But then it hit me. There are so many people for whom their mobile phone is just a phone. They don’t text message (“I can’t figure it out, but my kids/grandkids use it.”). They don’t go on the mobile web (“You can go on the Internet with this thing?”). They have no idea how to download content directly to it, but they would probably like to get more use out of their mobile device.

These folks are the target market for Displayware, the leading U.S. provider of digital merchandising and media download services for retailers. Their proprietary technology helps merchants nationwide increase sales and enhance customer loyalty by offering consumers the ability to directly download their favorite digital products, including music, movies, audio books, and other media, directly to any personal device while inside their store.

My guess is that no self-respecting teenager would be caught dead downloading stuff at an in-store kiosk. Maybe if it was exclusive content that was free and everybody coveted it. Otherwise, they won’t even consider it. They probably downloaded content while walking into the store from the parking lot without even thinking about it.

Displayware is a valuable service for people who still have the mindset that you have to go to a physical store to buy stuff. Who don’t really understand how to get downloadable content from thin air. They would rather have a real world experience where they hook up their device to a kiosk in a real store where clerks would be on hand to guide them through the process.

Businesses need to remember that because mobile is so widely adopted there is a wide range of uses. Everyone has different technical abilities and comfort levels. Wise businesses take advantage of that.

Share This

The one day conference at hotel Nikko in San Francisco brought to center stage the practice of behavioral tracking, which now forms the bedrock of content and retail sites throughout the web. As the director of the panel discussion put it, “Recommendation engines, contextual links, user logs, social media, audience profiling, content management, site optimization tools, are all now build upon a foundation of data about how people really shop, read, and interact online.”

As we already know (and all too well), delivering targeted ads to mobile devices is advantageous to mobile advertisers in myriad ways. For starters, more and more consumers on a daily basis are using mobile devices to access the Internet and shop, which leaves a virtual breadcrumb trail of valuable user data that is interpreted into behavioral data. According to Elgin Kim, the head of sales for Nokia Interactive, “Nokia achieved conversion rates of 40% with ads targeted using behavioral data about people who watched movie trailers on their mobile devices.”

Although the panel discussion shed light on the many ways that the US lags behind the rest of the world (mostly Asia and Europe) with mobile marketing penetration, mobile ad firms in the states are expected to do the most in coming years to advance the practice of behavioral marketing, which could do more than just about anything else to advance mobile marketing as a whole in the United States.

Share This

Virgin Mobile, which has a “proud history” of running risqué marketing campaigns to generate attention for its cell phones (including, as the Washington Post discussed, mocking religion in its holiday advertising and “plopping its parent company’s founder — in a nude suit — in the middle of New York City’s Times Square”)

Late last week, however, Virgin Mobile came under fire for running an online ad campaign that encouraged people to “disrobe for charity.” The campaign in question, called “Strip2Clothe,” asked people to disrobe on video and provide the footage in return for the mobile phone company donating a new article of clothing for each video posted to a nonprofit group that houses homeless youth.

After a resounding slap of criticism from an assortment of largely uptight but outspoken individuals, Virgin Mobile panicked and renamed the campaign “Blank2Clothe.” Now, instead of removing clothes, mobile users will be asked to do anything they want -thus the “blank” aspect” - to trigger views and therefore, more clothing donations.

Despite that Strip2Clothe videos have resulted in nearly 100,000 clothing donations since the start of the campaign, many are starting to wonder how far is too far for a mobile marketing campaign to go for the sake of generating views and traffic. Just as we’ve begun debating the most effective ways to reach mobile users with this new mechanism, our collective attention will just as soon turn to how to most “appropriately” reach them.

Share This

Bango

It seems the most important analytical feature when it comes to mobile sites is determining the number of unique visitors overall. Not the device, the location of the user, the network, but simply the sheer number of unique visits. One would venture to guess that location, and device used would be the most important data to analyze, but Bango’s study showed that out of 550 site owners surveyed; 80% chose daily, weekly, and monthly unique visitor counts as most valuable in making decisions. Going down the line of most important after unique visitors, those surveyed deemed the following most important;

• Conversion rates/effectiveness of mobile marketing - 71%
• New/repeat visitors - 58%
• Information about the handsets your visitors use - 54%
• Location - 50%
• The mobile networks used by visitors to your mobile website - 41%

Accompanying the news of the survey, Bango has also introduced its revamped version of its robust mobile analytics platform, Bango Analytics v3.0, which aims to provide the two most important metrics; unique visitor counts, and conversion rates from mobile marketing campaigns. To accomplish its accuracy, Bango uses link tracking for campaign analysis and page tracking for overall site analysis.

