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.

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

Looking for new opportunities

Many people keep depicting the “old” media as unwilling to change. Here Jeff Jarvis has a go at it (again), and there’s lots of people around the web classifying “old” media as dinosaurs (not always incorrectly).
During the Mobile Media Day I saw media people looking for new ways to go about their business.
Among those people was a young man (Edouard Andrieu) from Le Monde explaining how they created the Le Monde iPhone application, giving some interesting figures about their business along the way.

Le Monde’s digital estate

• As the leading french news website they attract 44,5 million unique monthly visitors (on all the websites of the figaro group, not only their main site). That’s twice as much as the second (Le Figaro) and 3 times as much as the third in the ranking (liberation.fr).
• They have free access for most of the important news, and a paying section for editorials and services
• Their revenues are spread as follows:
  1. Advertising: 57%
  2. B2C: 32%
  3. B2B: 11%

Unfortunately for Le Monde, the portion B2C part that comes from internet subscriptions is minor. But it is a beginning.

Mobile tradition

Le Monde has a long mobile tradition, dating back to the times when the Palm Pilot was king of the Smart Devices, here’s a timeline:

• Content for the Palm
• Sms+: headlines & weather forecasts
• WAP site
• Content for e-paper
• Mobile website: leader in french mobile news with 449000 unique monthly visitors.
• iPhone app

The iPhone application

What it offers

The application is available in the iPhone store and is very well made.
It offers:

• Breaking news
• Audio and video
• The news in pictures
• In depth coverage of the news by section

Here are some screenshots:

What is also nice are the adds that are shown at the bottom and that you can click on for more information or ignore and then they go away to give you back some screen estate.

Statistics

By march 2009

• It had been downloaded 430.000 times
• It had 2,2 million monthly visits, and
• 14,2 million monthly pageviews

Thanks to this success, Apple made an iPhone ad with the app as a guest star.

The future of the App

Le Monde will most definitely start using the Push notification features of the iPhone OS 3.0.
But also other platforms are being considered (e.g. Symbian).

Another interesting comment was that the iPhone app didn’t cannibalize the mobile website’s usage. That’s also why Le Monde will try to create more synergies between the two.
The same holds true for the website which is very complimentary to the iPhone app.

Last week I went to Amsterdam to join the Mobile Media Day 2009.

A day full of mobile media cases. And we had a couple indeed: Le Monde, Associated Press, and USA Today.

Forrester gave some figures about the industry, a gentlemen from Opera trumpeted the browser as the ultimate mobile internet experience (why? you don’t believe him?) and a mobile game case was presented.

Anyhow, I’ll be covering the three cases I mentioned earlier and the Opera presentation in follow-up blogs.

Independent Artist Geoff Smith set up a site ringtonefeeder.com where he publishes ring tones for the iPhone as an RSS stream. You can subscribe to his service and will receive a new ring tone every week, which is automatically synched to your iPhone by iTunes.

Here’s an example of an iPhone ring tone Geoff made. Folllowed by a short on how the service actually works.
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To many people the changes are not clear, but new mobile technology is going to transform society in this part of the world as it already did in some Asian countries (read: Digital Korea). These are exciting times, indeed.

The 8th MoMoAms was all about how this revolution will change our society. The speakers:

• Raymond Perrenet – EVP Strategy & Development at T-Mobile
• Johan Koolwaaij – IYOUIT, Scientific Researcher at Telematica Institute
• Teemu Arina – CEO at Dicole Oy
• Bruce Sterling – writes for Wired (beyond the beyond), Wikipedia, author of various books

The introductory note from Mr. Raimo van der Klein certainly deserves mentioning, as it got a number of ways of looking at the mobile context of people. One of the good insights was that it isn’t enough to know where someone is, you have to know why they’re there. For instance: are they in the Arena for a pop-concert or for a football match? Different crowd with very different needs.

Mr. Johan Koolwaaij presented IYOUIT a product that takes into account the location of a person and extra parameters like traveling speed of the person, and motion of the device to deduce whether that someone is -for instance- a passive participant of -say- MoMoAms or the presenter (i.e. when the mobile shakes a lot ). Very interesting indeed.

Before Mr. Koolwaaij’s presentation Mr. Raymond Perrenet talked about what a device like the iPhone can do in terms of stimulating the 3G usage: Have a look at the data it’s impressive!

Mr. Teemu Arina gave a presentation with incredibly beautiful slides. Slides with video that integrated seamlessly and didn’t look like dull embedded windows media player movies, and really added value and emotion to the text that was overlain.

The final speaker was Mr. Bruce Sterling (some say he’s a prophet, but he personally doesn’t like to think he is) who gave word of caution to all present: what kind of society may we be creating? Also a very telling presentation.

It was again a pleasure to be present in the packed Rooie Hoed. If I can rsvp in time once again I’ll certainly be going back.
You can find all the presentation material and the recorded presentations here

Beginning of the week I attended the Mobile Marketing Association’s event in Budapest.

A number of interesting cases were presented and many speakers shared the same concerns.

I’ll make a couple of small posts about the event (instead of one mega post) and I’ll start with the shared concerns:

• The value chain is too long
• Operators need to get moving
• Shortage of case figures to convince brands

The value chain is too long

One big common concern is that the value chain is too long and it isn’t clear as to how to split the pie among the different players. A consolidation is probably needed, or at least one kind of agency should take the lead and offer integrated campaigns.

Today many brands still work with smaller players because the bigger agencies are often not taking up on the mobile revolution fast enough. But in the end the brands want their agencies to integrate mobile in their campaigns (as they did with the web years ago).

Operators need to get moving

Operators sit on a ton of incredibly interesting customer data. Using this data to drive very targeted data would allow marketers to create incredibly well targeted campaigns for their brands.

Everyone agreed that the operators must play an important role as enablers. This said, it is clear that some operators will become data-pipes (which can be an interesting business in its own right) other will mover more into the content space and still others will wither away slowly. There isn’t one clear-cut path for all operators.

Shortage of case figures to convince brands

The industry is very young, therefore there aren’t a lot of cases and figures to show for to prospects. But the MMA is playing a good role here: bringing people together, gathering best practices and figures from the field.

The VRT (Flemish Radio and Television Network) is experimenting with mobile (what a surprise ).

They have set up a beta site http://m.beta.deredactie.be. They use the Mobixx platform to scrape their official site and make it easily accessible for mobiles.

It’s a clean site (ok, maybe the colors code be a bit lighter, but it’s still beta), but it works well.
Hopefully we’ll be able to access the TV news and background stories on the phone soon in an open video format so we can all enjoy it on our mobile phones.

Here are some pictures of the site (on a Nokia S40 browser):