Marino Bresciani

My first experience was in July 2006, when I was boarding to a flight to Germany, exactly at the same time of the World Cup semifinal match between Italy and Germany. I had the possibility, though, to watch most of the match in the boarding area, thanks to a DVB-H mobile phone. 2 inches-wide screens are not really much, especially if you share the vision of the match with other 5-6 passengers. But still enough to catch something.

Some months later, in Vodafone, my boss showed me the German Mobile TV – this was not DVB-H but a simple video stream played by a UMTS phone. In this case, instead, the experience was much worse… I could hardly see the ball.

Some months again, and still I tried to watch some Mobile TV, this time on a Estonian UMTS phone. Not really better.

The reason is obvious: trying to resize a video stream (intended for a 800×600 screen) into a 240×160 stream cannot be done without a huge loss in quality. But why resizing when we can actually also crop?

Well, finally (but actually I would say that a prototype of this technology was already available much time ago), some company has developed a patented application for editing/encoding video contents from TV signal to 3GPP automatically with a single shot. The coolest thing, is that at this point you can simply use an eye-tracker that automatically recognizes the position on the screen where a test user is looking at, so that it is really possible to understand where the real focus of the action is. Have a look at the screenshot!

The drawback, at least at the moment, is that such operation (clipping and resizing in real time) at that time, was still too expensive for obtaining a real live stream. But now, times are come, and the real Mobile TV is not anymore an utopia.
Ah, you do not need to spend 5000 eurs for a eye-tracker. There are head-pointers (mainly used for users with motorial disabilities) that cost much less and have much similar results. Otherwise, google around, there are applications that do the same!

Lauri Kinkar

One of the best overviews published lately on how the marketers today should feel about mobile marketing and where to start from, is Laura Marriott’s column The ABC’s of Mobile Marketing. The quick overview is divided into three parts and it is quite practical in nature, giving concrete suggestions on how and where to start in mobile marketing. As it is a topic which should precede my own few-months-old posting specifically on the psyche of SMS-campaigns, I would like to post Marriott’s ideas also here and supplement them with a few words.

The first of the three columns concentrates on different technologies incorporated under the flag of mobile marketing and the classifications of the channels. European marketers are familiar with the majority of those channels – special-priced messages, regular messages, even MMS in some cases are rather frequently used in mobile campaigns born in Europe, less so in North America.

Instead Marriott encourages to see the whole spectrum of mobile technologies and test various ones. I am sure that also WAP is a channel that would be willingly used, considering its sudden rise in popularity in all the Baltic States. WAP would be a great channel for distributing some exciting brand mobile videos. Since mobile marketing has gone through a 200% rise in the United States in 2005 and it is still allegedly lagging behind us (Europe) by a year or two, the experience gained from trying out exciting projects right now is very valuable and right on time.

The second part of Marriott’s column focuses on the choice of a partner. I agree that in areas where the marketer lacks competence, the choice of a right partner is of strategic importance. I believe that the majority of marketers would agree with me when I say that the choice of a partner is strategically important when selecting an advertising agency – long-term cooperation ensures stable quality. In addition to that, once the project managers get to know the products and brands, they can play with the solutions more and more creatively relying on the client’s visions and rules. Relying on my experience I dare to project the development of such synergy also to the relationship between a mobile marketing company and their clients.

But what to study and consider when choosing a provider of mobile services? Naturally, first one should go through all the links in the chain, starting from which operators the specific service provider cooperates with to which services the prospective service provider itself offers. Simple and logical? Yes, but at the same time so easily forgotten?

From other questions suggested by Marriott, I on my part would stress the topic of to what extent the prospective partner is concentrated on the solutions of mobile marketing. Mobile operators can be used as a good example here as they also can send messages in the required direction, but their main activities lie elsewhere. Similarly, there are many different activity niches among smaller service providers.

In the third and final text a few wide-spread mobile-connected myths are viewed. The most commonly known of those is the belief that mobile services are mostly used, and hence targeted at teenagers. The age dilemma has accompanied the field since its birth and stems from the fact that teenagers are indeed very active users of mobile services. But this fact does not justify excluding all the adults.

It is true that from certain age limit on the pattern according to which people use their mobile phones changes, but it would be wrong to assume that consumers in their forties or fifties only know how to use the green and the red button. The clue in approaching the target group is rather in the message, content and structure of the campaign. My retired grandfather looks very offended when I suggest that I could text message the solution of the crossword puzzle myself.

I hope that Laura Marriott’s thoughts make all the readers ponder about them – as you can see, they made me even write. Finally, my favourite quote, used by the author to sum up her thoughts – I believe it suits as an echo to my commentaries.

Mobile is now a mainstream marketing element. On “The Apprentice”
this past Tuesday night, Donald Trump encouraged the candidates to
boost consumer participation in a text-based campaign for Gillette.
If The Donald is doing it, shouldn’t you be, too?

/Laura Marriott,
Mobile Marketing Association <http://mmaglobal.com/> /