Between Brackets

DM2PRO and Quattro Wireless (the last one recently taken over by Apple) published an interesting study (via Mobile Marketing Watch) end of last year that reports on current strategies and future plans of advertisers, agencies, and developers with respect to mobile and social apps in the US.

Interesting to see is that a significant number of parties plan significantly more mobile apps in 2010 as well as an increase in budget reserved for launching apps. As preferred platforms, both RIM and Android are mentioned, but iPhone still leads the pack in everything.

As the report concludes correctly, this flood of extra apps will mean that promotion of an app will become more and more essential in order to stand out of the crowd.

Although there’s numerous posts, research, articles etc. to be found on mobile marketing on the web, apparently not everybody has read them. Ok, they might have read the rules on opt-in, but using mobile numbers that you provided as a member to one brand for marketing of a different brand seems to me like stretching the rules a bit.

Having received an unwanted SMS marketing message recently from a company that I did not know I tried my luck with the STOP keyword:

As you can see, this did not work. Now what ? Mailing / calling the company to get rid of this seems like the only way forward.

I expect I need to be even more careful when I hand out my mobile number to any company.

Let’s hope more and more companies make sure they adhere tot the mobile marketing rules, and provide a clear way to get rid of this kind of messages easily, otherwise we better expect a consumer backlash.

Toyota targets iPhone owners with a mobile Prius promotion (via Mobile Marketer)

They use a mobile website to offer product features, price info, etc. and the obvious dealer locator. It is understandable that they target mobile users, and especially iPhone owners as these people are typically doing more of their regular information look up with their phone. What is a bit weird though, is that they use a mobile website since a mobile website provides an experience that is quite different from the typical apps iPhone users expect. Perhaps it has something to do with timing, and Toyota feels the same way, as they announce the arrival of a real app in the near future.

What is interesting though is that they are really focusing on product information, to assist the customer with his/her buying process. Once they switch over to an app, they offer the consumer a buying assistant always on hand. However, now that they have established this relationship, and the consumer decides to buy a Toyota Prius, this particular app loses most of its value.

It would therefore be a good idea if Toyota built an after-sales app as well and pro-actively assisted the the consumer replacing the one app with the other. This app could offer maintenance advice, options that can be added to the car later on,info about Prius owner clubs or events, and any other information relevant to a Prius owner. They could even offer some mileage tracking features which could be fed back as a great source of actual usage data. By offering 2 apps instead of one, each app has its specific focus, and they can continue the relationship they built with the consumer, learn more about his/her needs and improve the product experience significantly.

Moconews.net reported that Blyk decided to postpone the roll-out of their services in the Netherlands and Belgium as a stand-alone MVNO. They will look for partnerships with operators instead.

Although Blyk denies any relationship to the current economic climate, it would not be that strange since advertising revenues may be less than expected for them as they are for numerous players. They do deny it has anything to do with financial success though and their funding is quite okay to say the least.

Too bad that this means there’s one less stand-alone mobile business model, that they have to turn to operators as well. This will certainly not reduce the stranglehold of the mobile operators on the market.

On April 21 Matt Jones VP Mobile Strategy & Operations from Gannett Digital (USA today is part of Gannett Digital) talked about the Mobile initiatives from USA Today.

In short USA Today is on the Mobile Web, has text services and also has a Native iPhone app.

They believe mobile is a unique medium for personal experiences, and strongly believe that it can entail a high degree of interaction and engagement when combined with traditional media.

Some interesting statistics about USA Today Mobile:

• 2 million monthly unique visitors
• 79% of all visitors are Male (21% are female)
• 69% are age 35 or older
• 40% have a House Hold Income of $100k or more

One of their popular Mobile applications is a text service for the sport-loving traveling business man. In the paper edition they publish a short code to register for text alert on the team of your choice. In the alerts they then add links to drive traffic to mobile sites.

For the iPhone they implemented a very nice application (unlike their mobile web site which looks a bit dated). And a specific feature is “the expandable ad” which allows them to show video en ads on top of text if needed (a sort of pop-up ad if you wish).

To wrap up, here some key milestones of their iPhone app:

• 2008-12-20: Launch
• 2008-12-24: #1 news app in the App Store
• 2009-01-29: #4 in entire App Store
• 2009-04-21: 1.5 million users

Tomi Ahonen has written an interesting post on the Blyk phenomenon. Why is this a relevant marketing channel? What is the importance of the dialogue they maintain with their customer base?

