You can’t give it away – not like this anyway

Square Group (see story below) seems pleased with the results of a Bluetooth experiment it is running at the Noel Coward theatre, offering a free video download from the ‘Avenue Q’ puppet show playing at the theatre. In the first seven days of the exercise, 703 people accepted the offer, promoted via a Bluetooth message sent to their device.
But I wonder if the company should really be so happy with these results. Those 703 are out of a total of 9,595 theatregoers who had their Bluetooth-device enabled. So against the 703 who said “Thank you very much”, you have 8,892 who said “Thanks, but no thanks.” Or possibly something stronger.
Put another way, the campaign achieved a (positive) response rate of just over 7%. That, of course, is a response rate that any direct marketer would kill for, But that’s the point. Mobile marketing is not direct mail. It’s more personal than that, and brands that ignore this fact do so at their peril. And while Bluecasting may be legal, to my mind, if 93% of the people you offer a free download to decline the offer, that’s not really a success.
I do have some sympathy with Square Group. The company can argue that it was Bluecasting to a captive audience of consumers likely to be interested in what it was offering. They were there to see the show after all; it’s not as if the message was broadcast from a bus shelter or billboard site to anyone who happened to be passing. In making the results public, in fact, the company may actually have done the industry a great service. Because I think that response rate of 7% says a lot about the value of Bluecasting as a marketing tool. Because if 7% is as good as Bluecasting gets, with a timely, relevant offer, to an audience that should be receptive to it, then personally, I’d be tempted to do something else.

David Murphy
Editor

Comments

[paul berney]

I wish I had £5 for every client or prospective client who asks about bluetooth marketing in the style of the 'talking shops' in the mall in the film Minority Report. Like many other areas of technology driven mobile marketing initiatives it seems attractive on the face of it.

Could they have gotten the same results without sending the message to everyone? How many people in the theatre audience would have accepted the content if they had seen a poster advertising it and a bluetooth point nearby?

It seems to me to be the latest version of the age old broadcast v targeting argument but just played out on a mobile.

I do recall once in my early career beaming with pride at a board meeting reporting that I had got the response rate on a piece of direct mail up from 1% to 5% and being shot down by the FD who wanted to know why I would consider wasting 95% of the budget a success.

For me targeting wins every time.

[Enrico]

Hi, I work as a manager for an italian Proximity (Bluetooth) Marketing company and I can tell you your opinion is very common between those people that don't really know this new media. If you let me, I'd like to explain.

When you do BT marketing you have many different kind of "no".
The first one is the one of people who just didn't see the message "Do you want to receive a bluetooth messagge from...?" on their phone. Many people keep their phone silent and many more keep it at the bottom of their pockets/bags. The BT message doesn't last forever, just some minutes, then disappear from the display. This "no" is huge, often more the 50% of the people passing by. For this reason we always announce the presence of a BT transmitter with a display, a poster or something. This can make the redemption double, or more.
The second "no" is the one of people who fear viruses and trojans and doesn't ever accept anything on their phone! The poster/display can help them relax too.
The third "no" is of people who doesn't have enough space in their phone memory to receive the message. With video in particular this happens very often. With our clients we struggle to keep their content in the range on 300-600Kb, but we've collected case-histories of big companies sending heavy (over 2Mb) promotional content and receiving many "no"s for this stupid reason.
So, this 3 reasons together can make almost 70% of the "no"s you receive from a BT campaign, and NONE OF THEM has anything to do with the quality of your marketing, the content of your message or the power of this new media.
And more than this, each one of this "no" can be avoided if you know this media and its limits.

Enrico