by Martin Koppel

I was reading emarketer’s newsletter and found an interesting writing about Google’s plans and why they decided to come out with so called gPhone.

At the moment there are at least twice as many cell phones than pc’s. It is obvious that Google cannot grow fast enough focused only on the PC’s. Idea is that Google should extend search marketing to new interactive platforms.

The chart below shows money today and in the future that Google can and can’t reach with classic pay-per-click Web advertising.
However, Google can reach those offline companies by pay-per-action (pay-per-call) over the mobile phone. Mobile search, maps and other applications enable Google to push search marketing principles into areas where the PC-Internet just can’t reach.

At least for me it seems logical step to make. Google has managed to become a real market leader and pioneer in Internet (for PC’s), they have ideas, knowhow, money and courage to do something crazy. I don’t want to predict anything, but i would buy Google’s stocks with hurry

by Chilldor

Recent article in Emarketer talks about Canada’s online ad market development.
Karin von Abrams, senior analyst with eMarketer notes that while “the country has one of the best broadband infrastructures in the world and higher household Internet penetration than the United States” it’s firms “have generally been slow to advertise online.”
However things are changing. Read the full article here.

by Martin Koppel

It seems that Google has taken the world domination as their next goal. At the moment they have tonnes of information about what people are doing in Internet. They know what people are searching, mailing, looking in YouTube, writing to their documents, information about websites and they even can see your daily, weekly plans and schedules but this isn’t everything. Soon they will know much more - gPhone is coming.

To be honest I have never thought that gPhone is the next great super phone, but it is much cooler to say gPhone than Android- open source operating system for mobile phones by Google.

Well at last Google revealed some information and presented finally their new system. If you pay attention then you’ll also find out how are they going to send ads to mobile users. Small hint - see how can they use the notification function. As always it is wise to hear what Steve Ballmer has to say about new products, since he always has something sensible to say.

Watch the videos and find out what Android looks like and what Steve thinks about it.

by Martin Koppel

Recently I wrote why Google is moving to mobile business and it seemed so obvious. Today I found an interesting survey that says that the number of worldwide mobile phone users is expected to grow from 2 billion in 2005 to approximately 3.3 billion in 2010. Currently, there are over 2.8 billion mobile phone users. At the end of 2006 there were 233 million subscribers in US, which is over 76 percent of the population. While people are already used to the e-mail and other internet based spam, mobile phones could be a great way to reach the right audience, since mobile marketing has the potential to be the next big thing in interactive marketing.

At the same time managing a mobile marketing campaign can be a challenge since there are many different entities contributing to a successful campaign. We have at least the carriers, advertisers, and consumers. But at the same time we have industry organizations like The Mobile Marketing Association, the CTIA Wireless Association, and the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which provide resources and guidelines for setting the standards to help move the industry forward. Like always we don’t have just perfect things, everything has its own advantages and disadvantages, so has mobile marketing. Marketers just have to think through what is their purpose and whether the selected methods are sustainable.

Positive side:

* Preliminary data shows good response rate for mobile campaigns (5% click rates vs. 1% for conventional web ads).
* New tool for brands and advertisers to reach new customers and target specific audiences.
* Smartphones and iPhone to enhance mobile surfing, promoting mobile marketing success.
* Messages sent to a mobile phone are more likely to be read than email sent to a PC, which can get caught in the spam filter.
* Mobile marketing campaigns are highly targeted and are opt-in, making them more effective than other forms of advertising.
* Mobile marketing can help build a customer database. Once customers opt in to receive an ad, you can use the information for loyalty marketing and customer retention.
* Mobile marketing can help generate buzz about your products/services because your offers will reach consumers while they are actively shopping, socializing, and making buying decisions.
* High penetration of devices with twice as many cell phones as PCs.
* Web searches on mobile devices will eventually exceed searches on PCs.

* Access to many international consumers who can’t afford PCs
* Mobile phones can receive input anywhere-anytime, enabling location-specific and behavioral targeting for local businesses.
* A cell phone is a very personal device that people take with them wherever they go, making it easy for marketers to develop a relationship with customers through this medium.
* Carriers have customer data and location information potentially available for targeting.
* Personalization, immediacy, and interactivity of mobile ads encourage response by consumers on the go.

Negative side:
* Trial and error period required for mobile marketers to learn how to succeed in mobile marketing, which differs from the traditional web marketing.
* Advertisers are wary of consumer privacy issues.