This study caught me by surprise, I was always under the impression referring sites, location of the mobile user, and the device the user is accessing the campaigns on was the most important. If I was in charge of a major mobile campaign that spanned several devices, networks, and platforms, unique visitors wouldn’t be at the top of my concerns. I’m not saying it’s not important, but when dealing with mobile-based campaigns, there’s so many more variables to track and data to be measured, than with traditional online campaigns. Be that as it may, unique visitor data does determine the effectiveness of any campaign overall, and should always be taken into account, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s the single most valuable piece of mobile analytics available.

Share This

The platform, called AdBid, which is accessible via AdBid.mobi, is a clean, organized community of both publishers and advertisers that can buy, sell, and bid on banner-ads from a central platform accessible via both mobile devices and PCs.

Like other ad-based marketplaces, AdBid allows you to create and fund a new account, create your mobile site, and then search plausible banner ads to monetize the new site. You can search through available ads via demographic variables that allow you to target your advertising to your mobile site’s audience. While this is nothing new, the company states their reason for creating AdBid was their frustration that there weren’t any large-scale communities for mobile-based banner advertising. In addition, most marketplaces are focused on text-based ads for mobile sites, which aren’t as effective as image/banner ads.

While the platform looks extremely easy to use, and offers mobile-based stats and reporting, I have only one major concern, which is do they really want to compete with Google’s introduction of mobile-banner serving via AdWords? It’s the same overall principal; however advertisers involved with AdWords have a much larger community of publishers to help spread their message. On the flip side, publishers have a much larger inventory of available advertisers and the targeting is done for them by the AdWords algorithm, instead of by hand. Maybe AdBid is seeking the niche aspect, and trying to do only one thing well, instead of being cluttered with options like AdWords

That aside, the BETA introduction looked to be a huge success for AdBid. It was launched May 1st, and by the next day, they had already served over 34,000 ads via their publisher network. This resulted in over 4,400 clicks within the first 24 hours. By the 10th of May, they had already reached the milestone of achieving over 100,000 ads served.

Share This

And if you think I’m kidding, just ask my wife.

Needless to say, you can always expect a fair share of feedback from me when a company delves into the juicy results of their research in this realm - whether it’s massaged for their benefit or not. Either way, there’s always something to be learned.

According to Direct Marketing Association (DMA), the results of its first-ever “quantitative research effort in mobile marketing” are in. And as it turns out, the survey illustrated that text messaging is “by far the most often cited mobile marketing method-accounting for 70 percent of consumer mobile marketing responses-compared to a 41 percent response rate to surveys and a 30 percent response rate for email offers.”

The online survey conducted earlier this spring retrieved data from 800 mobile phone owners. 157 surveys were completed by respondents aged 15-20, and the remaining 643 surveys were completed by respondents aged 21 and older.

As far as I can tell, this information is important for both consumers and small mobile advertisers. Text message mobile campaigns, as it turns out, are not only incredibly popular and effective, they are also among the cheapest and easiest forms of mobile marketing campaigns to create.

Best of all, the mobile marketing or direct marketing community will particularly find this information constructive as advertisers continue seeking ways to offer more pertinent and functional information to mobile consumers away from their desktops. If nothing more, the results continue to imply that mobile marketing will evolve into a multi-billion dollar industry that will overcome (through both simplicity and sophistication) the present barriers born of mobile phone users wary of purchasing data plans or broadband enabled devices.

In total, the survey revealed:

• 24 percent of those surveyed have responded to a mobile offer;
• One-third of the group that did not respond to any mobile marketing reported that they had never received an offer;
• 71 percent of people who respond to mobile offers have data plans with lack of interest and cost of airtime cited as the leading reasons by those who haven’t responded to mobile offers;
• 21 percent of mobile marketing responders indicated that they responded to three or more offers per month;
• Respondents that used AT&T (Cingular) Wireless and T-Mobile were more interested in mobile marketing incentives than respondents who used Verizon Wireless;
• Teens 15-17 (19%) and young adults 21-30 years old (19%) are twice as likely to respond to offers on their mobile devices as individuals 18-20 (7%);
• Never married respondents were the most likely of all groups to respond to mobile marketing appeals;
• Overall, higher-income respondents making more than $60,000 per year were more likely to respond to mobile offers;
• Responders to mobile marketing were typically more tech-savvy-for example, responders were twice as likely than non-responders to subscribe to internet-based music subscription services.

Share This

During eleven-time Grammy award winner Alicia Keys As I Am concert tour she partnered with the Mobile Giving Foundation to encourage text message donations of $5 from her audience. She took a few minutes to show a film clip from Alicia in Africa: Journey to the Motherland and then asked her fans to text the word ‘ALIVE’ to shortcode 90999. The text automatically sent the donation and showed up on their monthly phone bill.

When 6 to 12% of Alicia Keys concert goers responded with donations in $5 increments, over $40,000 was raised during the tour.

