the mobile marketing industry in a way that few self-governing industry organizations have done. The formation of the Participation TV Interest Group will help fuel the growth of what is already an exciting market sector.”

“MMA members include the leaders in developing consumer programming across all marketing channels, including broadcast, broadband internet and mobile TV, and this new committee is a natural fit for the association,” said Cyriac Roeding, executive vice president, CBS Mobile and MMA’s Global and North American chairman. “The Participation TV Interest Group will enable all players in the mobile marketing ecosystem to speed delivery of interactive or participation campaigns centered on the growing demands of today’s highly mobile consumer.”

Committee membership is open to all active MMA members.

About the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA)
The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) is the premier global non-profit association established to lead the growth of mobile marketing and its associated technologies. The MMA is an action-oriented organization designed to clear obstacles to market development, establish mobile media guidelines and best practices for sustainable growth, and evangelize the mobile channel for use by brands and content providers. The 400+ global member companies include agencies, advertisers, hand held device manufacturers, wireless operators, aggregators, technology enablers, market research firms and all companies focused on marketing via the mobile channel. The Mobile Marketing Association’s global headquarters are located in the United States. For more information, please visit www.mmaglobal.com.

Cell Phones Emerge as New Advertising Medium

2007-06-06T09:38:00.000-05:00

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Advertising is a highly competitive market with corporations constantly searching for an edge. As a result, select firms are now trying to reach customers via a new medium: cell phones. "Companies are using text messages to notify customers of special deals and banner ads to sponsor items, such as ring tone downloads," noted Julie Ask, research director at Jupiter Research.

A few factors are driving the interest. Increasingly, cell phones are becoming more data oriented and PC-like. Consequently, there is now space that advertiser can use for marketing. "Cell phone screen size is certainly not optimal but it does provide companies with room to advertise their wares," said David Chamberlain, senior analyst at market research firm In-Stat.

In addition, cell phones are quite popular among a prime advertising demographic: youth, including college and high school students. Many college students have abandoned wired connections for wireless ones, and a survey by The American Advertising Federation (AAF) found that 69 percent of high school teens own cell phones. The youth market tends to be quite interested in products with short life cycles, such as music and movies. These products generate a lot of advertising because companies need to quickly create a buzz as new products arrive.

Good News, Bad News

Yet advertising can be a two-edged sword. While it can create interest in a product, it can also generate a negative message. Pop-up advertisements represent one area where companies found the medium hurt rather than helped brands. Because little is known about the impact of cell phone advertising, vendors are moving cautiously. To date, the market is sending a mixed message.

At least initially, only a few consumers are embracing the idea of cell phone advertising: an In-Stat survey found that four out of every five users opposed the idea. The group supporting cell phone advertising seemed open to letting advertisers subsidize the cost of premium services, such as directory assistance, ringtones and messaging. High prices are often a reason why users do not rely on these premium services, so having advertisers partly underwrite the cost would seem to benefit users and advertisers alike.

With the market beginning to evolve, companies are searching for the most effective advertising vehicle. Banner advertisements are one possibility. "I don't think banner ads will be too effective because of the cell phone's small screen size," said Bob Egan, service director, emerging technologies at market research firm The Tower Group Inc.

Location-based advertising is another area that may have to struggle for acceptance. Here, carriers couple Geographic Positioning Systems with cell phones, so cellular networks can track user movement. As consumers pass various locations, they receive unsolicited advertisements, for instance, a local restaurant could send potential customers text, graphic, or video messages about a daily special as the users passed by.

Sign Me Up

Opt-in advertising services, where consumers sign up for advertising about items that interest them, seems likely to gain traction. "Customers do seem open to receiving mailings about a band's album or next concert," In-Stat's Chamberlain told TechNewsWorld. Sports and celebrity news are other areas where such advertising seems acceptable.

Past experiences may be one reason why users are leery of cellular advertising. Along with useful advertisements, for instance, have come boatloads of spam. "Many users are concerned about how many spam messages will make their way to their cell phones," The Tower Group's Egan told TechNewsWorld.

