by Marino Bresciani

If you are an indipendent artists, and you sell from time to time your original works, then this SMS service created in the States last July can be inspring.

The US based company mixtART developed an SMS service that allows independent artists to sell their original works of art as wallpapers to mobile subscribers. With their service, they provided mobile users access to an art application, offering a variety of wallpapers created by an array of artists.

Many artists featured on mixtART were attending an international art exposition in San Diego from July 24 to the 27th. Over there, the artists were unveiling works of art, which customers would have been able to purchase immediately for their mobile phones.

The exposition included many local artists who took fully advantage of the new service. To have a review of those wallpapers, some of them are available on http://www.mymixt.com/mixtart.

by Branimir Parashkevov

Hi everyone. As today is the 24th of December it’s a perfect time for some Christmas stories from the business world. I will begin with many people’s favourite McDonald’s. I have already told you a story about McDonald’s SoCal and you can read it again if you want in order to compare the strategies.

The name of the campaign that I am telling you about is “Merry Xmas in The Restaurant”. It was created by the well known 12Snap company and with the idea to create a new mass market sweepstake mechanism for McDonald’s Italy, where the clients can win while they are still in the restaurant.

The Motto of the campaign was “McDonald’s makes everyone a winner – Just send a SMS to Santa & get your gift within seconds.” On the cups in the restaurant there were printed numbers. Each customer that have sent SMS with those numbers receives a prize that can vary from mobile content as a phone call with Santa, a picture with him, a post card, to physical prizes as prepaid credit cards with 20 000 Euro, 13 000 free airtime prizes and 150 mobile phones.

According to MMAGlobal the campaign has reached the stunning 25% response rate and more than 1.5m customers in 5 weeks. With this numbers, it is considered to be the best mobile campaign of McDonald’s ever.

by Branimir Parashkevov

Hi everyone! Excuse me for being two days late with this post. Here I am with another case study on Mobile Marketing. Today I am going to introduce you the case of SoCal (South California) McDonald’s that were reaching their customers through text messages.

In the second quarter of 2005 SoCal McDonald’s launched a new one-month-long promotion targeted mainly in young adults. They allowed their customers to send a text message “McFlurry” to 73260 and automatically receive a redeemable coupon for a free “McFlurry” dessert. Also, the user was able to get the coupon from http://www.mobilestr33t.com/ and present it again in one of the participating stores from the chain.

The idea was invented by the McDonald’s Operators’ Association of Southern California (more than 600 franchised and company-owned stores in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties) and Gamut Industries LLC (a San Francisco mobile marketing company).

“This promotion is yet another example of how McDonald’s is reaching out to the youth market in a way that is meaningful to them,” said Clayton Paschen, III, president of the McDonald’s Operators’ Association of Southern California (MOASC), in a statement.

As the promotion targeted people in the age-range of 14 to 26, David Moranville, managing director, Gamut Industries, said that the goal was to “create a compelling way to connect with the younger demographic and make McDonald’s a relevant brand in [consumers] lives”. “McDonald’s recognizes that this is a unique target audience. The old tried and true method to communicate with them just doesn’t work anymore.”

The promotion phase of the service was connected with wild posting (sticking posters on different places) in high school, skate parks, and retail areas as well as billboards and buses presenting the text part of the campaign.

“The mobile coupon, as well as the free wallpaper and ringtones, pose great incentives for consumers”, Moranville said. “You get immediate gratification,” he said. “There’s no mail. You just click.”

One more goody from this promotion was that if you download your coupon from http://www.mobilestr33t.com/ you’re allowed to download free wallpapers of famous singers and bands as DJ Nelson, Green Day, Linkin Park and many others.

