While this doesn’t represent real market research, the answers are interesting, especially on the mobile phones. In a nutshell, everybody texts all the time, but it’s largely for interpersonal communications. Not many people in this demographic are signing up for recurring SMS communications or responding to short, code-driven promotions.

Well, a recent blog post by Marguerite Reardon provides yet another reason mobile marketing via SMS isn’t going to take off overnight—price. According to her post on CNET's Crave, the average price of a text message has doubled in the last year to $.20 per message. Yes, 20 cents per message. Now, obviously, for high-volume marketers and alerting companies, the prices will be much lower in volume. But it is still very expensive and apparently getting more expensive quickly.

Even at $.05 per SMS (very, very cheap), each text message is five- to 10 times more expensive than even a premium email solution at moderate volumes. And, SMS messages are limited to 160 text characters, as compared to full HTML and graphics in email messages.

Oh, and did I mention that mobile email delivery and Web surfing are usually unlimited and included with the price of a phone’s data service?

With the iPhone and all the wannabes out there providing desktop-quality email and Web surfing on a mobile device, I don’t think SMS and WAP are likely to become the prevalent marketing media for mobile marketers any time soon. Especially not at $.20 per text message . . .

MessageLabs found that 84.8 percent of emails in Switzerland in June were spam, edging out the traditional leader in this category, Hong Kong, (82.6 percent). France (82.1 percent), Israel (80.1 percent) and Austria (79.6 percent) round out the top five. Canada received 77.8 percent spam; the United Kingdom 74.3 percent and the United States 68.8 percent. Spam levels in Australia were the lowest, at 66.9 percent.

Globally, MessageLabs found 76.5 percent of all emails to be spam, representing a 2 percent increase over the last six months.

For marketers, the question has an unusual level of meaning. Does marketing end up pulling back like so many other parts of the business community? Or, do we seize the opportunity to grab mindshare and keep our budgets the same (or even increase them)?

The trouble for marketers is that our departments usually have the largest discretionary spend in most companies. This means that it’s the easiest part of the budget to change quickly. It’s more palatable than gut-wrenching items like reducing headcount and shorter-term than complex changes like reducing capacity.

Forrester Research recently published a report on this topic called “Marketing Cuts Budgets 3% In A Downturn.” The analyst firm surveyed more than 100 marketing leaders—members of its global CMO panel—about their response to a looming recession.

In a nutshell, about 40 percent said they foresee a budget cut this year in response recessionary worries, and about the same number expect to hang on to their budgets. About one in four said they are bullish and expect to raise their budgets despite any economic crisis.

In aggregate, marketers expect to cut budgets by 3 percent, with the biggest cuts coming in branding, advertising and traditional media spending. But the silver lining is, most marketers said they plan to maintain investments in staffing and training, marketing technology, and research and development—the long-term investments that strengthen the foundation of their operation.

One particularly interesting finding is that the smallest marketers in the survey tended to be the most bullish. Uncertain economic times present a great opportunity for smaller firms to level the playing field by stepping up marketing spend to reach their target audience while larger counterparts dial back.

Of course, the question for every marketer is the same—do we bulk up or slim down in the face of change and near-term constraints? There’s clearly no single, right answer for all companies but I’m hopeful that marketers across the world will be able act decisively and, perhaps, do our small part to make the recession as short as possible.

P.S. If you’re an email marketer and wondering what to do about the recession, my colleagues have been asking our clients and friends and have captured their recommendations in a recent white paper called, “How to Beat the Bear: Seven Secrets to Recession-Proof Marketing.”

Nearly one in three respondents said they would always respond to targeted, promotional emails, and fully a third of respondents in Australia said they had made more purchases after receiving promotional emails. People are also checking email on their mobile devices: 34 percent of mobile device users in China, 29 percent in Hong Kong and 27 percent in Japan.

Respondents also said promotional emails increased their brand loyalty, and that they were willing to share personal information if they believe it drives relevant and more targeted offers.

According to some recent research about people’s attitudes toward safeguarding their personal information, a person’s willingness to share information varies entirely by the context in which it’s asked. Paradoxically, the more “official” and formal a Web site, and the more it expounds on the confidentiality of a person’s information, the less likely people are to provide that information. The study’s authors summarize that reminding people about confidentiality provokes them to worry more about it.

