Today's Mobile Monday was all about mobile marketing. The high growth rate of mobile internet traffic in the Netherlands is creating quite a buzz. A lot of people have 2 or 3G phones capable of consuming mobile internet pages. Although the iPhone does not appear in the top 10 mobile internet phones, the mobile surfer is a desired target for the marketeers.
A good example is the mobile marketing bomb of the agency Mobillion. The campaign was triggered with a fake bomb letter. 25 percent did send the free SMS to participate in the game, 28 percent clicked the link to the mobile website, resulting in 2 percent of the people leaving their contact details behind. Although successfull, the raw results of the campaign where that only 20 people qualified as a sale (in this case: agreed to an appointment). The conclusion is that mobile marketing is a good complement for a campaign by causing a “wow” effect and thus lifting the whole campaign.
Samsung showcased the launch action of it's newest model called “Soul”. Aimed at a media-centric audience, they opted to let the users stream their own video to big screens positioned in the city. They created a big reach by teaming up with the community website “Hyves”, resulting in a lot of buzz. In total, 500 clips where uploaded and 100.000 pageviews generated on the website.
@ikbenechtben brought some live to the room, with a good statement that mobile internet will grow in the triangle between user, advertiser and content provider. Operators in general and KPN in specific where blamed for their short term thinking. His most usefull tip was “don't make it too complicated”. Multimediacontextualcrossmediaconceptualcampaign is what most of his customers want today, and that's a bridge too far.
Organizer Raimo van der Klein announced the start of his mobile consultancy company. I'm sure we'll see him at Citylive when he creates the mobile internet vision for his first customer Rabobank.
Vodaphone on the other hand was little more desparetly looking for ideas. They announced a contest with a 100K price for the best mobile internet idea.
The presentation of Blyck was refreshingly simple: Offer a free mobile subscription and fund it by linking the youngsters with their favorite brands. That's what they launched 6 months ago. All common mass media use the user as part of the business model (free newspapers, free radio, add funded TV). Mobile is still different, because people don't get it for free. In solving the question “Give people what they want”, Blyck found out that 16-24 year old people want voice an sms. The third application they use is not mobile internet, but the alarm clock on their mobile. The message from Blyck is that since they don't want mobile internet, there's no point in giving it to them for free.
From the advertiser perspective, mobile represents an opportunity. Young people don't consume media the way people used to do. That's the reason for the failure of current advertising models. Relevant content has become key, since broadcast messages don't work in a personal device like a mobile phone. Exposure needs to be measured in a different way. Normal response rates are around 2 percent, the response rate of Blyck is 29 percent. This proves that the actual number of users can be much lower then with tradional media channels.
On the tecchnological level, Blyck just uses MMS messages to distribute their advertising messages. This shows that even without taking the hurdles of mobile internet, the consumer can be reached.
Admob, the mobile advertising broker, came to tell us that they already served 26 billion add impressions on 4500 mobile websites. They use the classical bannering mechanism that also exists in the internet. The question is of course if this model will translate well to mobile. My opinion is that since people want to do other stuff on their mobiles besides browsing, the advertising model needs to adapt to that and become more interactive as well. Don't hijack the mobile screen, but add value by offering the right proposition at the right place at the right moment in time. But of course, the market will evolve beyond this status quo we today call the mobile web. My biggest concern for Admob is that they completely ignore the mobile and personal aspect of the mobile device. The future does look different, people.
Some interesting figures from the presentation: the Apple Iphone ony has 1 percent market share in mobile internet and Admob sees today 26 billion pageviews per month across Europe.
Chetan Sharma, author of the book Mobile Advertising gave us a good look in the future. Mobile internet is growing, that's for sure. What's more important is that Mobile 3.0 is becoming part of our “lifestyle infrastructure”. This means the mobile will be much more then just a communications tool that happens to have some internet capability.
Each mobile campaign needs to be evaluated based on the following criteria:
- reach (how many users)
- targetting (are they the right users)
- engagement (how long do you get their attention)
- viral (superdistributor index)
- transactions (what did it do to your bottom line)
He states that i-mode did not translate to Europe and US because the whole infrstructure and services that caused the technology and business models behind i-mode to succeed in Japan was not put in place fast enough in Europe and US. He blames our carriers not ony for being too slow, but also for talking too technical (MMS, UMTS) instead of highlighting the advantages (send pictures, surf faster) for the user.
Chetan has a high expectation of future mobile handsets. An example is that he expects that handsets will have a built in projector, so bigger images can be used in mobile advertising. He believes the idle screen of the phone is the hoy grail of advertising, but it will take us 5 years before we can make this interactive.
Towards user research, he noted that what people tell you in interviews is typically 50 to 80 percent wrong. You need to focus on measuring real user experiences. I think he would be thrilled if he knew what we at Citylive did already 3 years ago with the real Living Lab i-City. But for the rest of us he has a good advise: “Watch your kids, they ARE the market!”
The famous Doc Searls started of off in French, but after someone pointed out he was in Holland, this co-writer of “The cluetrain manifesto” switched to English.
He started of by convincing the marketeers in the room that a free customer is much more valuable than a captive customer, so you shouldn't try to “own” the user. He quoted Alvin Toffler, who said “The information age will end the era of the all-silo economy introduced by the industrial age”. If mobile platforms want to succeed, they should open up, just like the internet and the PC. The iPhone does not qualify here, in contrast with the original Apple II. Mobile phones still have closed architectures,
Doc went on about the Vendor Relationship Management concept, which basically is a business model where advertising is replaced by free media where consumers are equally empowered as the vendors to take and move their content and data. He thinks consumers will have their user agents that will negotiate with the user agents of the vendors. All in all quite and old idea, but the relbutton he invented to make the concept easy to grasp by normal people is just great. (although a bit old-fashioned-web-2.0-styled). It's a nice concept, now let's see how the internet industry could implement this.
Today's Momo offered a good overview of where Europe is with regard to mobile advertising. Although the real mobile internet offering is still stuck on the browsing paradigm, marketeers have a lot of good idea's to make it more interactive. It's events like this that help us as an industry make he mobile internet come true. I'll definately attend the next one on September 24.
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