QR Codes? Nah, Give ‘em Some Money

Hats off to Coca-Cola for its latest mobile campaign (see story below). The promotional blurb for the campaign describes it as an industry first, and while it may not seem like the most sophisticated sales promotion campaign ever devised, industry first is indeed a fair description, in the UK at least. Elsewhere, operators like Turkcell have gone out to brands and pitched them with promotions where the brand buys a tranche of texts or talk time and then gives it away to consumers as part of a promotion, but over here, up until now, the idea never seems to have caught on.
Which is odd, because when you take two facts as a given, the first being that teenagers love their mobile phones, and the second being that they never have enough credit, then the idea of giving them free credit when they buy a can of pop seems like a no-brainer.
Personally, I hope this campaign is a raging success, and that if it is, Coca-Cola shares the results with the rest of the industry. Then when people who know their mobile stuff, like Helen Keegan for example, say that we should not get too caught up in the technology around mobile marketing, and devise campaigns that offer consumers real benefit, without too much effort on their part, we will finally have the proof that, as I suspect, she is absolutely right.
When we hear so much talk about how many billions the mobile advertising market is going to be worth by 2012, giving someone 50p phone credit when they buy a can of pop sounds so humdrum, so mundane, that the genius of this campaign could be easily overlooked. But as we all know, the best ideas are often the most simple. This is as simple as they come, and for that reason, I hope, and believe, it will go down a storm.

David Murphy
Editor

118 800 Mobile Directory Service Suspended

Let the street parties begin. 118 800, which has managed to create just about as bad a brand image for itself as any company could manage in the space of just over four weeks, has suspended its mobile phone directory enquiry service after its website seemingly found itself unable to cope with the number of people trying to opt out of the service.
A notice on the company’s website says that the service is suspended “while we undertake major developments to our 'Beta Service' to improve the experience for our customers. We'll be back as soon as possible with the new improved service.”
Mmm. I’ve not entirely convinced that many people out there could give two hoots whether the service ever sees the light of day again. In fact, speaking purely from my own personal experience, I think most people would be happy to see it die a not very slow death.
To explain, I’ve just received my third round robin email from the third different friend, advising me that there is now a directory of every mobile phone number in the country and that if I don’t want to start getting spam phone calls or texts on my mobile, I should unsubscribe from it.
When the storm over the service, branded 118 800 and operated by a company called Connectivity, first broke a few weeks ago, we contacted them and got the impression that they were not so much unscrupulous as perhaps a little naïve.
They don’t in fact, have every mobile phone number in the country. They claim to have around 15 million, collected when people have registered their mobile number for a competition and either agreed to have it passed on to third party companies, or not bothered to check the small print. So when I searched for my own number, for example, it seems they have it, which is hardly surprising given the number of times I have registered my phone number to see what a particular competition or campaign was all about. When I tried my wife’s they didn’t, as she would no sooner enter a competition via her mobile phone than attend a live football match. 
But the perception out there is clearly that there is this scummy company trying to make money by selling your mobile phone details. Hence all the emails from friends trying to do each other a favour. The one I got this morning said that it is currently impossible to make your number ex-directory as the servicve is unavailable, and indeed, a quick clickthrough to the 118 800 website revealed that the entire service is “suspended while we make improvements”.
The message helpfully advises consumers not to call the company on the 118 800 number for anything other than landline directory requests as they will be charged for the call. But as we noted almost a month ago, it’s somewhat surprising that a company in the business of giving out phone numbers doesn’t have one for its own switchboard on its website.
What must have looked like a licence to print money has quickly turned into a disastrous launch for 118 800. To suspend the service while improvements are made is one, arguably positive move, but to make it impossible for consumers to opt out at the same time strikes me as nothing short of stupid. In fact, if, as it seems, the website can’t cope with the number of opt-out requests it’s been getting, that’s a slightly different point, but if the tech team (presumably there is one) behind the service could not foresee this scenario on 10 June when the original story broke, then you have to wonder what they’re playing at.
How much damage this whole affair has done to the concept of mobile marketing among people not currently converted to the idea is a moot point. If nothing else, it should reinforce the point, often made, that the mobile is such a personal device that you invade its privacy at your peril. I for one will be interested to see, if 118 800 survives its botched launch, how many mobile numbers it has left to trade once the dust settles.

David Murphy
Editor

Is There an App for That?

Applause to Vodafone for its attempt to bring some clarity to data roaming charges (see story below). In its press release to publicise its new data roaming tariffs, it not only points out the costs, but also, the amount of data they include. It then goes further, explaining what this data actually means in terms of data roaming activity. So receiving and replying to a short email, it says, would use around 100kb of data, and cost 50p. This is very good. Now you know if you only need to look at four or five emails a day while you’re out of the country, it’s going to cost you £2 - £3 to do so.
Vodafone then goes on to explain what the £4.99, 25MB daily data tariff gets you. And a detailed explanation it is too. 25MB, says Vodafone, would be enough data to browse approximately 250 Internet pages, read and reply to 25 emails, find your way to a restaurant on Google Maps, read eight news stories on the BBC website, change your status on Facebook, and watch three 90-second videos on YouTube. It even takes the trouble to point out that for the purposes of its data roaming tariffs, a day is classified as midnight to midnight UK time. This is useful to know if you’re in a different time zone, and will help prevent customers spending more than they anticipated.
And yet, for all Vodafone's efforts, which are indeed a major step in the right direction, I still can’t help feeling this isn’t enough. Because let’s be honest, who out there counts the number of web pages they browse, or emails they read and reply to, or the number of videos they watch?
When I plug my Vodafone USB dongle into my laptop, not only do I get fantastic mobile broadband coverage, I also get a fuel gauge telling me how much data I’ve used. I’ve never come close to busting my monthly allowance, but it’s nice to know I can check on it at any time. My question to Vodafone and the developer community is simple: why can’t you offer the same sort of fuel gauge for the phone? Then when I go abroad and need to go online, I’ll know exactly how much data I’m consuming. There may be some rational explanation as to why this isn’t possible, but that’s the beauty of not being a tecchie yourself; you can ask questions like this in complete ignorance, in the hope that someone out there might have the wherewithal to make it happen.
As Apple is fond of saying in its ads for the iPhone, there’s an app for that. Well at the moment, it seems, there isn’t. So who's up for the challenge of producing one?

David Murphy
Editor

What You (may have) Missed – Part 44

Another month seems to have flown by in a flash. Time, then, for a look at some of the highlights.
There was the usual frenzy as the latest iPhone hit the streets, offering a raft of improvements over the previous model, and clocking up sales of a million in the first three days. Shunning the iPhone’s appeal, however, Orange announced that it would be launching the HTC Hero, its first Android phone, early in July. 
Mobile content storefront specialist FoneStarz Media was appointed by Vodafone Egypt to manage its  content downloads portal. The deal will also see FoneStarz managing the App Store for the Vodafone network in Egypt. And Sony Ericsson revealed that it was adding app store GetJar’s library of over 45,000 free applications to its PlayNow arena service. It was a good month for GetJar, in fact, which was also asked by Virgin Mobile France to provide its entire catalogue of free mobile applications for its newly announced mobile app store.
Mobile search engine Taptu revealed that it is now carrying out more than 1 million searches on a daily basis. The service attracted 3.4 million unique users in April. The company also found time to unveil an iPhone app version of its mobile search solution.
Meanwhile, Flytxt announced a move into S. Africa, and 2ergo said it was expanding into China, via a strategic partnership with telecommunications business development company, Intralink. China has an estimated 592 million mobile phone users, and 2ergo says it will leverage its partnership with Intralink to focus its business efforts primarily on forging relationships with major broadcasting companies and mobile network operators in China.
QR Codes were in the news not once, but twice. First HarperCollins Publishers and Melbourne-based mobile marketing firm QMCODES announced plans for a campaign using QR Codes on book jackets and marketing materials which would take readers to a mobile site with information about the author and the book when scanned by a phone with a code reader. Then Arena BLM unveiled a QR Code campaign to support the launch of Pathé's ‘Blood: The Last Vampire’, which opened in UK cinemas on 26 June. Again, the code links to a mobile site with a trailer, themed wallpapers and more mobile goodies.
Orange extended its Orange Wednesdays 2-for-1 cinema ticket offer to include a similar deal for meals at Pizza Express, while The All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) and IBM unveiled two smart mobile applications, including the Seer Android beta, which uses location-aware visualisation technology to act as a real-time guide and interactive map of the 2009 tournament for G1 users.  
Elsewhere, Vodafone launched the Vodafone Access Gateway service, designed to improve reception indoors for Vodafone customers. So it’s a femtocell, but sensibly, Vodafone avoiding using that particular tecchie term. BuzzCity launched a community translation service across its mobile social network, myGamma, enabling myGamma users to help expand the network’s reach to include smaller language communities and speakers of regional dialects. And the winners of the sixth annual Meffys awards were revealed. Nokia, GetJar and Flirtomatic were among those picking up the gongs.
Finally, after a brave but ultimately doomed attempt at making some money from the site via a paid subscription, we decided to carry on doing it for (next to) nothing, though as ever, we welcome all enquires from advertisers looking to reach a mobile-savvy, business-focused audience.
Stay tuned throughout July for all the latest mobile marketing news.

David Murphy
Editor

As You Were...