Spam may be even more unwelcome in cellular networks than it is in data networks. Depending on users' calling plans, they may have to pay a few cents whenever they read such messages.

Spam Filtering Needed

As a result, cellular providers may need to put anti-spam measures in place like those that Internet Service Providers use for data services. "Cellular carriers may find that users will be canceling their contracts and moving to other services if they can not control cellular spam," noted In-Stat's Chamberlain.

Spam overruns are a future rather than a present concern; currently, most of the cellular advertising campaigns are at a nascent stage. "We've seen a few interesting pilot programs and special promotions but no advertiser has yet allocated a lot of money to cell phone advertising," Jupiter Research's Ask told TechNewsWorld. There is interest in such possibilities, and companies, such as Enpocket, Martix Mobile Marketing, M-Qube Inc., and Texting Now are focused on helping companies deliver their marketing messages via cell phones.

These firms have generated some promising early results. Enpocket claims that 15 percent of users respond when they get text-message ads, and that number is twice the level of direct mail advertising.

The high response rate coupled with the significant research required because cell phone advertising is so new has resulted in expensive rates, at least initially. Marketing companies are charging between 10 and 35 cents each to send text messages to cell phone users, a rate 25 to 50 percent higher than billboard, radio, and television advertising.

Some companies are willingly paying the extra fees. The medium has been more popular abroad than in the U.S. In Europe, text messaging has been quite popular for a number of years. In Asia, especially Korea and Japan, cell phones are commonly used to complete mobile commerce transactions.

How big the cell phone advertising market will become in the U.S. is unclear. Andrew Robertson, CEO of BBDO ad agency, the third-largest in the world, expects cell phones to become larger than television advertising, but not everyone agrees with that statement. "Television advertising still accounts for 85 percent of advertising dollars spent in the U.S.," concluded In-Stat's Ask. "Even if cellular advertising is quite successful, it will take many years for it to approach the volume of revenue that television advertising generates."

Case Study - Dos Equis and Kikucall

2007-06-05T11:59:00.001-05:00

Brand - Dos Equis

Company - Kikucall

Objective:
Dos Equis wanted to interact with consumers at a series of live events supporting the "Dos Equis Mysterious Nights" promotion. The fall promotion asked consumers to solve the mystery of the missing Xs from the Dos Equis logo for a chance to win $20,000. A series of Mysterious Nights events were executed in eight U.S. Markets to promote the online Dos Equis mystery.

Solution:
Dos Equis' promotions agency, Alcone Promotion, contacted to Kikucall to craft a campaign to boost participation in the online promotion by integrating wireless into a series of Mysterious Nights events. In order to achieve the clients' goal, Kikucall designed a mobile application that allowed consumers to interact with each other and Dos Equis via text messaging on site at the promotional events. The Dos Equis Mysterious Nights Text program was executed by Dos Equis Brand Ambassadors on site at the events.

1. The program asked consumers to send a text message to Dos Equis with a note to someone in the bar. The consumer's text message was then displayed on screen at the event in real-time.

2. After receiving each text message, Dos Equis sent a response SMS to the consumer, thanking him or her participation, and driving him to the Dos Equis website to participate in the Mysterious Nights promotion.

3. During the promotion, events occurred simultaneously in multiple markets. To ensure that the right messages reached the right event teams, Kikucall developed an application that routed each consumer message to the appropriate Brand Ambassador via SMS. The consumer message also appeared on a Kikucall-designed web interface that Brand Ambassadors projected on screen in real-time at each event.

Results:
Kikucall successfully delivered a total of 2,085 SMS messages during 67 Dos Equis Mysterious Nights events. Participation was high at each event, and a steady flow of text messages were projected on screen. IN the first three weeks of the program, 2,858 consumers visited the Dos Equis website to participate in the Mysterious Nights promotion. Visitors spent a total of 1,331 hours, 20 minutes, and 28 seconds trying to solve the mystery of the missing Xs from the Dos Equis logo.