I can’t seriously suggest that marketers go out and cavalierly offer no assurances on privacy as part of an opt-in strategy. But this post does make me wonder if there is more room for creativity than I had thought in terms of how we marketers build our opt-in and registration pages.

Kudos to the ad:tech team for putting on a great show. There are 600-plus registrants from countries across Asia. The choice of Singapore is excellent—it's an incredibly modern, spotless and safe city filled with multi-lingual residents and business people.

Email marketing is definitely one of the hot topics at the conference, with multiple sessions dedicated to it. Mobile marketing is also of great interest. But, despite the rumors that mobile is so dominant here in Asia, marketers here have yet to "crack the code" on how to market over this medium.

Mark Read, the CEO of WPP Digital, made a powerful point this morning on the topic. He said that Google reported that the majority of mobile searches are being done from the iPhone and that a huge amount of the overall mobile Web surfing is being done on that phone as well. His point was that the break-out of mobile Web and mobile marketing is less likely to come from WAP and SMS and more likely to be achieved by bringing the current Web and email world onto the mobile devices themselves.

Asia will remain a challenging region for marketers but it will offer tremendous rewards for those who execute well here. Like Europe, multiple languages and distinctly different cultures make any single marketing effort difficult. And, the geographic size, travel distances and varying political approaches perhaps make it harder to market here than anywhere else in the world.

For ad:tech's first conference in this part of Asia, I think the turnout and the topics suggest that the marketing maturity here is high and the opportunity is massive.

To evaluate the email programs of the top online retailers, our research team logged on to the Web sites of 820 top retailers identified by Internet Retailer and registered to receive emails from each that had an email marketing program (94 percent of Top 500 companies vs. 83 percent of other companies studied). Then we compared the practices of Top 500 retailers to the other 320 retailers.

Among the findings:

• Not surprisingly, nearly six out of 10 retailers in the Top 500 offered a preference center at opt-in, while only one out of four other retailers studied did so.
• However, nearly three-quarters of the companies in the Top 500 with email programs didn’t offer customers any alternatives to unsubscribing, such as choosing different subscriptions or altering message frequency. And even more interesting, three out of four companies that had offered choices at opt-in didn’t offer to let recipients change those choices when they went to opt out.
• And the most surprising finding: one out of five companies that didn’t offer recipients any choices when they opted in to receive emails did give recipients choices when they tried to opt out. As a last ditch effort to keep subscribers on board, these companies offered to send less often or send different types of content.

While the study underscores that leading retail companies do optimize their programs for best results. It also reveals that even the best programs can improve and take results to new levels of success.

In the study of consumer attitudes toward email and online interaction with businesses released in late May, nearly three-quarters of adult email users in North America said they use email every day, and two-thirds said they prefer email for communicating with businesses.

The report also found that consumers not only prefer email for communicating with businesses now, but they also expect to prefer it five years from now, despite the rise of online threats and the emergence of other communications channels and Web 2.0 applications.

“Far from being eclipsed by Web 2.0 and other emerging communications methods, consumer expectations suggest that email will be the workhorse channel around which future online communications will revolve, said Habeas CEO Des Cahill in Habeas’ announcement.

I agree. This is something I have believed in and talked about for a while now. People love email for its ability to be highly personalized, relevant and timely. Marketers also love its immediacy and low cost in relation to other channels. And, as email marketing tools continue to evolve and become increasingly central to marketing execution, email truly will become the workhorse channel for marketers. It’s exciting to see this future unfolding.

But it’s important to remember that just because people like email doesn’t mean they will tolerate anything you want to send. More than 88 percent of survey respondents said they would like to be given more choices over the content and frequency of the emails they receive. And, a rising percentage expressed concern about being a victim of email fraud, and worry over spam and virus threats reaching them through their mobile devices.

Although email appears set to remain a favorite of consumers, email marketing as a percentage of overall online advertising spend will actually drop over the next five years from 2 percent to 1.5 percent, according to new figures from eMarketer. The research firm cites email’s low cost relative to other channels as reason for the drop, even though its figures predict that money spent on email marketing will hit $492 million this year and increase by 55 percent to $765 million in 2012.