In recent weeks, we may have given the impression that we were going to end free access to the site, and start charging an annual subscription fee. As indeed we were. But it seems we underestimated the reluctance of the majority of our readers to start paying for something you have previously enjoyed for free.
So the good news, for our readers at least, is that it’s business as usual. No annual subscription, free access, and perhaps a more concerted effort on our part to monetise the site in other ways.
So call it an embarrassing climbdown or a reality check as you prefer, but we have no regrets about trying to move to site to a subscription model. As we said when we announced the plan, it would have given us more time to devote to the site and enabled us to go both broader and deeper. Equally, we have no regrets about backtracking. If there’s one thing we’ve learned talking to companies in the mobile space, it is that the business model you start out with isn’t always the one you end up with, certainly not if it means losing most of your audience. And the exercise has not been completely futile. It’s led to some discussions about various other projects, at least two of which look like they might have legs.
In making this announcement, we would like to thank those individuals and companies who did take out a subscription, and of course to reassure them that their subscription fees will be refunded. In fact, until we saw how things panned out, we left the cheques unbanked, but those companies that made a direct payment to our bank account will be reimbursed. 
And in the meantime, we’ll be here doing what we’ve been doing for the last three and a half years. We hope you enjoy our continued coverage of the global mobile marketing scene.

David Murphy
Editor

Cracking the Code

Congratulations to HarperCollins for embracing cutting edge mobile technology to connect teenage readers with its latest book releases (see story below). Though I should have seen enough whizz-bang technology to remain objective about it by now, I still can’t help the tinge of excitement I get when I scan a mobile barcode, like the one that appeared on my laptop screen when I opened up the HarperCollins press release, to be taken directly to content on the mobile Internet.
The publisher, and its technology partner QMCODES, hope that mobile-savvy teens will embrace the technology with open arms. HarperCollins has even taken a positive step to get round the most obvious drawback – the fact that most people don’t have a barcode reader on their phone – by putting one on its own mobile website. The two companies deserve every success. And yet…
The ‘and yet’ is really around the take-up of the technology. When you’re writing for an audience made up of mobile-savvy people who all have data plans and all browse the web on their phone as much as they do on their PC, it’s easy to assume that everyone lives their life this way. The point was brilliantly illustrated at the Mobile Web 2.0 Summit last week by Andrew Grill, chairing a session on mobile social media, who took time out to ask the girl passing the microphone to people who wanted to ask questions, how often she used the mobile Internet. She replied that she hardly ever used it because she was worried it would cost a lot of money. I don’t think she knew there was such a thing as a data plan.
I don’t know if there are any stats on this, but I would love to know, firstly, what percentage of teenagers are on a data plan, and secondly, what percentage are even on a contract. If there’s a market research firm out there that has the answers to these questions, or the means to find them out, please get in touch.
I don’t want to sound cynical. The only way that things like QR Codes are going to enter into the public consciousness is if more companies like HarperCollins are brave enough to use them. But I don’t think that putting a mobile barcode reader on your mobile site goes far enough. Someone needs to tell these mobile-savvy teens that you can surf the web on your phone without running up a huge bill. While they're at it, how about a super-cheap tariff to encourage take-up? If it’s anyone’s job, it’s the networks, but from where I’m standing, I don’t see much happening.

David Murphy
Editor

Don't Call Us

There’s a storm brewing over a new mobile phone directory service, 118 800, operated by a company called Connectivity, and due to launch next week. The service offers to put people in touch with someone they want to get hold of, but whose mobile number they don’t have. 118 800 is registered with PhonePayPlus, and has been told by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) that there is nothing with the service provided it complies with data legislation, which it claims to do.
Connectivity claims to have 15 million mobile numbers in its database. To get hold of someone via mobile, you enter their name and address details on the 118 800 website, and if they are in the directory, the company sends them a text message informing them that you (by name), are trying to get hold of them, and giving them your number. It’s then up to them whether or not they call you back.
In the future, the company plans to launch a version of the service where you can request to be put through to the person by phone. 118 800 will then call the person up on their mobile, ask them if they want to talk to you. And if so, put you through. Whichever way you use the service, if it’s successful, it costs you £1.
Brand Republic reports that the Daily Mail and the Independent have both carried reports today that focus on the privacy fears of those on the database. In the Daily Mail piece, Nigel Evans MP, the Conservative chairman of the All Party Group on ID Fraud, is quoted as saying:
“People feel that their mobile phone number is very private to them and should not be traded for profit. People will be infuriated if they find they are bombarded with calls from people they don't want or expect to hear from. It is a clear invasion of privacy.”
On the BBC website, meanwhile, Chris Watson, a lawyer at CMS Cameron McKenna is quoted thus:
“You are supposed to have people's consent if you are going to pass their number around and they need to know where it is going to go. When people tick a box, saying they have no objection to their number going to the company they are dealing with, they don't anticipate that it could then be sold. Not just possibly to trading partners, but to anybody under the sun.”
When I first heard about the fuss, I wondered what the problem was. After all, when you give a company permission to use your email address to send you communications, you routinely get one box to tick to give them permission to use it, and another if you want to give them permission to pass it on to other organisations. Which, of course, is how email marketing lists are compiled.  
It’s so long since I wrote anything on the Privacy in Electronic Communications Regulations that came into force in 2003, that I couldn’t honestly remember whether a similar situation exists for mobile numbers. According to the ICO’s helpline, it doesn’t. Typically, I was told, you give up your mobile number and your permission, and somewhere in the terms and conditions or the privacy policy, there will be something which tells you what the company might do with it, in terms of releasing, or not releasing it, to third parties.
So when Connectivity says on its website:
“Our mobile phone directory is made up from various sources. Generally it comes from companies who collect mobile telephone numbers from customers in the course of doing business and have been given permission by the customers to share those numbers”
it is no doubt telling the truth, but it’s not saying nearly enough about whether the people in the directory really knew their details were going to be passed on. If they did, then no one can have too much to complain about. If they didn’t, because they stupidly hit the 'Agree' button without reading all the tc & cs (as we all do), then Connectivity has gone out with a business model that is guaranteed to get it bad press, and to ignite the wrath of the very people whose details it is trading on.
On this point, it should offer as much clarification as it can, as quickly as it can. It should also, perhaps, try to look less like a company with something to hide. The corporate website address, www.connectivityltd.co.uk just points at the consumer-facing 118 800 site, and for a company that aims to make a business out of putting people in touch with each other, it’s odd, to say the least, that neither website includes a contact phone number (118 800 doesn’t count).
There are a couple of other interesting points here. The lady on the ICO helpline said that some people calling today had asked if the TPS (Telephone Preference Service) had a role to play here, but the ICO’s office was advising that it had not, as 118 800 is not being used for marketing purposes. Which makes me wonder if there’s any reason why it might not be, if someone really wanted to target some very wealthy individuals, and deemed £1 to be a suitably low cost per acquisition.
The second point is the rate at which redundant mobile phone numbers are recycled, which means that the 118 800 directory could contain a mobile phone number which belonged to one person who gave permission for it to be shared, but is now owned by someone completely different. Whether Connectivity has screened the numbers for this is not clear. And without a phone number to call them on, finding out could take some time.
To this end, I just called 118 800 and asked for a phone number for a company called Connectivity. After an admirably brief pause, the chap on the line told me this was the number for Connectivity, but that he couldn't put me through to a press office to get some answers to my questions. Instead, he took my phone number and said he would try to get someone to call me back. Where have I heard that one before?
What happened next made me think again. Firstly, the phone rang within a minute, with a number for Connectivity’s head office. When I rang it, I was put through to a spokeswoman, Jo Smith, who listened patiently to my questions, and did her best to answer them.
On the issue of number recycling, this could not arise, she said, as the number is tied to the owner’s address. Fair enough. On the issue of whether the people whose numbers are on the directory ticked a box explicitly stating that the number would be passed on to third parties, or whether they just ticked a box giving permission for it to be used, with the details buried in the tc & cs, she thought it 99% certain it would be the latter, but told me:
“We can tell any person where we got their number from, so they can go back to the company concerned if they thought their data was not going to be passed on.”
When I asked for her job title, instead of the expected ‘Press Officer’, she told me she was the company’s Financial Controller. The company had been gearing up for an official launch on 18 June, she explained, but because a journalist had come across the website and broken the story this morning, the company was trying to cope with 200 calls a minute from worried consumers.
So perhaps they’re not so much unscrupulous, as unprepared. Even so, if those 15 million numbers do belong to people who never realised they were going to be sold on in this way, Connectivity should perhaps prepare for a few more days like today. If so, they should look for a new Financial Controller, because their current one would make a great Press Officer.  

David Murphy
Editor

Subscription Reminder

A reminder that as of 1 July, Mobile Marketing Magazine is moving to a subscription model. After this date, access to the site will be by way of an annual subscription of £60. It’s not a decision we’ve taken lightly, and you can read the reasons behind it here.
As an incentive, we are offering a 2-years-for-the-price-of-1 deal for the first 50 subscriptions. If you wish to continue reading Mobile Marketing Magazine after 30 June, just send us an email and we will reply with details of how to pay, via cheque or PayPal. As soon as payment is received, we will issue your login details.