* FCC yet to rule on limiting use and release of customer data, including location information.
* In April, FCC released order requiring mobile marketers to obtain express consent from customers before carriers can release data and to make it easy for customers to opt out.
* Mobile marketing is fragmented and complex because of many different handsets and carriers, different types of functionality, and different preloaded apps (i.e. Google Maps on iPhone).
* Currently, reach is low because consumption of mobile content is small (10% of subscribers), and penetration of 3G devices is still low in most countries.
* Current WAP technology inadequate, discouraging web searching and surfing.
* General intolerance of advertising messages on a personal device.
* Current carrier-imposed “walled garden” approach prevents unfettered mobile web access.

* Adaptation of content and messages to the mobile web results in poor user experience.
* Scarcity of mobile web sites (only 8% of 1,000 top U.S. brands offer a mobile site).
* Current low usage of WAP-based mobile search doesn’t support investment in creating mobile sites because traffic volumes are low, except on search portals and other high-volume sites.
* Establishment of reliable measurement and metrics for advertisers to measure mobile ad effectiveness is needed.

by Rain Rannu

For several years the Nordic Mobile Media conference has been organized in Latvia and Lithuania. Now the scope has been broadened and the first Central European mobile media conference has been organized - mid-May in Prague. As expected, a lot of people were present, including my humble self, to find out how the Central European market differs from ours and what could we learn from them or take over. And vice versa.

After two days at the conference it seems that services like m-parking, m-payment, m-state etc. that are quite spread here, are viewed as “emerging services” - which is definitely a step ahead compared to the time some years ago, when no one even talked about those services. At the same time SMS services with periodic taxation (so called “clubs”) are more spread in Central and Eastern Europe than here. Our service providers are only making first tests with these.

Widely discussed new “future services” like mobile TV, selling full-length songs through mobile phones, mobile search etc. are still in the testing phase everywhere - some have achieved promising results, the majority still has nothing else to show than the bare existence of the service.

I’d better finish now. For those who are more interested, the organizers have put up slides of the speakers, from which I would bring out good overviews about mobile (service) market in Russia, the Czech Republic and the whole of Central and Eastern Europe.

by Lauri Kinkar

MasterCard and VISA are launching a mobile phone payment pilot in Taiwan and Korea respectively. According to Finextra, in Korea it is possible to order a VISA payment programme via SMS and after installing it, the consumers can make so called contactless credit card payments using their mobile phones. Presumably MasterCard will use a similar solution in Taiwan.

In Estonia mobile phone payments as such are one way or the other pretty well-known. When I want to read today’s business paper, I order a password per SMS, pay a certain amount of money for it and log on. When I’m travelling on a train from Tartu to Tallinn in a business class and do not have any cash on me, I pay for my ticket using the m-payment of banks, dialling 1214*merchant’s code*125 and call. I enter the PIN code on my phone’s keyboard and a second later the conductor receives an SMS confirming that 125 EEKs has been deposited into the account of the railway company.

Which parallels can be drawn between our payments and the efforts of large credit card companies? And which are worth drawing?

Firstly, the solution, or payment programme ordered via SMS versus making a call/sending a text message. Calling or texting is, of course, much nicer and the requirement to first download something and then install it, creates an inevitable barrier right in the middle of the ease of use. What if my phone does not allow to install or launch such programmes?

At the same time the scope of VISA and MasterCard has to be considered - it would be rather painful to make SMS or call connections in all the target countries with all operators. (Of course, why do we have then local gateway providers? Presumably they have everything necessary in one place.) Without knowing the technical and legal background, there is still a shadow of a doubt whether VISA and MasterCard have chosen the best payment solution from the consumer’s perspective or can anything be done better.

To sum up, when we talk about Estonian payments and compare them to the attempts of the credit card companies, we must admit that on one hand we are comparing apples to horses. A local bank can offer its clients on local level a very direct interaction with the account, using whatever means. Credit card companies deal solely with credit card payments and proceed from the card as such.

On the other hand, for a payer in a payment situation these might one day be two competing solutions in the same geographical spot. In that case it seems that call-based payment systems rooted in Estonia might have an advantage because of the ease of use. At the same time there is nothing more welcome than all sorts of attempts to fit credit card payments inside a mobile phone, especially by two largest credit card companies, who potentially have the strength to change the behaviour of a large amount of consumers. Good luck trying!