This case seems similar to the one of Dunkin Donuts, but you can see here one difference – it’s the targeting options and practices. This shows us that mobile services in combination with web-content are a sure way for winning customer’s interest in our services, as soon as we prepare well and have the ideas. Still, every target group is possible and the promotion practices are unlimited!

by Chilldor

John Strand, the main speaker at the Nordic Mobile Media Conference said the following in his speech and the subsequent interview:

* Mobile operators are facing more difficult times than ever as price pressure is enormous. Operators must find new sources of income and be more efficient.
* At the moment most of the operators try to do everything by themselves, manage the whole value chain on their own. The smarter ones will start using subcontractors and only do those things they are really good at. Hence, the role of those mobile service creators will increase who offer added value.
* The operators who do not subsidize phones will become more successful.
* Operators will still try to handle most of the clients in the same way, offering them one or at best a couple of brands. Actually one should go deeper: in Denmark Telenor has created a brand for women, in Belgium BASE has created a brand directed at Turks, in Denmark there is even a mobile brand for gay people. People’s needs and wishes are different and with the help of branding the operators get more clients to whom it is easy to offer services that are meant for them. Such “fragmentation” will continue and become more active.
* Operators should introduce a different taxation policy: for example, you pay a euro or two per megabite for reading your mail and much more for downloading files; at the same time, when you order a video from a service provider, its megabite will cost you only a few cents.
* Mobile TV in its present state is a stillborn child. No one wants to watch the news at 9 p.m. on their mobile phone. Mobile TV is meant for ordering video clips so that people can watch them at a suitable time.

by Chilldor

It is a somewhat refreshing experience to read this research conducted by AppTrigger. Unlike many similar articles and research summaries, there is little hype here and it lacks radical visions on how in two or three years time the whole life has moved into the mobile phone. Here they tell you that despite the avalanche of new mobile services, more than half of the mobile users in the UK use the phone still for the same activities as in 2003. The interpretation of figures is even too pessimistic in my opinion – standing in the midst of mobile services it is easy to overestimate their influence on an average user and sometimes a statistical reality check does you good. In my opinion it is good that a bit less than half of the mobile users have changed their habits in last couple of years.

Of those who use more advanced services, the following data emerged:

* Within the youth market (16 – 24 year olds) 62 per cent said that they download music or games;
* The ‘young careerist’ market (aged 25 – 34) said they are more likely to use their phones for PDA tools (diary, contacts and email) and checking websites (62 per cent and 69 per cent respectively);
* The mainstream age market (aged 35-44) make commercial transactions with their phones (39 per cent said they conduct transactions such as topping up their balance);
* The mature age group (45 to 55 year olds) were most likely to user their phones for checking websites;
* Only 22 per cent of mobile phone owners in all age groups said they have used Location-Based Services (LBS)

by Marino Bresciani

This is an idea that came out from Volkswagen, and it is somehow an extension of their policy about polling about all the usual customs of the people. For example, Volkswagen knows that 73% of the people want to take the tiny soap and shampoo from hotel rooms. They also know that 60% of ice cream buyers prefer cones over cups.

On an apparent quest to learn everything, Volkswagen’s launched SMS polls on a big screen on Times Square. In this picture, for example, you can see how VW asks for people preferences inflight.

Results are generally announced one day after, which is a nice invitation for the people to return to the store soon in order to see the results…

by Martin Koppel

Today, when credit card frauds have increased significantly and even moved to social networks like Orkut, it is wise to consider extra payment forms. It all depends on the service you are running, but the overall trend shows that people are thinking seriously before they are providing credit card data. Obviously it is difficult to substitute credit cards, but it is possible to give people alternative payment forms. People who tend to be suspicious or recently read about credit card frauds would like to use something more secure or at least something that seems more secure to them.

For smaller payments I would suggest SMS-billing as an alternative. It has its own disadvantages, but studies have shown that people sense it as secure, anonymous and easy to use payment method.