David Murphy
Editor

What You (may have) Missed - Part 43

Another busy month, and lots to catch up on. Mobile advertising was in the news as the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers released figures showing that mobile ad spend in the UK was worth £28.6 million in 2008, split almost 50/50 between mobile display ads and paid search, and virtually double the previous year’s spend.
Also on the mobile ad front, Amobee Media Systems launched a mobile advertising service for Telefónica in Spain, while in the US, Alcatel-Lucent and 1020 Placecast teamed up to provide mobile service providers and brands with a location-based service delivering relevant messaging and advertising to opted-in consumers.
And mobile marketing firm Velti acquired Ad Infuse, which specialises in personalised mobile advertising. Velti says the acquisition will enable the company to strengthen its position in the US market and sustain its growth over the coming years.
Also on the acquisition trail was 2ergo which snapped up Australian mobile marketing firm Wapfly Technologies, as part of a move to extend its global reach into the Asia-Pacific region. Wapfly specialises in developing mobile Internet sites, mobile applications and mobile marketing services for brands, broadcasters and agencies.
If it’s not advertising it’s apps, and research from Strategy Analytics revealed that the Apple App Store captured a 12% share (by volume) of the mobile applications market in 2008. And in what looked like a belated attempt to take on Apple at its own game, Nokia finally launched its Ovi Store, though technical problems meant its debut was somewhat fraught. Meanwhile, Vodafone announced that it was planning to stimulate a new generation of mobile Internet applications by providing Internet service developers with a single point of access to its global customer base. The move means that developers will only need to create Internet applications once in order to reach millions of Vodafone customers on any device, and will be able to charge for it directly through Vodafone’s billing system. Vodafone was also on the hunt for the best mobile Internet start-up, offering a total of €150,000 (£133,000) prize money in its ‘Vodafone Mobile Clicks’ competition. The winner will be announced in September.
O2’s media business launched a location-based mobile marketing campaign for health club group, Fitness First. The campaign offers five days free membership and a personal training session via SMS to O2 customers living in specific postcodes near Fitness First gyms. Meanwhile, Mobilize released the results of a mobile campaign for online food and drink retailer, Approved Food & Drink. An SMS offer was sent to 6,000 opted-in customers, resulting in a 550% increase on orders placed in the three hours immediately after the texts were sent out, compared to the previous day
And the champagne corks were popping at Orange, which celebrated the fifth anniversary of the Orange Wednesdays, 2-for-1 cinema tickets campaign, one of the best-known and longest-running mobile campaigns.
Mobile web, media and messaging service Wadja.com launched a white-label mobile social network offering, enable brands to build their own branded mobile social networks, powered by the Wadja platform. And Xtract released its flagship social intelligence product, Social Links, in a Software as a Service (SaaS) version.
Near Field Communication (NFC) techology was in the news, as Credit Suisse, PostFinance, SIX Multipay, Swisscard, Swisscom and Visa Europe reported the successful conclusion of a pilot study of contactless payments using NFC-enabled mobile phones incorporating Visa payWave card payment technology in Switzerland.
Separately, Innovision Research and Technology and NXP Semiconductors announced a joint marketing and licensing agreement related to NFC technology. The agreement aims to bring both companies’ complementary NFC capabilities to other companies actively involved in the NFC value chain.
On the mobile payments front, Billing Revolution announced a partnership with mobile ad network MoVoxx to use Billing Revolution’s technology platform to commerce-enable ad placements on mobile phones.
And mobile messaging company Sybase 365 revealed that it was partnering with global development organization Swisscontact to provide sustainable development of Mobile Money Transfer (MMT) and Mobile Money for the Unbanked (MMU) services in emerging markets. The Sybase 365 mCommerce solution enables subscribers to buy, pay, bank and remit money via a mobile device.
And those are only the highlights of another action-packed month in mobile marketing. Stay tuned throughout June for all the latest news as it happens.

David Murphy
Editor

Subscription Reminder

A reminder that as of 1 July, Mobile Marketing Magazine is moving to a subscription model. After this date, access to the site will be by way of an annual subscription of £60. It’s not a decision we’ve taken lightly, and you can read the reasons behind it here.
As an incentive, we are offering a 2-years-for-the-price-of-1 deal for the first 50 subscriptions. If you wish to continue reading Mobile Marketing Magazine after 30 June, just send us an email and we will reply with details of how to pay, via cheque or PayPal. As soon as payment is received, we will issue your login details.

David Murphy
Editor

Mobile Marketing Magazine Moves to Subscription Model

At the risk of dropping a bit of a bombshell, we are moving Mobile Marketing Magazine to a subscription-only model. With effect from 1 July, the site will be accessible via an annual subscription of £60.
It’s not a decision we’ve taken lightly, and we’re fully prepared for the sort of mass exodus that you get when you start asking people to pay for things you have previously given them for nothing, but our reasons for doing so are as follows:
In the almost four years since we launched Mobile Marketing Magazine, we have built up a loyal user base, which now amounts to 23,000 users per month. During this time, the site has been supported by a handful of advertisers, for whose support we remain extremely grateful. Not that they’ve been doing it for fun. Those advertisers who have used the site have mostly found that the investment has been fully justified by the leads it has generated for them. But there have simply not been enough companies willing to support the site through advertising to justify the work we put into it.
We don’t want to stop putting the work into the site. We believe we’ve created a pretty valuable and useful resource (or that’s what people tell us at least), and we want to go on making it better and better. Indeed, the money generated from subscriptions will, we hope, enable us to devote more time to the site, and take more of an in-depth look at some of the burning issues of the day.
So those companies that are prepared to may a modest fee will, going forward, be able to get their daily fix of mobile marketing news and views all in one place. Those that are not, we guess, will have to pull it together from other sources. As an incentive, we are offering a 2-years-for-the-price-of-1 deal for the first 50 subscriptions.
We’re not naïve: we would be surprised if our decision doesn’t wipe out a large part of our readership. Charging for a blog? What are they thinking of? But we've always said from day one that we're not a blog, but a trade magazine that just happens to be published online, and we hope that those who do stick with us will find the information, knowledge, and, dare we say, commercial advantage they get from the 1,000+ stories we post every year, more than justifies the annual fee, especially when seen against, say, the cost of a registration pass to attend a conference.
If you wish to continue reading Mobile Marketing Magazine after 30 June, just send us an email and we will reply with details of how to pay, via cheque or PayPal. As soon as payment is received, we will issue your login details. And remember, the first 50 subscribers will receive two years’ subscription for the price of one.
If this decision means this is the end of the road for you and us, then we hope that you have enjoyed our coverage of the mobile marketing scene over the past few years. But we sincerely hope you'll stick with us for more of the same going forward.

David Murphy
Editor

Downing Tools

It's a Bank Holiday in the UK on Monday so we'll be downing tools for the day. If you're missing your daily fix of mobile marketing news, click around some of the Category links in the right hand sidebar to catch up on some of the stories you might have missed first time round. Normal service will be resumed on Tuesday.

David Murphy
Editor

MIG in a Kilrush

I’m at The Hospital in Covent Garden, where Mobile Interactive Group (MIG) is launching two new businesses. Kilrush is described as a “next-generation mobile Internet business”, while Mobile Interactive Technology (MIT) is, as the name suggests, a technology business. They join MIG’s existing business units, 4th Screen Advertising (mobile advertising), Jigsaw (digital solutions) and New Toy, a “live experiential design” agency.
MIT is the new operating technology business within MIT, which will design, develop and build proprietary applications and technology for the global mobile and digital markets. Core products within MIT include an SMS Gateway connected to all UK and Ireland mobile operators; an MMS Gateway which supports cross-network mobile Shortcodes; plus a Voice Gateway, the MIGPay mobile billing platform, and the MIDAS mobile messaging suite.
Kilrush is a mobile publishing platform, which MIG says has been designed to work with all the component parts of a customer’s digital portfolio, from mobile web publishing to developing applications, widgets and websites. Kilrush also comes with mobile advertising and billing capability as standard.
MIG says the platform is scalable, and has the flexibility to serve both large and small businesses across multiple sectors, including publishing companies, agencies, service providers, operators, broadcasters, and media and entertainment businesses.
MIG has also unveiled ITV as a Kilrush client. Kilrush has secured a 12-month contract with ITV to enable ITV.com’s production team to update the broadcaster’s mobile Internet sites on a daily basis.
Before the launch began, I nabbed MIG CEO Barry Houlihan, to ask about the signicance of the new business launches. He told me:
“We set out to become a communications services group serving all parts of the mobile value chain, and really, this is us finalising the last two parts of that value chain. We looked at a lot of mobile Internet businesses in the past 12 months, with a view to acquisition, but in the end, we didn’t feel that any of them were right for where we felt the mobile Internet and apps are going. A lot of them use legacy, Internet-based tools, designed more for the web than the mobile web, so we have designed our own system that allows creative people to build a mobile Internet site within minutes.”
Kilrush (named after the village in Ireland where Houlihan’s parents live), is available as a managed service, or as a software tool for clients to build their own sites.
“As far as I’m concerned, every web site should have a little sister, and that’s what Kilrush is all about,” said Houlihan.
MIT, Houlihan told me, will pick up the work previously done by MIG, which now becomes the holding company. There are a couple of additions, though. The first is SMS voting.
“We are working with the broadcasters and Ofcom to allow people to interact with their favourite TV programmes via mobile again,” Houlihan told me. “We have been pushing hard for this. We worked with Comic Relief a few weeks ago and helped them to raise £8 million through 5 million mobile intractions, so we are helping the broadcast community to understand people’s huge appetite for mobile.”
MIT will also offer a new Voice Shortcode Gateway, and is also launching an SMS ad insertion platform, which will enable MIT’s SMS gateway customers to insert ads at the bottom of confirmation or other text messages. The company deployed this in its recent campaign supporting the Walkers ‘Do us a Flavour’ promotion. Consumers could vote for free via a Shortcode which was ad-funded by O2 with a free SIM offer. As a result, Houlihan told me, 65% of votes came via mobile, far outnumbering those registered via the web. In addition, he said, early trials of the format have seen a  clickthrough rate on these ad-funded messages of 18%.
“We have 2.5 million messages a day on our network, so we have a huge inventory available to us, combined with a cutomer base that is in a recession and wants to retain customers and add value,” said Houlihan.
MIG has certainly come a long, long way since Houlihan and his two co-founders left O2 to form the company in 2004. In the last year alone, turnover grew from £37 million to £65 million, and the company rejected a £25 million offer. The company currently boasts 200 clients and 120 employees, and this year, Houlihan says, is looking to expand internationally, with the focus on Latin America, Africa and the Eastern bloc.
The company dwarfs most other mobile marketing businesses out there, and while big doesn’t always mean better, it’s encouraging, especially in the current climate, to see a company so bullish about the mobile revolution, and so confident about its place at the forefront of that revolution. 