Full Study here

Mobile Marketing 101: Know Thy Audience

2007-06-05T09:44:00.000-05:00

One of the primary decisions anyone creating a mobile campaign must decide is whether or not their audience actually uses mobile devices. If they are a user, depending on their age, you must decide how they use them so your message and delivery is relevant. I just came across a press release from comScore which underscores this point.

comScore breaks mobile phone users into three groups:

Adult Adopters (age 35+) - More functional view of phones. Didn't own a phone until they were an adult and just want the basics.
Transitioners (25-34) - Started using in teens, early adulthood.
Cellular Generation (18-24) - This is the most likely audience to engage with your brand through a mobile device. They've had access to phones throughout their lives.

This may seem logical, you may say to yourself, "self...I shouldn't push cutting edge mobile P-2-P technology to my 40-year-old target market", but many marketers are ignoring the obvious and campaigns fail to achieve results. Rushing a mobile campaign to market without being goal-driven and targeted is like giving a toddler a Motorola Q and expecting them to use it. They may be initially happy with all of the buttons, but that happiness will soon fade when all they really wanted was something shiny.

Originally written by Matt Dickman

Mobile Marketing - How does it fit in?

2007-06-04T13:33:00.001-05:00

There are Pros and Cons to all forms of Marketing. While print, radio and television have tremendous reach, they provide limited interaction with consumers. Direct mail allows Marketers to segment their market, but is limited in its ability to grab consumer's attention. While the Web provides unprecedented interactivity and monitoring, but is not personal and has to fight for the consumer's attention. Marketers must provide a way to connect with consumers via all of these mediums when and where they show interest in their products to be most effective. Mobile Marketing provides an interactive and integrated platform that can be leveraged across all online and offline marketing.

Though many Brands excel through traditional and interactive marketing methods, it is also true that many competing factors can cloud the Brands message. Given this reality, smart marketers must constantly update their marketing mix with new responsive media to increase the probability of customers receiving the right message when they want it and where they want it. The most effective and least intrusive forms of mobile marketing are delivered on an opt-in basis; the availability and convenience of subscription based mobile marketing is ideal for foging loyal customers. This relaxed environment means customers are more receptive to the messages being communicated. By contacting prospects when and where they are most open to receiving marketing information, companies can garner unprecedented returns.

When designing a mobile marketing campaign, it is important to integrate and align the initiative with other marketing campaigns and goals. Mobile marketing campaigns are easy to integrate with all traditional marketing: brand marketing, direct marketing, market research, event marketing, in-store marketing and customer relationship management.

Brand Marketing
Mobile marketing provides a variety of options for increasing brand awareness. By providing consumers in-depth information you can influence purchase decisions by delivering tailored messages to specific demographics. Prospects receive the content they want, in a format that is convenient when it is needed. Integrated Mobile Brand Marketing is limited only by the imagination.

Direct Marketing
Direct marketing campaigns provide an opportunity to collect customer leads, deliver coupons and communicate promotions to a targeted audience. Mobile marketing's tracking and reporting capabilities provide fast, detailed campaign results, enabling quick prospect follow up. Mobile Marketing is flexible enough to easily integrate with traditional direct marketing strategies, and enables the development of creative drecet marketing campaigns that deliver quantifiable results.

Market Research
Researching consumer behavior via their mobile phone will change where, when and how we gather market data like no medium has before. The ability to survey , collect data and poll customers via their mobile phone, then push coupons, benefits and rewards programs directly to thei rMobile Phone will change the way brands develop and motivate loyal customers.

Event Marketing
Event marketing has long been a staple of marketing, there is no better time to raise brand awareness than when consumers are relaxing and enjoying themselves. Mobile event marketing allows brands to engage their audience by leveraging mobile interaction directly through television advertising, sproting events, concerts and trade shows.

