Between Brackets

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)

The iPhone proved that people do want to access the internet when the experience is fun and easy and now accounts for 50% of mobile internet traffic in the US.

But now the Android is starting to show up in the statistics. According to AdMob stats already 5% of all mobile internet usage in US comes from Android handsets.

These figures are from AdMob and they don’t include traffic to sites that don’t serve AdMob ads… But they are an indication.

We’ve launched our new mobile website.

The address is still http://www.betweenbrackets.mobi.

Our old mobile web site was:

• very simple (hm, understatement)
• not in sync with the wired website, and
• the same on every device

The new site is

• in sync with the wired site: the same information is shown on a desktop as on a mobile device, and
• adapts to different devices: on the iPhone icons are shown in a grid, and on other devices we used lists. Also, devices with small screens (<200x320) are sent smaller pictures (32x32) than devices with larger screens (64x64).

Let’s do the washing powder test…

Before:

After:

Looks better, right?

The tech behind the magic

For the technically inclined, here’s what we use behind the curtains:

• Drupal 6
• A custom module we’ve built for the device detection based on Wurfl
• Different Drupal themes for the different representations

Please, help us improve it

We score pretty high on the ready.mobi tests. Last time we checked it was a 5

However, if the detection doesn’t work for you or the pages don’t render well on your phone, please let us know! Leave a comment or contact us.

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.

As people move away from there desktops and start using their powerful phones more, it will start impacting them soon, whether they like it or not.

Yet Microsoft’s Windows Mobile is moving towards the place where Un*x has been ever since the emergence of Microsoft Windows: nowhere in the end-consumer market, because of the lack of a good standardized GUI/Window Manager. A number of gui managers where written by each Un*x player separately to have something to show for, but there never has been a unified gui that everyone liked and every vendor offered. This is now also happening with Windows Mobile (HTC, Samsung, Sony all had their attempt at improving the gui).

Un*x people didn’t think the GUI was the important stuff. “It’s all about the kernel! The engine is what’s important, and it will always be!” They thought GUIs were something stupid for lay people. Guess what the lay people are the majority of users today…

Judging from the Windows 6.5 gui stuff we’ve seen so far, the people at Microsoft are not entirely convinced they should really take a good look at the gui.

It’s got improvements some improvements, but not enough. I’ve been using an HTC Touch Pro lately and must say it is a very nice device, but:

• it responds a bit slow to user input
• you need to use a stylus a lot
• pfff, those awkward little menu’s…
• the touch screen is ok, but not like the *Phone (ok, ok, that’s patented). And it’s not a hardware thing either, it’s the way Windows Mobile is implemented (6.5 only supports resistive touchscreens which are less accurate).
• you can only synch with your desktop, not with the cloud (yes, myPhone is coming to an internet connection close to you soon)
• No App Market (not until at least Q4 2009)

It’s not that they don’t spent enough money trying to improve, but it’s as if they don’t think this is really important for them. But they really need to rethink their Mobile platform and GUI and start making disruptive changes to it. They have the big advantage over the Un*x vendors in that they can decide everything on their own. So hopefully we’ll start to see some serious changes to their mobile strategy. Or did they loose their edge?

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

QR -quick response- codes or 2D barcodes are an easy way to link information to a physical object (see also older posts on mobile augmented reality and Mobile Visual Search).

In the city of Utrecht in The Netherlands monuments will be tagged by the Utrecht Monumenten Fonds, linking monuments by means of QR code to online information.

One shoe set-up the QR code system.

BTW, here’s our blog’s QR code:

Encoded and decodable with the QR software from the zxing project Want to encode your own? Go to their freely accessible online QR code generator.