David Murphy
Editor

Ps
Houlihan is still speaking, and has just revealed that MIG will launch a £30 Payforit tariff with Vodafone in the next few weeks, tripling the current £10 maximum.

What You (may have) Missed - Part 42

We’re a third of the way through the year already, and after a quiet start to the month, things heated up a little towards the end of April. It was month in which Apple celebrated the 1 billionth application download from its App Store, in less than nine months. Who said people don’t download apps to their phones. They do now.
Mobile transaction network mBlox announced that it was moving into the mobile advertising market with the launch of an ad insertion pilot, while one of the established players, JumpTap unveiled tapMatch, a pay-per-click (PPC) performance mobile advertising marketplace, in which brand and performance marketers bid on keywords and categories to run ads that appear on mobile web pages, above search results and in applications.
There were contrasting views on how the mobile market might be affected by the recession, with mobile social network operator BuzzCity declaring that the global recession is having little to no effect on mobile advertisers, while on the following day, Juniper Research released a report saying that the recession will cut mobile entertainment growth by almost $13 billion (£8.9 billion) over the next five years. 
There was more bad news from comScore, which released the results of a study of US Internet usage via mobile PC data cards, which show that the subscriber base, which has previously been growing strongly – began to decelerate noticeably in Q4 2008.
Buongiorno unveiled peoplesound, a mobile-centric social network. peoplesound is specifically designed for the mobile phone, with a closed network of friends. Ad-funded mobile games company 123play.com announced a deal with free newspaper Metro that will offers readers free mobile games. And text query service AQA 63336 announced the launch of AQA2U, which enables anyone with interesting content to keep in touch with their followers, and make money from texts sent to subscribers to alert them to new content.
The European Parliament took action to end what EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding called “the roaming rip off in Europe,” by capping the price of a text message sent from abroad in the EU at a maximum of €0.11 (£0.10) as of 1 July, instead of €0.28 currently. The cost of making and receiving mobile calls abroad is to come down too.
Vodafone was named as the UK’s most valuable brand in a study prepared by brand research company Millward Brown Optimor. It responded by offering a day’s free mobile web browsing for its customers (today), and launching a daily flat-rate fee of 50p for unlimited mobile browsing and email.

Prime Exhibit

On the subject of usability and the way that mobile sites render on different screens (see story below),  I also met with Jonathan Viney, Sales Director at Wapple, at the show. He’s just joined the company after 15 years with Vodafone and three as a sales consultant.
He told me he’s currently working hard to get the tecchies he works with to appreciate the value of the technology the company has built that enables mobile sites built using its Canvas and Architect solutions to render perfectly on any device. The tecchies, having built the solution, take it pretty much for granted, but as a relative outsider, Viney believes it’s the company’s “bar of gold” as he described it.
When a phone tries to look at a Wapple-built mobile site, the technology, which Wapple calls Exhibit, first validates the phone using the User Agent Profile (UAProf). It then validates it several more times using a variety of public and private domain information. If the phone fails to pass all the checks, as happened when Wapple first encountered the G1 in its testing phase, and periodically with the iPhone when the software is updated, the system raises an alert and Wapple intervenes manually to fix the problem.
The proof of the pudding for Viney came when he was asked whether Wapple could validate phones being used in Angola. To answer the question, he ran a report, the results of which amazed him.
“The report told me there had been no validation failures,” he told me. “The amazing thing was all these obscure makes of handset that I had never heard of in 15 years of working with Vodafone that the technology coped with.”
Viney says that Wapple is just starting to market the Exhibit technology to companies who have built mobiles sites or applications on other platforms and want to validate phones trying to access them. Going forward, however, he believes the company’s star products will be Canvas, which is aimed at people with no coding expertise who want to build high functionality mobile sites; and Architect, which is aimed at the developer community.
The company is five years old on Monday, currently employs 16 people, and according to Viney, will turnover more than £1 million when its next results are posted. Looking further ahead, however, he says the company is planning for rapid and substantial growth.

David Murphy
Editor

Usability Shock

I’m at the Internet World show in London, where I’ve just come across User Vision, which does usability testing for mobile websites. No don’t laugh, I’m serious. True, the company’s main business is in usability testing for the web. It’s a sign of how niche the mobile stuff is that it has only worked for six clients over the past two years. Two of these are mobile networks, Orange and O2, while Nokia is another.
The company runs its tests in its interactive lounge in Edinburgh, where a gooseneck camera observes the user trying to navigate their way around the client’s mobile site, recording the problems they encounter, as well as the things that work well.
“It’s important that in their desire to solve any issues, clients don’t lose site of the things that work well,” Strategic Director Emma Kirk told me.
The key issues that clients encounter, Kirk added, concern the way that mobile website attributes are placed and how they render on different screens. The company has been running web usability training sessions for brands for several years, and is launching sessions looking at mobile usability in London this summer. Kirk has promised to keep us informed.
It should not surprise many people to hear me say that I think mobile usability is a fantastic concept. The fact I have never come across the concept until today shows what a rarity it still is.

David Murphy
Editor

Signing Off

We are signing off for a few days now over the Easter period. Normal service will be resumed on Tuesday. If I’m honest, I have to say that I hope to come back to a slightly more vibrant industry after the break. My gut feeling is that things have been a little quiet over the past couple of months. Maybe everyone’s too busy doing stuff to tell us about it, or maybe everyone’s just recovering after the exhaustion of Mobile World Congress, but there seems to be a dearth of campaign activity at the moment. Given the current economic climate, that would perhaps not be surprising, were it not for the relentless wave of mobile marketing activity that has been taking place for the past couple of years. I sincerely hope it isn't going to come to a grinding halt just because of a global financial crisis.
Whatever, whether you’re recharging your batteries or burning the midnight oil this Easter weekend, have a happy and peaceful one.

David Murphy
Editor

What You (may have) Missed – Part 41

It may be 1 April, but there's no time for fooling around, as we bring you the highlights of another manic month in mobile marketing...
The UK’s mobile networks showed they have a heart by agreeing to waive their usual charges on text donations to the Comic Relief appeal, so that every £1 or £5 donation went in its entirety to this year’s appeal, which has so far raised an incredible £65.7 million. This year's appeal went mobile in another way too, thanks to Wapple, which developed and hosted the first official Red Nose Day mobile website for Comic Relief. 
Not content with its fundraising efforts, Vodafone, also found time to agree a deal with Twitter that will allow its customers to send updates to, and receive SMS notifications from, the messaging network, as well as three more with record companies Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and EMI Music, to offer their tracks and albums DRM (Digital Rights Management)-free, across Vodafone markets, both for mobile phones and PCs.
There was plenty of activity on the campaign front. Car maker Volvo turned to mobile with an ad campaign incorporating 2D barcode technology to promote its C70 Coupe Convertible by linking print ads directly to the mobile Internet. Digital agency Saint at RKCR/Y&R and Mobile Interactive Group (MIG) created a viral mobile application for the Home Office’s ‘It Doesn’t Have To Happen’ anti-knife crime campaign, which enables users to engage with the app, and then send it on to their friends. And Incentivated released the results of the mobile response element of a TV campaign that it handled for GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), which attracted 25,000 text responses in two weeks.
Times Mobile launched a ‘Going Out Guide’ service, utilising Mobile Commerce’s ‘RoundU’ application, while National Rail Enquiries and Agant launched an application that enables iPhone and iPod Touch users to access real-time rail journey planning information across the national rail network.
Other iPhone apps released in April included one from consumer group Which? that gives iPhone owners access to Which? advice and Best Buys on their phone, and a free, GPS-based iPhone application from Sense Internet that allows users to find and book the nearest Travelodge or affiliated hotel room. And just to make S60 Smartphone owners feel wanted, Epocware announced the launch of Handy RSS, an advanced RSS news reader for those devices.
Northern Ireland-based SLA Mobile signed an agreement to provide multimedia technology platforms to Fox Mobile Distribution (FMD), a unit of Fox Mobile Group and one of the world’s leading mobile entertainment distributors, while directories business Yell chose WIN plc to provide the software platform for its new 118 24 7 TextBack service, and Trinity Mirror Group implemented Mobile Commerce’s Monetised Mobile Search service across all 13 of its newly-launched mobile sites. 
Deutsche Bank’s Global Transaction Banking (GTB) division, which specializes in payments clearing and settlement across all major currencies, selected mobile payment provider Luup to power a mobile payments services to its clients in 80 countries across Europe, Middle East and Asia, while African operator MTN Group chose Fundamo’s Mobile Wallet solution to power its MTN MobileMoney service, which will be available to a subscriber base of over 80 million users across 21 countries in Africa. 
The Direct Marketing Association’s Mobile Marketing Council published the first ever set of best practice guidelines for the Bluetooth marketing sector, while the Mobile Marketing Association released the first DVD in its new series of educational tools, featuring content from the November 2008 Mobile Marketing Forum.
And finally, figures revealed that mobile users in America are taking quite a shine to this mobile web browsing lark, as Bango revealed that the US had knocked the UK off the top slot for mobile web browsing, with a 29% share of worldwide traffic, compared to the UK’s 20%. These stats were backed up by more from comScore showing that the number of people in the US using their mobile device to access news and information on the Internet more than doubled between January 2008 and January 2009.
So much for March, April is ahead of us, and as ever, we’ll be here with all the news as it happens, so check back often.