Customer Relationship Management
The personal nature of the mobile phone makes them the ideal vehicle for enhancing existing customer relationships. Rather than just one-way corporate marketing messages, mobile marketing provides an avenue for two-way dialog with customers. Companies can provide customers with promotional information; secure account informations and status, frequently asked questions, customer support, loyalty programs and more.

Full article click here

Case Study - Absolut Bling Bling WAP Campaign by Madhouse

2007-06-04T12:14:00.000-05:00

Company: Madhouse Inc. (www.madhouse.cn)
Client: Absolut Vodka via The Hyperfactory

Background:
Having taken the fashion world by storm, this iced-up obsession with luxury and "Bling Bling" has proven its longevity. Absolut hopped onto the ice wagon to celebrate the holiday season with a special edition Absolut Bling Bling bottle, full of sparkly goodies to "dress up" the bottle of booze.

Goals:
Have consumers associate luxury and exclusivity with the Absolut brand and promote the special edition Absolut Bling Bling bottle in

China

to the desired target audience.

Solution:
Madhouse, in partnership with The Hyperfactory, created an exclusive WAP campaign site promoting the Absolut Bling Bling bottle via ringtones, wallpapers, drink recipes and nationwide event information.

Meanwhile, to drive more traffic to the site, WAP ads were also served by the in-house intelligence mobile ad serving system, MadServing, to specifically target GoTone users (China Mobile sub-brand targeting business travelers) or consumers whose handsets are valued at 2,000 RMB and above in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangdong, Chengdu, and other select tier 1 cities across a breadth of large WAP portals on the China's largest mobile ad network, MadNetwork.

Results:
During the 9 days of mobile media production, the targeted ad served by MadServing achieved over 1,800,000 total targeting impressions resulting in over 3.2% click-through rate to the Absolut Bling Bling mobile campaign site.

For study click here

Mobile Advertising: One-To-Many Multicast Would Pay Dividends, So Why Aren’t We Doing It?

2007-06-04T10:45:00.001-05:00

Mobile advertising may be a hot topic, but few have really got their head around how to deliver it in such a way that it makes sense – and money – for the companies involved. The answer may have been there all along in the example set by print and cable companies that have built their bottom line on delivering advertising to a mass markets – cheaply and effectively. As Tom Wheeler, a managing director at VC firm Core Capital Partners, writes in his latest column on TMCnet: “Mobile advertising is a one-to-one operation, and as a result relatively costly to deliver.” Sending one message to mass audience (as is the practice in print and cable) costs “virtually nothing to deliver compared to the one-to-one unicast of mobile distribution.”

Full article here

Mobile Marketing Briefing - New Report

2007-06-04T10:15:00.000-05:00

The latest trends were discussed at a recent E-consultancy roundtable and have been written up in this briefing (free to registered users).

Here is a SWOT analysis for mobile marketing based on the discussion we had.

There is more detail in the full briefing which also contains the latest statistics and some useful resources.

(It's important to keep in mind that mobile marketing covers a range of disciplines and types of marketing including brand advertising and direct marketing but this hopefully at least gives a flavour of what is happening in this 'sector'.)

Strengths

Adoption of the mobile internet is speeding up and consumption of content is growing.
The experience of using the internet to go online is getting more agreeable all the time due to better technology, including handset improvements.
The 'walled garden' approach adopted by mobile operators is being consigned to the dustbin with the likes of T-Mobile and 3 signing deals with the big search engines.
Fixed price 'all-you-can-eat' deals for mobile content are helping to drive content consumption.
There is more leadership from bodies such as the Mobile Marketing Association.
It is getting easier to pay for things by mobile, especially small-ticket items.

Weaknesses

The mobile internet is not yet mass market which means that brands / advertisers are only dipping their toes into this rather than committing serious budget. It's where 'internet marketing' was several years ago.
In terms of handsets, the market is actually getting more fragmented which means that it is getting harder rather than easier to work towards a user experience which is satisfactory across the board.
The fact that mobile marketing is not a discrete area of marketing means that there is no body with a mandate to oversee the various constituent parts. It can be hard to know where to go for best practice, advice etc.