Needless to say, these same politicians probably have no idea that far more personal information, such as credit card purchases and family status, is routinely bought and sold between marketers with virtually no ability for consumers to control it. But the price we pay for being Internet marketers on the leading edge is the inevitable shots by people who don’t like change they don’t understand.

My guess is that such legislation will never see the light of day. Few consumers would volunteer their permission to be silently tracked from site to site. The drop-off in available advertising views would destroy countless Internet businesses that depend on that advertising revenue. On the other hand, it's a pretty interesting thought exercise to consider if most of the marketing on the Internet moved toward a fundamentally permission-based model... That could be a very good thing for everyone who reads this blog.

What makes the Goodmail solution interesting and potentially ground-breaking is the company’s ability to offer this at scale. First of all, it is including marketers as a target audience, which opens up a whole new realm for legally-certifiable emails. Marketers communicate with large audiences and can potentially create massive cost savings over the more traditional paper and stamp approach. Second, Goodmail is smart to be open about their pricing. My assumption had been that the company would price this as a premium service. Surprisingly and fortunately, its press release states the pricing as 3 cents per message. Considering how much the alternatives cost, this is a huge savings and will likely spur wide adoption.

My hat is off to the Goodmail team for this innovative new product. I’m interested in learning more about just how legally binding this solution is and whether it’ll take a major court case to put the question to rest once and for all.

1. Limited resources. Necessity is the mother of invention.

2. Limitless upside. Incredible rewards drive incredible effort; anything seems possible.

3. Individual impact. People at all levels can directly impact the company’s success; they tend to act like owners.

4. Tight community. True interdependence minimizes "free riders," and creates virtuous culture that ensures maximum productivity.

5. Unique people. The risk profile of small businesses attracts “out of the box” people.

6. Lack of process. Little oversight and limited processes result in risk taking and non-standard approaches.

7. Extreme flexibility. The business can easily shift to accommodate new opportunities.

Creativity is very hard to measure, but it is just as much the lifeblood of marketing as it is the key success factor in young businesses. The bottom line is that creativity and innovation derive from a willingness to try new things, to be flexible and, above all, to take risks. So, the next time your boss is pressing for more creative campaigns, tell him/her that creativity is easy--as long as you're willing to try new things, and be wrong from time to time.

Most of the ideas for location-based marketing are either interruptive (e.g., SMS someone when they walk near your store) or based on old media (e.g., text a request for a coupon based on seeing a printed placard in a store). But now a Chicago-based company, Akoo International, has created something entirely new: a cross between a jukebox and an SMS coupon delivery solution. In a nutshell, the firm places an interactive, large-screen display in a store, bar or other venue. The device allows people nearby to text in requests for videos, music or other short form types of entertainment media. Like a jukebox, it queues up the requests. However, it takes it one step further by using those request interactions to offer coupons, ads and other forms of marketing. The best part is that marketers can now know exactly where a customer is located physically without all the fancy technical challenges of GPS.

I don’t know whether this is the much anticipated killer-app for mobile marketing, but it is most definitely a great example of the next generation of out-of-the-box marketing approaches we'll be seeing in the coming years.

Well, a funny thing happened.

The mobile revolution went ahead and happened, but it apparently didn't pay any attention to all of us marketers predicting its future. Let's look at the revolution as it is playing out now.

SMS did take off. It's used so often now that I wonder how we lived without it. It's become the instant messaging solution for the mobile world, but it's barely budged the needle for marketing messages.

WAP is everywhere, but most people don't seem to care. Dramatically faster networks coupled with increasingly powerful mini-browsers have brought the full Web right onto our little phones. If you haven't tried surfing the Web on an iPhone or an iPod Touch, then you need to rush out and give it a try. WAP didn't change the world; long live the mobile Web browser.

And, while the carriers are trying to figure out how to appropriately make your location data available to marketers, along comes Google. Try downloading the latest Google Maps for your phone. (It works on tons of phones, but best on the iPhone.) Do a map-based search for, say, a sushi restaurant and it'll pop up a list of matching restaurants right near you--all without you even typing in your ZIP code or location. Did I mention Google Maps is free? This is permission-based (implicitly) and non-intrusive, and it completely bypasses the telcos. Who would have predicted that?