David Murphy
Editor

Fashion, not Passion

I spent yesterday evening at an event organized by the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) and The Marketing Society (TMS). The event was the first in a series of ‘Brand & Agency Briefings’, designed to provide an opportunity to hear directly from leading brands and agency thinkers on how they are using the mobile channel today, and what they plan to do next.
The turnout was excellent, more than 200 people, and according to the MMA’s Managing Director, Europe, Paul Berney, of the 325 people who registered for the event – yes, some people ducked out at the last minute to watch Coronation St. – 65% were from brands or agencies. Personally, I’d like to see that figure broken down further; my suspicion is always that brands don’t turn out to these kinds of event, but talking to Jonathan Bass from Incentivated and Alex Meisl from Sponge, it appears client-side marketers were pretty well represented last night.
Like the rest of us, they were treated to some top-quality presentations, and drinks courtesy of Mobile Interactive Group, MX Telecom and O2 Media. The presentations came from Chris Carmichael, Director of Innovation at British Airways, Steve Wing, Head of Business Development at Guardian News and Media, and Rory Sutherland, Co-Chairman of Ogilvy Group and President of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), and for whom the only apt description is indefatigable, not to mention entertaining. I stopped taking notes after five minutes of his presentation and just sat back and enjoyed it. If he ever gets bored doing the day job, a career on the after-dinner circuit surely beckons.
The most interesting thing about the other two presentations was the sense that both BA and The Guardian were getting into mobile because they were afraid of missing the boat, though to be fair, BA did launch a WAP check-in service back in 2000, before removing it a year later.
“We want to be part of this” said Carmichael. “We have to be involved” said Wing, and later: “This is now too compelling a market for us to ignore…This is the beginning of forever for us for publishing on mobile devices…It’s too disruptive not to take part.”
Everyone in the mobile marketing business is fed up to the back teeth of hearing that this will be the year of mobile, or that it’s finally reached its tipping point, but what I took from last night was the sense that the dominoes are slowly beginning to tumble, as one brand after another launches a mobile site or a mobile app or a mobile campaign. In many, even most, cases, they’re not doing it because they are passionate about the mobile channel. Rather, they are responding to consumer behaviour. (Now do you get that headline?) As more people avail themselves of a phone with a browser, and as more people find out about and sign up to a flat-rate data plan – who remembers dial up on the Internet? – and as more people realise there are better ways to spend an idle 10 minutes at the bus stop than watching the world go by, then mobile browsing will continue to increase and more people will click on more mobile ads and who knows, those companies and those people on the mobile marketing coalface who really are passionate about the mobile channel, might finally start making some proper money out of it.
I’ll drink to that.

David Murphy
Editor

A Breeze of Fresh Air

I’ve just met the acceptable face of Bluetooth marketing. OK, that might sound a bit facetious, but Bluetooth does tend to get quite a bad press, due to the way in which some brands and Bluetooth marketing providers deploy it. I remember being spammed by a hi-fi brand on three consecutive days last year as I was walking through Waterloo station in London. But talking to Greg Isbister from breezeTECH this afternoon, it’s obvious that some companies take a slightly more sophisticated approach.
breezeTECH works with, among others, T-Mobile, which sponsors West Bromwich Albion football club. It helps T-Mobile leverage its sponsorship on matchdays by offering supporters in the ground a free Bluetooth video download in which Team Coach Tony Mowbray runs through the team he’s picked, and explains his approach to the match.
The download is promoted in the club programme and via billboards in the ground. This call to action is essential, Isbister told me, in order to get people to want to download the content.
There are other important factors too, which Isbister has promised to expand on in a Guest Column in the coming weeks. But the very idea of a Bluetooth marketing firm talking about the need for a call to action was music to my ears. If Bluetooth has a place in the future of mobile marketing, it won’t win it by spamming people who just happen to be walking past the wrong bus shelter with Bluetooth switched on. There’s got to be an element of opt-in about it, and it was refreshing to hear someone from a Bluetooth marketing firm so keen to talk about it. 

David Murphy
Editor

Mobile: The Next Generation

Elaine Doherty, Principal Business Consultant at Logica, examines what brands need to do in order to use the mobile channel successfully for marketing and customer relationship management

As Internet-based communities, online conversations and social networking tools continue to strengthen their positions in the communications market, it would be easy to believe that the halcyon days of mobile are truly over. However, an increasing number of announcements from well-known organisations regarding upcoming forays into the mobile space, to sit alongside their online offerings, show that the medium is, if anything, currently experiencing another surge of interest. As these businesses are proving, the key to sustainable success in the long term involves reconsidering the relative mutual exclusivity with which web and mobile have traditionally operated.
For individual users, web and mobile have enabled connectivity that has crossed boundaries of distance, time zone and even socio-economics. The advent and rise of Web 2.0 has not only made these connections possible but even facilitated conversations between the impromptu communities created by this new found connectivity. Its successor, Web 3.0, aims to provide the next logical leap i.e. to proactively build and bring together communities in a more defined and, ideally, a more beneficial way.

Commercial tool
For businesses, the Internet has remained primarily a commercial tool, opening up new markets, helping to reach new customers and changing definitions of how, where and when work is possible. Although many businesses have now started to embrace Web 2.0 tools to better understand and identify with their customers, the possibilities for Web 3.0 technologies remain largely untapped. 
If the Internet was the first great equalising force in commerce, forcing organisations across all industry sectors whether small or large to reconsider their traditional business models and operations methods, mobile must surely be the next. With over 74 million subscriptions in the UK market (according to Deloitte), there are virtually no businesses that can afford to underestimate the value of this medium for reaching their target audiences.
Nor do businesses have to enter the mobile market unwillingly. Just as the Internet did for e-commerce, so mobile can and will do for e-communication. Alongside benefits such as access to customers through their preferred medium, mobile brings with it the potential for new revenue streams that operators and advertisers cannot and should not ignore. Reaching new audiences and tapping as many revenue opportunities as possible will become especially important as the recession deepens.

Significant rewards
A highly targeted mobile campaign could reap significant rewards for a number of businesses; and provide revenue-share opportunities for a number of others. Research has shown that users perceive information that they find relevant to their own needs as ‘content’ rather than ‘advertising’ – a distinction which, naturally, leads to a preference for those who offer them value through this content, rather than those who spam them through advertising.
Similarly, as User Generated Content (UGC) becomes firmly entrenched as the favoured choice of the Web 2.0 generation, operators and vendors will find themselves under pressure to ensure that interactions with users do not seem contrived. Content or conversations that come across as manufactured or commercially driven will quickly be met with the same disdain as spam. Admittedly, it can be tricky providing users with personalised content, while still making mobile operations financially viable, but for those operators and vendors who strike the right balance, the potential for customer loyalty and business growth is immense.
As with all successful mobile campaigns, old and new, the key to ensuring user relevance lies in using the right criteria and tools to build accurate customer profiles. Fortunately, from contextual targeting to behavioural and social profiling, there are now a variety of options to help businesses build a comprehensive picture and better understanding of their potential customers. In the crowded and often competitive mobile space, operators and vendors that can optimise their profiling capabilities to maximise the perceived value of the content they provide will be the ones who make themselves heard above their competitors.

A Waste of Time?

At first glance, the figures from price comparison website moneysupermarket.com make for shocking reading. Extrapolating from a poll of just over 2,000 mobile users, moneysupermarket.com has calculated that the UK’s mobile networks are, in its words, “raking in” more than £10 billion per year in unused talk time and texts.
For sure, mobile networks are a soft target, and no doubt there are many people out there who could save money by going on a cheaper tariff. But I wonder how many users are already getting as good a deal as they can get. When I last switched network providers, I took a deal from 3 which gave me 500 minutes per month to any network for £15 a month, with an additional £5 a month for (mobile) Internet access. The deal came with an additional guarantee that I could not be moved on to a more expensive tariff as long as I remained with 3.
I got a feel for what the deal is costing 3 when I upgraded my phone just before Christmas. The sales assistant was not far short of desperate to bump me up to a £25 a month tariff that would offer me even more talk time. I didn’t take it, because I didn’t need it. And that’s my point really. I doubt whether I get anywhere near my 500 minutes talk time in any given month, so I am, in theory, contributing to this £10 billion that the networks are raking in. But what am I supposed to do, ring people up for the sake of it? And when the deal I’m on is as good as it is, what do I care if I don’t make full use of my allowance each month?
I’m not saying the logic used in the study is false, by any means, just that the topline figures, although they make for good headlines, don’t tell the whole story. Competition, and the very high rate of churn among mobile operators in the UK, have forced them to offer some very good deals. Where I do agree with moneysupermarket.com is in their advice to people to check the tariff they’re on. For all that’s said and written about mobile networks proactively contacting their customers to tell them when they could save money by moving up or down a tariff, I can safely say, in almost 20 years, shared between four UK mobile network operators, it’s never happened to me.