Some stats:

• 3% of UK mobile phone subscribers in the age bracket of 16-24 are Blyk customers
• 200 big brands (l’Oreal, Coca Cola…) advertise on Blyk
• On average each brand runs slightly more than one campaign a month
• Response rates of users is 25%(!).

For a service that started only 18 months ago this is really fantastic.

Past the figures, Tomi, also gives an example of how Pizza hut could use Blyk in its media mix to support classic ad campaigns and make them more efficient and more measurable.

Interesting read.

PS: I’m curious how well Blyk Belgium will have done in 15 months (they’ve launched here in January)

Apart from stating the obvious (“Go Mobile”) Ogilvy tries to give their customers 21 solutions.

According to the Mr. Fleishhacker Mobile marketing is the big antidote to the recession.

We agree, only we don’t think it is just an antidote to recession, we also think this is where the biggest growth potential and innovating potential lies for marketing (regardless of the recession).

Mobile Marketing means:

• personalized: the mobile phone is a personal device, and most of us only use one (or use one sim card anyway).
• measurable: since it is more personal than the family computer or desktop work, measurements are more reliable
• unprecedented reach: 3 billion sms users (comparison: there are only 1,5 billion TV sets and 480 million newspapers are printed daily)
• interactive: the mobile phone can be interactive on its own, but can also turn other media such as TV and radio into interactive channels (think: sms voting/games). E-mail did this to a certain extend, but the fact that you always have your mobile phone within arms length makes it much more suitable (no need to boot the pc)
• youth: young people love the 7th mass medium.
• cost effective: the budget required to set up a mobile marketing campaign is peanuts compared to a TV campaign. This may change a little as marketers 1.0 around the globe start to understand the power of the new medium.

So the recession has a silver lining after all: it will speed up the process of integrating the mobile channel into the media mix.

According to a comScore research (in the US), light internet users are more likely to use their mobile devices to surf than heavy internet users.
And when they use their mobile device to surf they tend to do look for content that matches an active life.

This is interesting in two ways (at least):

• operators should now recognize of making the mobile internet more available to ‘light users’ (as Mobistar currently does with their Internet Everywhere subscription).
• you’ll be able to connect to the otherwise less connected (light) internet users better on the mobile web. So if that’s your target audience, then go mobile.

That is, if the conclusions of the research are correct

Depending on the source this will be the year when Mobile Marketing took off (or not).

Some sources are not unanimous on the subject yet: Mobile Marketer’s got both proponents and opponents to the above statement.

Often the lack of penetration of mobile internet is brought up as the main argument. But that’s a lack of understanding of the many possibilities mobile marketing already offers without the need of a permanent 3G connection:

• texting is one of the major areas for the moment
• standby screen applications is another possibility
• branded applications (downloaded via Wi-Fi or side-loaded via pc)
• finally, the user can use Wi-Fi (instead of a 3G connection). Granted, the experience is not as full as having a 3G connection, but many people do it.

And from the many projects that are launched I can only conclude that Mobile Marketing has already taken off.

So, yes, classic online advertising is still bigger than mobile marketing, but they’re both growing. And from the statistics mobile marketing has the steepest growth rate.

Lately I’ve been playing around with the latest iPod touch a lot. It’s a very nice device (a bit too brittle to travel with for me). The integration with the AppStore is amazing. Searching for new software, paying for it and then installing it is a breeze (watch your wallets!).

But, what irritates me is that even though we’re supposed to be living in a globalized world not everything is available globally.
Take for instance the iFood Assistant from Kraft. It is an advertisement tool from Kraft (for which you have to pay in order to use it!) that supposedly helps people prepare fantastic meals. I say “supposedly”, because I can’t install it and test it for myself (without performing any tricks).

If you look for it in the AppStore you won’t find it (that is, if you’ve said you’re located in Belgium). When you try to download it via iTunes it becomes apparent why.

When will global companies stop acting childishly local. I understand they have local regulations to take into account (which doesn’t apply in this case I believe). Or that they need to tune some stuff to the local flavors. But, if you advertise something on the internet (global reach), then either clearly state it is not available globally (and mention why) or make it globally available.

PS: when I wanted to leave a comment on the site and specified a valid e-mail address the Kraft site told me to specify a correct e-mail. So I couldn’t leave them a comment