So, what has been the biggest impact of the mobile marketing revolution? It's not advertising. It's not even closed-loop, permission marketing. It's branding. Yes, the original stalwart of marketing has taken the early lead on transforming the marketing world onto our phones. Ring tones, wall papers, screen savers, branded games and other applications appear to be dominating the eyeballs and dollars on the mobile marketing front.

This is why I love technology revolutions. They do change everything, but no one (and I mean no one) can ever predict how. I guess that’s why they call them revolutions <grin>. The most exciting news of all is that the mobile revolution is barely underway and, while I have no idea how it will play out, I can absolutely guarantee the most exciting parts are yet to come.

From Scott:
It dawned on me the other day, that I spend more time with my inbox than I do with... well... anything! Seriously, this is sad, but totally true. Staring at Outlook (or at least having it stare at me) for more hours than I spend with my wife and daughter, what's up with that? Even worse, given the inordinate amount of time that I allocate to the inbox, I still don't feel in control of it. Calgon, take me away!

Unfortunately, I suspect that too many of us suffer from the same symptoms of email overload. The good news is that help may be on the way. As I mentioned last week, there are a number of start-ups that are creatively using technology in an attempt to make life in the inbox more efficient. Of the many inbox tools that I've tried, Xobni (inbox spelled backwards) might be the most interesting thus far.

Xobni (which is pronounced Zahbnee despite the fact that its logo has a macron over the "o"), is an Outlook plug-in that non-intrusively embeds itself at the right side of Outlook and provides a number of nifty inbox productivity tools. (To name a few: email search, quick access to previously received attachments, and a nice view of previous threads that have transpired with specific contacts.) For me, however, one of the most interesting aspects of Xobni is its ability to provide insightful, metric-based views into my personal email habits. Xobni's user-friendly analytics tool let's me slice the data any way I see fit:

• Who do I email the most?
• Who emails me the most on Saturday? (A: Bill Nussey. (Take a weekend every now and then, Bill.))
• When do I spend the most time catching up on email?
• Do I send more than I receive? (A: Yes. I guess I'm part of the problem.)

With this data at my disposal, I've been able to identify ways to take regain a little control over the inbox. For example, I was able to see that one of the folks on my team sent me a steadily increasing stream of emails leading up to our weekly meeting on Friday. By adding a 15-minute check-in meeting on Tuesday, I was able to eliminate a large number of time-consuming back-and-forth email threads.

Xobni has been in beta testing for a few weeks, and, like most beta products, still has a few kinks in the system. (It still doesn't seem to be counting all my incoming messages.) Regardless, if your life revolves around email, I'd recommend that you take it for a spin. Beyond productivity improvements, Xobni will give you a glimpse into factors that are going to play a huge role in the future of the inbox. Next week, I'll dig a little deeper into some of those factors and how they might eventually influence how a consumer views and interacts with messages in the inbox.

Until then...

From Scott:
A few months ago, the Internet was abuzz with the meme of Inbox 2.0. A couple of articles in the Wall Street Journal (here and here) and a post in the Bits section of The New York Times, pointed to a future where the inbox would begin to take more proactive role in managing communications, acting as much like a social network as it does a hub for receiving good ol' SMTP messages. Leading the charge on this new frontier are a number of start-ups (Boxbe, ClearContext, and Xobni to name a few) that are, in essence, using technology to help consumers manage their overload of email. More recently, we've seen some of the big inbox providers indicate that changes were indeed on the horizon. To wit, at this year's CES, Yahoo's Chief, Jerry Yang demonstrated a future version of Yahoo! Mail that included a "simplify my inbox" button, which, once clicked, would reorder messages based on "people that are important to me."

My colleagues and I pay careful attention to anything that has to do with changes (perceived or real) that may impact the inbox. As such, a number of us have been testing these new inbox tools, talking to inbox providers and holding late-night bull sessions in an effort to intuit email's future and its impact on email marketers (all the better if we can devise new offerings to better serve them ). At the most recent Email Insider Summit, I shared some of our initial findings in a presentation that contemplated the factors present in a hypothetical "inbox algorithm" that inbox providers might use to categorize, prioritize and sort messages. Bill has been kind enough to lend me some real estate in his blog to expand on this topic. So, over the next few weeks, I'll try to contribute some additional commentary on the future of the inbox. (I just can't bring myself to call it Inbox 2.0.)

Until then...