David Murphy
Editor

What You (may have) Missed - Part 40

It’s March, and for anyone in the mobile business, that can only mean one thing: Mobile World Congress is out of the way for another year.
This year’s event saw the usual raft of big announcements. Yahoo! unveiled Yahoo! Mobile, which is essentially a homepage for mobile browsing from where users can jump off to their favourite places. Gigafone launched its new digital advertising solution, Ochre, and announced nine partners from across the advertising value chain, including Yodel Digital and Sponge Group
Amdocs announced a mobile applications portal, the Amdocs App Store, describing it as a collaborative environment in which service providers and their third-party developer partners can develop, sell and profit from the digital applications and value-added services. Nokia was another firm to launch its own App Store.
Jinny Software launched its fully-managed Mobile Marketing & Advertising Service, which will provide advertising from agencies to the operator as a managed service and share the revenue earned from advertising with the operator.
Vodafone announced an agreement with Opera Software to develop a custom-made version of its Opera Mini mobile browser. Also on the browser front, Bitstream released its BOLT mobile browser as a free public beta offering, claiming that it is around 25% faster than its competitors when downloading full real web pages and multimedia content.
Zain announced plans to bring mobile banking to over 100 million people in East Africa with the launch of its Zap service, which will be available initially in Kenya and Tanzania, prior to its launch in Uganda.
And we were wowed by a demonstration of a mobile application called iPointer, which brings back information on public buildings to your phone simply by pointing your phone at the building in question. It’s not available yet, but its creator Intelligent Spatial Technologies, has big ideas to sell it to network operators as a local search solution. Having seen it for ourselves, we hope they succeed; it’s fantastic. To see more of our coverage of MWC, just enter ‘MWC;in the search box at the top of the left hand sidebar.
But there was more to the mobile world in February than Mobile World Congress. Bebo launched Bebo Open Mobile, a new global partnership program which will offer the mobile industry a suite of tools to provide their customers with access to the Bebo social networking experience.
Google announced the launch of Google Latitide, which lets users share their location, overlayed on Google Maps, with friends and family. Orange embarked on a £7 million marketing campaign to promote Orange Wednesdays, its 2-for-1 midweek cinema promotion which is arguably the longest-running and best-known mobile marketing campaign.
Independent mobile ad agency RingRing Media revealed that it had booked in excess of $4 million (£2.75 million) worth of mobile search and display advertising since it launched in June 2008. T-Mobile was rated the number one brand online in the Mobile sector, in the Kaizo Advocacy Index, which measures the online reputation of 20 major brands across four sectors. Orange came last.
Kirusa and Tetco-Voxpilot unveiled what they claimed is the world’s first Video SMS product. Kirusa says that Video SMS is the first in a series of 3G initiatives it is developing as an extension to its current Voice SMS offering.
And Vodafone ended a busy month by entering into an agreement with Microsoft which will see the operator offering businesses a single communications and collaboration solution composed of fixed and mobile voice and data, customer equipment and handsets, and Microsoft Online Services.

Phew, it's been some month. Stay tuned throughout March for all your mobile marketing news.

David Murphy
Editor

Maximimising Your Mobile Campaign ROI

Evanna Kearins, Director of Marketing at Valista, offers tips and tricks for advertisers and service providers who would like to successfully augment their mobile marketing and merchandising campaigns

In the current economic decline, even small adjustments within a mobile marketing program can make all the difference between increased revenue and disappointing results. Reaching out to customers via multiple channels and keeping campaigns simple are central. If you want to dramatically improve the success of your mobile marketing campaigns, create simple offers that focus on loyal customers.
According to a recent Experian survey, there are over 2.7 billion mobile phones currently in use, and ABI Research expects mobile marketing to grow to over $24 billion (£16.5 billion) worldwide by 2013. Smart companies are leveraging the mobile channel to reach consumers more effectively. Here are a few pointers to help you get the most value out of each mobile campaign...

Keep it simple
Keep subscription terms and conditions simple. Make sure that every customer understands the terms and conditions of each offer. Clearly explain any discounts or commitment periods associated with offers to avoid complaints due to misunderstanding. The more complex the terms of a promotion, the less likely customers will be willing to participate. 

Keep it similar
Bundle only similar or related products. To simplify the delivery process for anything sold, bundle products that are of similar type. For instance, package a movie ticket offer with a ringtone associated with the movie that the customer is watching. Bundling only digital goods together and only hard goods together keeps within the customer’s area of interest, and increases the likelihood of purchase.

Keep it to three
Limit bundled items to three. Bundling more than three items together pushes the purchase price for products up and the discounts down – and we know that a significant increase in price often decreases customers’ interest. To avoid pushing customers away, merchants need to evaluate what would be of most interest to customers when bundling products, and ensure that complementary and similarly-priced products are offered together.

Sell across multiple channels
A company’s best customers are typically the best customers across multiple channels. So use cross-channel loyalty to reduce churn and increase customer satisfaction, leveraging other channels to communicate with target customers. For instance, augment SMS campaigns with one-off emails that are easily readable on both mobile phones and PCs.

Provide value for money
One of the most common complaints levelled against the mobile content market is poor value for money. Ensure that the prices charged reflect value for money to consumers. Poor value is becoming even more apparent in today’s economic climate.

Make loyalty programs relevant
To keep customers loyal, make sure that loyalty programs offered are attractive and usable against future purchases that customers find valuable. There’s nothing more annoying to customers than receiving points for items that they can never use. 

Mobile marketing has continued to take off in both North America and Western Europe over the last couple of years. As more consumers move to flat-rate data plans and embrace mobile messaging, we expect advertisers and service providers to see more value from mobile marketing strategies. Companies that are able to identify smart ways to leverage their customer knowledge and apply that to their mobile marketing campaigns will experience the most success.

I’ve Seen the Future

I’m at the Technology for Marketing show in London, where I’ve just spent 10 minutes talking to mobile marketing firm Piri. We’ve written about the company before, focusing on its work with radio stations. Piri provides an interface designed to enable DJs them to handle incoming texts from listeners and to send out advertising messages in return texts.
Today though, Managing Director Lee Bowden told me about the company’s work with Future Publishing, and it’s a great example of how consumers can be convinced to opt in to third party marketing messages on their mobile phone, something that many marketers are sceptical about.
Here’s how it works. Future has a raft of magazine titles, covering everything from home cinema systems to mountain bikes. By definition, subscribers to these magazines are a self-selecting group, with an avowed interest in the subject matter of the magazine they subscribe to.
Over the past few years, Future has asked subscribers to opt in to receive relevant third party offers and advertising messages on their mobile phone, and many have agreed to do so.
“The key word when all this was being put in place was ‘relevance’” Bowden told me. “We made sure that the mountain bike magazines would not be able to target subscribers to one of the knitting magazines just because they were opted in, even if they wanted to.”
Future uses the Piri platform to target these subscribers in various ways. Every other week, the games retailer GAME targets opted in subscribers to Future’s console gaming magazines with offers on the latest game due in store that weekend.
“For every big game release, every retailer wants a bigger slice of the pie,” said Bowden. “This allows them to target known gaming enthusiasts and get them into their store rather than the competition’s. They can even time the message to go out on a Saturday morning if they wish.”
In the weeks when GAME is not targeting the gaming enthusiasts, a rival games retailer uses the Piri platform via Future, and between them, Bowden estimates that the two firms are sending out around 65,000 messages each month.
In another campaign, Future ran a telemarketing exercise to pitch consumers with the idea of subscribing to T3 magazine via their mobile for £5 per issue, at a time when the cost of buying the magazine on the newsstand was £3.99. So that’s a £1 premium for the convenience of paying by mobile, rather than the usual discount you get when you sign up for a 12-month subscription.
Out of 10,000 people called, 6,000 allowed Future to pitch them with the idea. Of these, 1,600 went on to subscribe, with 283 of these agreeing to take the mobile subscription, for which they are charged £5 every month on their mobile, until such time as they text ‘STOP’. All of which is, of course, spelled out to them at the time of subscription, and in each of the monthly messages they receive.
I was very impressed by what Piri had to say. The concept being deployed by Future is “Blikesque” in its targeting. Even better, in fact, because the people being targeted don’t just say they have an interest in mountain bikes or cross-stitching or whatever it is. They put their money where their mouth is and subscribe to a magazine on the subject. Who said third party offers on the mobile couldn’t work?

David Murphy
Editor

Home, Sweet Home

Back at my desk in the UK, it feels great to be back in the real world. Mobile World Congress is undoubtedly great fun, and there’s always a real buzz about the place, but it’s absolutely manic too, and to a certain extent, we’re still playing catch up with some of the news coming out of MWC and elsewhere, so we’ll run one of our news in brief round-ups on Monday.
The organisers say the event was a great success, noting that more than 47,000 people attended, though the gloss is taken off this figure somewhat when they point out that this figure includes not just visitors and exhibitors, but also the press (2,400), and even the people who built the stands. No idea how many they account for, but with 1,300 companies exhibiting, say two per exhibitor at a rough guess, and you get some idea.
Coming out of an event like MWC, it’s hard not to be optimistic about the future for mobile marketing. So in the interests of balance, we’ll offer something of a reality check this afternoon at around 4pm, with a Guest Column from John Wade, Director of Digital Strategy at direct/digital agency Wunderman, who argues that this is no time for brands to be experimenting with mobile, and explains why. Read it if you dare, and whether you think he’s talking sense, or complete hogwash, please leave a comment to let us know what you think.
Think of the debate as the perfect way to start a weekend that anyone who was out in Barcelona, or is still heading back, will be looking forward to with unparalleled relish.

