by Martin Koppel

Consumer magazines have been realizing that mobile Web might be quite useful.

Experts say that mobile web is almost as sensational a the Internet 10 years ago, it is the Internet in peoples’ pocket. Mobile Internet comes complete with all the ads that consumers see on their desktops. Mobile sites provide a new platform for magazine brands to sell ad space. Unlike the paper, mobile magazine sites provide ad space that can be targeted to exact locations, respond to user requests, providing a dynamic ad platform.

Since phones are portable and personal devices, mobile ads can reach consumers quicker and more intensely than ads in other media. The frequency of return visitors to mobile sites outstrips Internet sites clearly. At the same time the Mobile Marketing Association keeps strict guidelines on phones, protecting them from spam. Consumers just have made clear how much they value their phone privacy.

The idea is not taking magazines to mobile, it is taking brands to mobile by taking the core user of each brand and translating it to mobile. Magazines are not reproducing the content, they are looking at what customer needs on the go. It is an effective way for marketing the brand and bandage people even more with the magazine.

What comes next?

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.

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/> /

Lauri Kinkar

A while ago I-Touch Movilisto published some facts that had caught their attention during the three years of being in business. Despite the fact that the success of a marketing campaign is determined by approximately zillion different factors starting from the product characteristics and target group profile to the timing and context of the campaign, Movilisto dared to come forth with some concrete numbers. Thanks to that we are able to compare their experiences with those of us much more objectively.

Thus, without further delay, I would like to point out three observations from this study, which as a rule apply also to Canada and North America:

*5–20% of the target group usually respond to the call to send a text message and participate in a prize campaign.

To be precise, Movilisto’s analysis talks about people who come in contact with the calls for participation. At the same time one should mind the fact that in the context of sales promotion campaigns, “people who come in contact with the calls” are basically the buyers of the product. Of the latter some have chosen the campaign product because of the prize game and some have not – both groups notice the game targeted at them at some point or another and may participate in it if they wish to. Be it as may, with my experience based on conducting about 120 consumer games with Mobi, I honestly think that the participation percentage suggested by Movilisto can be used as a rule of thumb, with some excellent campaigns outdoing it from time to time.

*48% of people aged 20-40 participate in a suitable marketing campaign preferably via text messages.

The Internet follows with only 26% presumably because a text message can be quickly sent precisely at that moment when mouth-watering campaign prizes and attractive appeals printed on the box are discovered. As that may happen in a checkout line, by the stove or on a tram, the chances that a working Internet connection is at hand, is pretty slim. 19% of people allegedly respond preferably by calling and 7% of the people wish to participate via snail mail.

While viewing the present statistics, one should definitely take into consideration the context in which the response takes place – I believe that people participate in campaigns on product home pages which they can reach during their lunch break at the office by clicking on a banner, at the same time as the majority of consumer games have written their direct communication and participation instructions on labels, which can be studied anywhere.

*As a rule 65% of the campaigns use many response channels (the Internet, snail mail, etc.) and do not rely on mobile phones as the most preferred communication channel. The remaining 35% of the campaigns enabled participation only via text messages. My suggestion to the planners of similar campaigns is that if it is not a typical situation of a very specific participation, then all channels can be used, so as not to limit needlessly the participation in the campaign

I believe that those three facts and suggestions enable all consumer game planners to predict better their participation numbers. As a final commentary may it be said that I-Touch has connections with 95 operators all over the world and thus reaches 400 million end users.

Robin “Internetiturundus” Gurney

I come from a “traditional internet marketing” background. That means I have spent almost ten years thinking about creating effective websites, online pr and link building, search engine marketing, usability & accessibility issues and, more recently, stuff like website credibility, analytics and content strategy /information architecture, but you know what ?

I am way behind the game

Where is the future of this internet marketing stuff? Well its probably in your pocket right now. Yep it’s in that thing we call a mobile phone.

Marketing people have been talking about convergence for a long time now and I have to admit that I think mobile has won the race already.

Wireless pocket devices (will we still call them phones just because they can make calls too?) that people carry with them everywhere are the convergionists’ dream: mobile WILL become a key ad medium of the future.

The trick however will be to create engaging content that adds real value to people’s lives: I do not think that currently profitable gimmicks like ring tones and poor replica games will produce enough profit long term. They will be commoditised.

Niche content, accessible anytime and anyplace, is where the big bucks will be.

After all, mobile users are unaccustomed to receiving interruptive advertising, and unlikely to change their minds about that.

So you can forget about bombarding people with unsolicited mobile-spam-sms/mms.

Mobile marketers will have to think smart !

Of course its naive to say that mobile will replace all but certainly its share of marketing budget will grow significantly.

Small agencies that think smart (and move quick) will be able to lead the shift to integrated marketing where mobile will play an increasingly large role.

So here we will be dedicating more time to understanding the potential of mobile marketing, how it fits with what we do and more importantly how it can be used to gain competitive advantages for our (altex marketing) clients….

Maarja Semevsky

One of the most important questions that the organizer of an sms-campaign faces is the one about the target group. Who is the consumer of the product and what is their relationship to mobile phones? ComScore, an internet marketing research company with offices in New York, Toronto as well as London, has released a study of mobile users. From the survey conducted in the USA it became evident that at the moment the users of mobile phone can be divided into three groups:

1. The Older Generation – aged 35 or more. This group of people had their first contact with mobile phones in their adulthood. They expect from their mobiles only basic functions and do not get excited about new technological developments.

2. The Transition Generation – aged 25 to 34. These people fall in between two distinct groups: those who developed with mobile phones and those who did not. They came in contact with mobile phones in their teens or as young adults.

3. The Mobile/Cellular Generation – aged 18 to 24. Those young adults have used mobile phones most of their lives and therefore got used to the idea that mobiles are a part of their life.

Serge Matta, the vice president of ComScore says that during the last decade mobile phones have changed the habits of American consumers dramatically. The youngest users grew up with the technology, those just a few years older did not. That causes considerable differences in attitudes and behaviour between different groups of users. As mobile phones constantly evolve in terms of design, functionality, and features, it is important that manufacturers understood the needs and expectations of different consumer groups.

Nowadays mobile phones enable us to do much more than just call. They offer entertainment, convey social status and express one’s personality. Both the Mobile and the Transition Generations see mobile phones as multi-functional, at the same time as the Older Generation needs only the basic functions. Almost a quarter of both the Mobile and the Transition Generations find that trendiness of a mobile phone is an important factor when buying one, as compared to 10% of the Older Generation. The Mobile Generation also places great value on the features of a mobile phone, for example 42% finds a camera to be important and for 20% an MP3 Player is important.

It does not take much for an sms-campaign to be successful. It is important to know your target group and plan the campaign accordingly.

Find out more about the study here. Click on the link below

Link to study