Here are some points why web based company should consider SMS-billing:

• almost everybody can use it – over 95% of people in most of the developing and developed countries carry a mobile phone,
• people can use it despite the location or time,
• you are able to target young people and reach those who don’t have a credit card,
• people are using it impulsively – SMS-payment is simple and doesn’t take time,
• smaller prices drive people to consume more,
• no chargebacks – people don’t have to worry that something extra is taken from them,
• it supplements the existing revenue stream – our experience with web based companies have shown that while integrating SMS-billing as an extra option, revenues have increased,
• people sense it as more secure measure, because they don’t have to share their personal data.

by Chilldor

WAP has become the “silent success story” of additional value-added services of recent years – at last “the mobile Internet” has enough users, so that it pays off to offer services through it, at the same time as the theme of mobile search is becoming more topical – how to find WAP-pages? Is the operator’s WAP opening page really the only solution?

At a 3GSM information session an analyst asked a rhetorical question: “Why is it that we have to search for a mobile search?” At least the smarter phones could have it at the bottom of the screen all the time? You type in the word, the phone connects to the Internet and takes you to the desired page right away?

At 3GSM it seemed that next year we will probably see some changes, because providing a good search becomes important for phone manufacturers and operators. Unlike the web search, where it is clear that Google is No 1 and everyone else follows at a great distance, the things with mobile search are blurrier and two approaches dominate: one is that Google will be used also for mobile search, the other is that each operator will offer its own search engine brand.

What are the advantages of each approach? The advantage of Google is, of course, that it is a world-known brand and their search results (excluding the China-business) are neutral. Search engines offered by operators (supplied by companies like JumpTap) are different, as in their case those items are preferred, which can be used via the mobile phone right away: for example, ringtones- wallpapers-games of the operator’s partners, mobile TV clips etc. Although the results are not neutral, they try to ensure that the content corresponds better to the habits of the mobile search user. I wonder which approach will be adopted by our local operators?

by Chilldor

In MMS / SMS marketing it is a rather frequent question, why doesn’t MMS work as well as SMS. A British research company, Portio Research Ltd, which focuses on the mobile and wireless technology sector, has made a profound analysis on the topic – has MMS failed?

The representative of Portio Research, John White, claims that SMS is not as “sexy” any more as it used to be. As if SMS were a dated technology already. But numbers tell a different story: even today SMS makes up 75-80% of non-call-based services. Text messaging increases at an immense speed and the amount of mobile owners will grow in the next five years from 2.5 billion to 4.5 billion. By the year 2011 SMS traffic is estimated at 3 trillion!!

Next to that the use of MMS is really somewhat more “modest”, although we are also speaking about billions a year. Hence we have no reason to think that MMS has failed.

The mobile industry had unrealistic expectations with the introduction of MMS. That is the reason for the disappointment now. SMS is popular because it is simple. MMS should be viewed as mobile entertainment, not as a channel of communication. MMS is more complicated and more expensive than SMS, therefore it is unlikely that people would use MMS rather than SMS for sending simple information. The reason why in 2002-2004 the use of MMS vegetated is that at that time the necessary technology was not accessible for the masses. In addition, MMS was priced according to its size (KB) and that created confusion in the users when calculating the price.

Lastly, the popularity of MMS has grown, as all the networks are ready for it now, coloured camera-phones attainable at a more reasonable cost and the the prices of MMS are cheaper and more transparent. Compared to SMS one could certainly claim that MMS is a big loser. But when you look at them separately, in their own context, you might say that in case of MMS we are dealing with a very popular added-value service.

by Chilldor

Recently there has been quite a bit of talk about using text messages as mobile discount coupons. The main problem with sales campaigns based on the place of purchase is how to send the coupons to a certain group of clients and how to make sure later that each coupon is used only once.

Mobile coupon solution proves once more that the course of the campaign can be very successfully controlled by an added unique code – after showing the message, the code used in it loses its validity. As always the whole process is 100 per cent paper-free and according to my estimates it takes less than 15 minutes from the “production” of the coupons to the first purchase.