David Murphy
Editor

MWC Day 2 Wrap-up

I’ve had a great day here at MWC, the highlight undoubtedly that iPointer demo, but there’s been lots of other stuff to see too.
We are sitting on a lot of announcements that we haven’t had time to write up as yet because we’ve been sitting in briefings and demos, but we’ll get on to that in due course.
A few people at a Mobile Entertainment Forum party last night were saying they thought the show was a little quiet this year, but from where I’m standing, that’s not how it looks to me. From what I’ve seen, innovation in the mobile business is alive and kicking. I look forward to seeing some of the great ideas coming out of MWC coming to fruition.

David Murphy
Editor

MWC: Yahoo! Unveils Yahoo! mobile

Right now, I’m in a Yahoo! press conference, where Yahoo! Connected Life Executive Vice President Marco Boerries is in the middle of unveiling Yahoo! Mobile, describing it as “Your starting point to the Internet”.
Yahoo mobile is, essentially a homepage for mobile browsing from where you can easily jump off to your favourite places. It comes pre-loaded with one-click links to popular services such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Yahoo! Maps, but users can also add their own. Users can either choose from a pre-populated list of popular widgets, or use the integrated Yahoo! oneSEARCH voice-activated search engine. When you get the results of your search, there’s an option in the menu to add any returned site to the Yahoo! Mobile launcher. This extends to friends too. If you have someone you want to keep in touch with, you can add them to the launcher too, for one-click access to their social network updates. Another feature called Pulse aggregates all of your social network updates in one screen. Yahoo! mobile also inorporates Yahoo! oneCONNECT and onePLACE
Yahoo! mobile is available as a browser version, but also as a downloadable application for the iPhone and for Smartphones from Nokia, RIM (Blackberry), LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and Windows devices. Boerries also revealed that an Android version will be released at some point. The mobile app doanload incorporate the Opera Mini mobile browser. The browser version is available initially as a private, invitation-only beta, with the full release, along with the iPhone app, due at the end of March. The Smartphone version ships at the end of May.

David Murphy
Editor

Letter from Barcelona

So here we are in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress. A few things have changed since last year. First, the hotel. That’s hotel with an ‘s’ in the middle. Last year, I was just off the Ramblas, so Leicester Square, if you compare Barcelona to London. This year, I’m at the end of the Northern Line, in a quiet little area called Valldaura, so a little off the beaten track. Lovely little place though, the Garden House Hostel. If you’re trying to do MWC on the cheap, or just tend to leave it too late to book a hotel, (I tick both those boxes) you could do a lot worse. True, the bed you pay for is just about all you get, save for the door and a mains socket. But at less than €20 per night, with free wi-fi, breakfast for €2.50 and a kitchen where you can knock up your own meals, it’s hard to complain. Other people of a certain age have obviously cottoned on to this. There aren’t many youths in this youth hostel, and when I arrived late last night, one group was tucking into some lovely-looking food and wine. 
The other change this year occurred when I went to register and pick up my pass for the show. As last year, I got my neat little MWC rucksack, exhibition guide and other bits and pieces, but unlike last year, there was no travelcard for the Metro. Judging by the reaction I got when I queried this with the lady on the registration desk, I was not the first hack to notice. Well what do they expect? Give a journo a freebie one year, and he’s going to shout long and hard when you take it away the next. A sure sign that the credit crunch is beginning to bite in all sorts of places.
Still, who needs the Metro? I made my way to the Fira exhibition complex this morning on a very nice Specialized mountain bike, hired from Barcelona Bike Rentals. What a nice bunch of people they are. I asked if I could start my 8-hour reservation when they opened at 10am, even though I might not make it until a bit later. “No problem” they said on the email. So I was a bit perplexed to get a call on my mobile at half 11 asking when I was going to pick the bike up, as the guy had come in at 10 just for me. Usually on a Sunday, they don’t open till 11. It got better/worse depending on your point of view. When I picked the bike up, I said I’d have it back to him by 3. It was then that he told me they close at 2, but that he’d come back at 3 anyway to keep me happy. And all this for €20. Yes, despite the plug, this is not one of those Sunday Times Travelogue pieces where I say nice things about all the things I’ve blagged. I did pay for it; I just though the service was exceptional, and at the end of a great afternoon, I can say without any reservation that a bike is a great way to see Barcelona.
As for the show itself, who knows what to expect, or what the big themes are going to be this year. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is the year when people will really start talking about Location-based Services (LBS). While there’s still a lot of hype around mobile advertising, I think a lot of people now know what it’s about and what it can do for them. LBS, I think, is still at the stage where a lot of people see a lot of potential in it, and there are a lot of good ideas floating about, but the dots are still not completely joined up. Some of the partnerships sealed at this year’s show should help to make some of these ideas a reality.
We’ll be reporting from the floor of the show as often as we can. I’ve tried not to over-commit to too many briefings this year, as the PRs who have been bombarding my inbox these last few weeks will confirm, so I hope to have time to fish out some of the more interesting, quirky stories.
If you’re at the show, enjoy it, and if you’re not, stay tuned.

David Murphy
Editor

It’s Still Survey Time

At the risk of repeating ourselves, if you haven’t already done so, please take a couple of minutes to take our short, 2-minute (if that) survey and put yourself in with the chance of winning a fabulous LCD projector worth £700, courtesy of Hitachi  
There are just seven short questions about how often you visit the site, how long you stay for and what type of business you work in, all of which will help us get a better picture of who our readers are.
We also need your email address to enter into the prize draw, but rest assured, we won’t be passing that on to anyone, or using it ourselves, for anything other than picking the winner. If you’ve already completed the survey, thanks! The sooner we get enough responses, the sooner we can stop nagging you to do it.

David Murphy
Editor

What You (may have) Missed - Part 39

It’s February already, and as people around the world wonder just why they had that first drink of the year last night after the January detox, and the mobile industry prepares for its annual decampment to Barcelona, for Mobile World Congress, it’s time to take a brief look back at the mobile marketing highlights of 2009 so far.
Both the iPhone and Android platforms were in the news, as AdMob revealed that it was launching a tracking service for iPhone application downloads, and also launched its first advertising unit for Android applications, enabling developers to monetise their applications on the new device platform.
Mobile content discovery service Mippin also announced that it had optimised its browser-based service for the iPhone and Android devices in its first major upgrade to the service for 2009. And OfferPal Media launched its ‘Managed Offer Platform’ for the iPhone. The platform monetizes developer traffic by enabling iPhone users to earn points or other types of virtual currencies in exchange for taking part in advertising offers such as free trials, online surveys, and discounts.
There was plenty of launch activity. Idle screen mobile marketing provider Celltick announced the launch of livescreen.com, the world's first web-based ad server which allows local and global advertisers to purchase idle screen advertising in all markets where Celltick's LiveScreen Media platform is operational. The platform has been built in collaboration with BidVertiser, an international ad network that serves billions of ads per month, using a proprietary ad serving platform.
Mobile and online flirting service Flirtomatic revealed that it was launching a mobile beta in the US, in an attempt to replicate the success it has enjoyed in the UK and Germany. And the Financial Times revamped its mobile site at m.ft.com, optimising the site for iPhone and Blackberry users, who account for over 60% of FT.com mobile traffic.
On the campaign front, soft drinks company Britvic appointed content interaction and transaction company mirada to drive its mobile marketing and promotional activity, while children’s charity Save The Children tasked Incentivated with handling the mobile response element of a text-based appeal to put pressure on decision-makers to do everything in their power to end the violence in Gaza. The appeal generated 115,000 responses in three days.
Elsewhere, the Mobile Marketing Association appointed Mike Wehrs to the role of President and Chief executive, replacing the indefatigable Laura Marriott. Vodafone revealed that it had successfully trialled an evolution of mobile broadband technology, achieving peak data download rates of up to 16Mbps. The high speed data connection was achieved during field trials of HSPA+ 64QAM technology on Vodafone Spain’s network. And interactive communications company Oxygen8 Communications and mobile SMS ad firm Mobiya announced a strategic international partnership to deliver classified ads to consumers via their mobile phones.
And finally, premium-rate charged telecoms services regulator PhonepayPlus, issued a statement on mobile phone-paid services, outlining new measures to protect the public from a range of practices in the mobile premium content market which are causing complaints and undermining consumers' trust. In response, the Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF) said it was “not convinced” that the new regulations achieve anything that wasn’t possible under the previous Code of Practice.
That’s all for now. Stay tuned for all the news throughout February, and if you haven’t done so yet, please take a couple of minutes to complete our survey. Everyone who completes the survey goes into a draw for an ultra-portable LCD projector from Hitachi.