Opportunities

Mobile Search - there is a great opportunity for advertisers to get traction on mobile search engine listings as many brands haven't jumped on board yet. Duncan Jennings has done a great blog post on mobile search.
Local search / listings ... phones with GPS. Huge potential.
The mobile phone is a very personal device and a great opportunity to get personalised marketing messages across - if done properly.
Acquisition and Retention....
Branding and direct response....
Flash Lite means that more designers and developers will get on board with mobile with something which is familiar.

Threats

It continues to get more difficult for companies to provide a consistent experience across different browsers and the ever expanding variety of handsets and personal devices on the market.
Abuse of mobile marketing damages the industry (i.e. consumers being ripped off and permission marketing principles being ignored). It could get worse if the offenders are not punished properly.
From the point of view of the mobile operators, there are numerous threats which boil down to any disintermediation from the value chain, whether because of VOIP or the fact that consumers don't want their content.

There is more detail in the Mobile Marketing roundtable briefing. This isn't meant to be exhaustive so feel free to contribute things which have inevitably been missed...

Thanks to Incentivated, Kodime, New Media Edge and Sponge for their input.

Article here

Spending on Global Mobile Advertising to hit US $14 Billion by 2011

2007-06-01T11:31:00.001-05:00

SINGAPORE : Companies worldwide are increasingly seeking to reach their customers via their mobile phones.

And the Asia-Pacific is seen as important as it has the fastest growing number of new mobile subscribers.

On Monday, the Mobile Marketing Association set up its Asia chapter to establish advertising guidelines and best practices to help the industry grow in the region.

Whether it is getting one's exam grades through SMS or activating a discount coupon, marketing professionals are keen to explore advertising via mobile phones.

For entire article click here

Microsoft Moves into Mobile Ad Space

2007-05-31T14:56:00.000-05:00

With Google snapping up DoubleClick and Yahoo acquiring Right Media, putting pressure on Microsoft to play its hand, analysts have been predicting Microsoft would make a major move in the online-advertising arena.

Microsoft is betting on the next frontier: mobile advertising. Mobile advertising and marketing opportunities could grow to reach $10 billion a year by 2010, according to The Shosteck Group. And mobile search is now accessible to more than 85 percent of mobile phones, according to wireless market research firm M:Metrics.

Full article click here

Hope For Mobile Marketing

2007-05-31T14:32:00.000-05:00

The Cellular-News brings new hope for mobile media marketing today: teens in the UK say OK to mobile ads. Among the 1500 cell users aged 11-20 surveyed by Q Research, 32% were willing to receive ads on their mobile phones. Contrast that to the 90% of American adults who weren’t at all interested in receiving them.
Targeting increased teens’ willingness to receive ads: 71% said they’d be willing only if the ads were for things. Click here for the article

Mobile Advertising Market Expecting more Mergers

2007-05-31T12:27:00.002-05:00

The global mobile advertising market is estimated to reach US$9.5 billion in gross revenues by 2011, according to the just released report from EJL Wireless Research. The United States mobile advertising market is expected to reach US$2.3 billion, roughly 25% of the overall market by 2011.

The largest segment is expected to be mobile couponing reaching almost USD $4 billion by 2011 or 42% of the overall market. "We believe that the recent transaction involving Third Screen Media and AOL is the tip of the M&A iceberg for the mobile advertising industry and anticipate and recommend a significant consolidation of the industry to create market efficiencies that will eventually lead to explosive growth" says EJL Wireless founder and President, Earl Lum.

"However we note that issues regarding 3G services, data plan pricing, ARPU, personal behavior and negative advertising stigma remain significant market barriers for the mobile advertising industry."
http://www.cellular-news.com/story/24079.php

- Alan Johnston, Cellular-News

Can I use my Mobile Phone Numbers for Marketing?

2007-05-29T10:26:00.000-05:00

Found this article: http://blogs.konainteractive.com/tom/archive/2007/05/26/can-i-use-my-mobile-phone-numbers-for-marketing.aspx