by Marino Bresciani

Recently, the British regulator in charge of air travel has approved cellphones for use on airline flights, reports the BBC. Airlines will be allowed to activate base stations in the plane’s tail after takeoff, creating a zone of mobile coverage around the plane.

Also, ‘The services could stop working once aircraft leave European airspace. Initially, only second generation networks will be offered but growing interest would mean that third generation, or 3G, services would follow later, said Ofcom. The cost of making a mobile phone call from a plane will be higher than making one from the ground.

This is not the first time we finally hear about use of mobile in aircrafts. Already one year ago, the low-cost company Ryanair announced the introduction , aiming to become the first to allow passengers to use mobiles. By the way, it looks like now Ryanair has had its plans held up by nearly year because of problems getting approval from certain national regulators. OnAir has also had problems getting approval for a system adapted to Ryanair’s aircraft.

Anyhow, at the moment, most of the interested airlines (including AirFrance and British Airways) are in deals with in-flight communications experts OnAir to fit the latest mobile satellite technology on their planes from next summer. Callers will pay the same rates as international roaming charges.

Custom SMS services on a plane can be definitely a possibility, then. Ideas are still on the way, though.

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.

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.

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!

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/> /

Maarja Semevsky

Now and then I follow up on the statistics about which country is the leader in using mobile phones and sending text messages. Mainly the leader is the USA, followed by Russia. But at the moment the studies are showing that Russians do not like talking on mobile phones or sending text messages, but what they do like is ordering and downloading different mobile contents from the internet.

It is not very surprising that also in Great Britain there are quite many text message senders – about 113 million personal messages a day.

India is surprisingly on the rise. According to experts, there are 5 million new mobile users every month and by the year 2008 India is expected to win a silver medal in the charts.

To make the situation more tense the Canadians have started to send more and more text messages. When one compares the years 2005 and 2006, striking differences can be seen. Namely in 2006 almost 3 times as many personal text messages were sent as the previous year, that is 4.3 billion messages instead of earlier 1.5 billion.

Probably not all the countries can be assessed by the same criteria as one has to take into consideration their culture and differences in consumer behaviour stemming from it. But it is evident that increasingly more and in increasingly more countries text messaging is used for communication.

Marino Bresciani

Some of you knows that I am quite keen on anything that makes mobile technologies useful and, most of all, usable for the majority of us, even those who do not consider personal computers as their best friends. That’s why a lot has been done right now on “virtual agents“, or, with a modern terminology, “k-humans“.

A colleague of mine from the university wrote his master thesis on one of the first versions of this virtual agents, and already at that time (2002), it was already possible to see how the facial expressions of these agents could be more dynamic according to the tone of the conversation between the agent itself and the customer.

But this was then, what about now?

Have a look at this flash demo below, that shows a simulation of a totally automated call center, where all the calls are answered by “Lucy”, that welcomes the user and, according to his requests, redirects him to the appropriate “collleague” (it can be a human or even another k-human).

But the most juicy detail is towards the end of the video, where you can see how this application works fine as well, on a Nokia N73, with all the necessary technologies embedded (live streaming, text-to-speech, voice recognition). This demo has been presented at the G-Force in London, in June 2007, and deserves its respect, as it is – at the moment – the only technology able to do this kind of cool stuff!

So, are you already planning your new future customer service?