This text to donate system is possible due to the efforts of Mobile Accord, a Denver-based mobile provider. Their tool mGive is the platform that allows micro donations via text with carrier billing.

Truly, this is smart mobile marketing at its finest. The integration of having a real world experience (being at a concert), seeing a media presentation (the film clip) and then asking for the response on mobile is exactly the right formula. The fact that the target market is the generation for whom text messaging is as easy as breathing makes it all that much better.

My hat is tipped to Alicia Keys, Mobile Accord and all the early adopter fans who donated. (The campaign is still live, so if you feel so inclined, you can add your $5 to the cause - just text ‘ALIVE’ to 90999.)

Share This

23half Inc.’s Thrrum MMS has been aggressively seeking partnerships with carriers, and it’s paid off. So far they’ve secured deals with the top 4 US carriers listed above, and is offering their beta service free-of-charge to participating users on the networks.

Subscribers can try out Thrrum MMS Search by sending an MMS picture message to m@thrrum.com. The service will analyze any picture of a book, a product label or any printed material and return relevant product information to the user.

While this is a good move on behalf of Thrrum, being the first to become integrated into carrier’s network, I still have a few questions. First and foremost, why would carriers choose Thrrum over all the other mobile visual search providers. Thrrum’s service requires the user to use a camera phone that has auto-focus or a macro-mode to successfully analyze an image and/or text. Other services from companies like SnapTell, Kooaba, and others can provide the same functionality, but without the use of focus or macro-mode. An instance where users wouldn’t have to do anything special, or need any special device-functionality is the route carriers should have taken when selecting a provider.

Also, Thrrum’s service is more or less a text-recognition service via mobile devices. It extracts text from images sent to their servers and uses that text to perform a search. It then sends the subsequent search results back to the user via MMS. While this is useful, full-blown image-recognition is the better route to go in, being carriers would then have an opportunity to introduce image-based advertising as well. It should be interesting to see how well received the service is on the networks, and how much consumers get out of it.

Share This

Paris-based advertising holding company Publicis Groupe announced recently plans to partner with Yahoo to provide better mobile marketing offerings and a true all-in-one service to provide cross-device, and cross-carrier advertising worldwide.

They’ve integrated their mobile marketing agency, Phonevalley, with Yahoo’s Blueprint technology which is the backbone of Yahoo! Go. “Go” is a platform that supports widgets and third-party apps on mobile devices. Blueprint, in theory, allows developers to create an app once that can run on the Yahoo Go platform, which is then compatible with hundreds of phones around the world. Their intention with this is to provide brands working with Publicis the ability to tap into this capability, making it easier to develop one campaign that could work on various phones, carriers and across multiple countries.

Phonevalley is claiming to be the first global agency to integrate Blueprint. In addition, Yahoo and Publicis will work with Yahoo’s Smart Ads technology, allowing Publicis to create numerous permutations of a given brand’s message more easily.

This again shows just how serious Yahoo is about mobile. We’ve covered several partnerships between Yahoo and mobile companies in the recent past that proves Yahoo is using mobile to boost its market share and to regain ground in the mobile search arena. Just last week, Yahoo announced five new partners, bringing the total list of carriers that uses its mobile search to 60 over the last 18 months. By partnering with carriers and device manufacturers, Yahoo is making sure it’s the first point-of-contact when using mobile search. It’s smart thinking on behalf of Yahoo, and seems to be working as planned.

Share This

No longer will we have to remember to visit a website when we are next sitting at our computer. We will be able to do it immediately using our mobile phone – from anywhere, at anytime. The lag time between seeing an ad and being able to buy what is advertised decreases to zero. One quick photo of a “buy now” icon on a print ad can link directly to a mobile commerce site and direct response becomes instant.

With SpyderLink’s ability to encode any image (think logos) with this interaction, we will start to understand that virtually everything we see is ready and waiting to give us more. Any logo anywhere can be made snap-able and interactive.

Want to know if there are any special offers from a particular brand? Take a picture of it, send it in and see what comes back.

Ready to be entertained? Take a picture of strategically placed game company logos and be directed to an online mobile game.

Need the bus schedule from where you? Take a picture of the bus sign at the stop where you are and get the estimated time of arrival of the next bus.

The possibilities are endless. Anything that is graphic can be photographed and interacted with. The only barrier to this all becoming reality is that the majority of consumers have no clue this is possible. Especially in the North American market where we are still learning mobile marketing even exists.

Consumer education about how to use mobile image recognition tools is critical to these exciting tools becoming part of everyday life.

UPDATE:
I also want to point out kooaba, another image recognition company. They are based in Switzerland and their solution allows the image to be sent via email, MMS or through the kooaba client.

Share This