David Murphy
Editor

Survey Time

If you haven’t already done so, please take a couple of minutes to take our short, 2-minute (if that) survey and put yourself in with the chance of winning a fabulous LCD projector worth £700, courtesy of Hitachi.
There are just seven short questions about how often you visit the site, how long you stay for and what type of business you work in, all of which will help us get a better picture of who our readers are.
We also need your email address to enter into the prize draw, but rest assured, we won’t be passing that on to anyone, or using it ourselves, for anything other than picking the winner. If you’ve already completed the survey, thanks!

David Murphy
Editor

How to Lose Friends and Influence People

Let me start this rant by saying that I have a lot of time for Turkcell. The operator is a regular speaker on the conference circuit, and whoever they put forward, they always seem to talk sense. For a mobile operator, they seem quite innovative, and that’s not an adjective you can use in conjunction with the words ‘mobile operator’ too often.
So it’s no real surprise to hear Turkcell celebrating the success of its Tone & Win ad platform (see story below), based on Ringback Tones. Now Ringback Tones are funny things. They have not taken off in the UK, but in Asia, they are huge, accounting for around 50% of mobile content revenues in some markets. The concept is simple. You buy a ringtone, but rather than using it as the ringing tone that you hear when your phone rings, it’s actually what someone calling you hears while they are waiting for you to answer the call. It’s no real surprise that they are so popular. For a teenager, what cooler way could there be to show the world what great taste in music you have by treating/subjecting callers to a snippet of one of your favourite songs every time they call?
This, I can understand, and could probably even cope with. But I do have a problem with Ringback Tone services based on ad jingles, and Turkcell is not alone in providing them. Vodafone, if my memory serves me correctly, have one running somewhere.
The problem is this. If I like an ad jingle so much that I want to pay money for it and put it on my phone so I can listen to it whenever I want, that’s fair enough. But I think it’s a slightly different proposition to accept an ad jingle in return for free texts or talk time and then make my friends listen to it every time they call me. I thought the whole point about mobile was that it’s supposed to be opt in. Who’s opted in here? Ironically, the only person who doesn’t have to listen to the ad.
On the Tone & Win blog, it says: ‘Callers listen to advertisements from mobile phones and win with Turkcell’s Tone & Win’. What do they win exactly? It’s their friend who gets the free texts and talk time, they just get to listen to an ad they didn’t ask for.
I’ve used the words ‘ad jingle’ a few times. Now I could be wrong. It could be a really cool piece of music that is “brought to you by Coca Cola” or something similar. I have been trying all morning to find someone at Turkcell or their PR firm who can enlighten me on this point, so far, without success. But whatever it is, given the limited amount of time to play with before the person being called answers the phone, I think it’s safe to assume that the branding must be pretty quick and up front.
Perhaps I’m making a fuss over nothing here. After all, the Turkcell service has been shortlisted for a GSMA Global Mobile Award, so the judges obviously like it. But I can’t help thinking that when the person who has to listen to the ad is not the one who benefits from it, or who opted in to it, something’s not quite right. However much the advertisers, and the operators, like it.

David Murphy
Editor

Answer a Few Questions, Win a Projector

We are increasingly being asked by companies for more information about the people who read Mobile Marketing Magazine. So over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be running a short survey. We tried this once before and the results were enlightening, but the numbers too low to have any real value. So this time round, we have managed to secure a beautiful, ultra-portable projector, courtesy of those nice people at Hitachi. To paraphrase the Arctic Monkeys, I bet you look good in the board room. Actually, we had nothing to do with securing it, credit for that must go to David Hobbs, possibly the world’s greatest living PR man. (Steady on – Ed).
Anyway, the projector in question is the CPX4, and it’s designed to deliver convenience and performance in business environments such as meetings and presentations, it says here. It also comes with the additional convenience of Hitachi's new Quick Connection software. This removes a key frustration of many business users by ensuring that the PC can be quickly and easily connected to PCs via wired or wireless networks.
Now this little beauty could be yours, completely free of any financial consideration. All we need you to do is answer seven quick questions and give us your email address when you see the survey pop up over the next couple of weeks. You only need to do it once. If it pops up again after you’ve done it, just click the ‘Never’ button and that should do the trick.
In return, you may win this lovely little projector, we get to find out a bit more about you, and when potential advertisers ask us about the profile of our readership, we can give them a slightly more scientific answer than the current: “anyone with an interest in mobile”. And it goes without saying, of course, that the only thing we will do with your email address is use it for the prize draw. Your details will not be passed on to any other company, and once the draw has been made, they will be discarded.
Do we have a deal? We sincerely hope so. Keep a look out for the survey, and please take two minutes to fill it in if you can. And if you want to find out a little bit more about the projector, there’s more information here.

David Murphy
Editor

We are the Greatest

Sitting where I sit, you see an awful lot of press releases from companies and their PR agencies. And I don’t know if it’s these tough economic times that are leading the people who write them to become ever more desperate, but the hyperbole seems to be reaching previously unheard-of levels.
If I hear one more company telling me they are “the world’s leading” messaging company/mobile marketing agency/supplier of behavioural targeting solutions, or that they are “the global leader” in their chosen field, I won’t be responsible for my actions. Just tell us what you do folks, and stop bragging. In most cases, with little or no justification.
It’s not just the press releases either. At this time of year, anyone who is anyone in mobile is making plans to attend Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, either as an exhibitor, or just an interested spectator/networker. As a result, anyone trying to cover what’s going on in the industry is inundated, and I do mean inundated, with requests to meet some of these companies during the show. The process starts in December and builds to a frenzy during January. The most amusing pitches are the ones that arrive a couple of days before the show, asking if you’ve made any plans yet.
I’m treading cautiously this year. Last year, I agreed to seven or eight briefings on each of the two days I was there, leaving myself with virtually no time to do my own thing and dig out some of the more interesting, quirky stories. Worse still, having been pitched and agreed to meet these firms, when I got to their stand, half of them greeted me with a cheery: “What did you want to talk to us about?” “I’ve no idea”, I would answer. “Your PR told me you had some really interesting stuff going on, maybe you could tell me about that?”
At which point, more often than not, I found out that there was nothing particularly new to talk about, but that it was always good to put a face to a name, or some other such inanity.
I’m not making that mistake twice. This year, I’ve composed a standard ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you’ type of reply which no doubt some of you reading this have been on the end of.
With this in mind, I have at least been impressed with the approach of two PRs this year, one of whom wrote to me to tell me that he had loads of clients going to the show, but that most of them would be of no interest to me as they dealt in network infrastructure and network quality testing probes and other stuff that we only write about when there’s really nothing else to write about. This made me much more predisposed to give more consideration to the two clients he thought I might be interested in meeting.
The other, perhaps slightly naïve approach, came from a PR who told me that her client “does not have a particular announcement at the show, however, I wanted to reach out in case you'd like to have a face to face meeting with a company executive and discuss some trends in the mobile space or in payments, etc.”
But I admired her honesty nonetheless, and told her so when I wrote back to decline the offer.
If you are at the show this year, say Hello if you bump into me. I’ll be the walking billboard wearing the magazine’s URL on an extra large T-shirt, if the marketing budget can stretch to it again. But don’t keep me talking too long - I’ll probably be on my way to a briefing.

David Murphy
Editor

What You (may have) Missed - Part 38

A slightly different round-up for you this month, a day early, and this time round, we’re looking at the key events of the past year in the mobile marketing world.
January kicked off with some good stats and some bad stats. The good ones came from Acision, which released figures showing that global SMS traffic over the 2007/2008 New Year period had increased by 30% compared with the same period the previous year, as no less than 43 billion text messages were sent by people to each other to wish them a Happy New Year.
The bad ones came from Pitney Bowes Group 1 Software, which released a report that revealed that churn within the mobile sector had risen from 33.4% in 2005 to 38.6% in 2007. That’s a stat that would keep anyone in charge of a mobile network awake at night, and we wonder whether things will show any sign of improvement when the figures for 2008 are out.
Perhaps they will if SNAPin Software secures more contract like the one it announced in February; a global deal with Vodafone Group to deploy its SelfService software as part of a global initiative to increase customer satisfaction, and grow customer loyalty.
Another significant announcement in February came from ROK, which revealed that Cadbury Creme Egg, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment’s ‘24’ and Codemasters were among the first advertisers on its FreeBe TV service, a sure sign that mainstream brands were starting to embrace the mobile channel.
Talking of embraces, in March, mobile and online flirting service Flirtomatic revealed that the virtual engagement ring promotion it had run at the end of February had generated 14,278 sales of virtual rings at a cost of around 40 pence each.
Meanwhile, Bango released statistics showing a shift in mobile web traffic, from the mature mobile markets of Europe and the US to the developing markets of China and India. According to the stats, the top six countries accessing the mobile web via Bango in January 2008 were the UK, India, the US, South Africa, Indonesia and China, with China rising from 19th position six months ago.
April was a busy month, as the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) published its global Mobile Advertising Guidelines, which were designed to encourage the uptake of mobile advertising by brands worldwide, while enhancing and protecting the customer’s experience.
In the same month, ad-funded mobile network Blyk revealed that it had signed up its 100,000th member, and Refresh Mobile unveiled Mippin Maker, an entirely free service that creates a perfectly-rendered mobile edition of a publisher’s website on the fly from an RSS feed.
In May, Nielsen Mobile published research showing that 44% of UK mobile phone subscribers belong to an online social network, and that of these, 25% use their mobile phone for social networking-related activities. And Vodafone agreed to pay €31.5 million (£30.4 million) to acquire Zyb, the Danish company that operates a social networking and online management tool enabling mobile phone users to back-up and share their handsets’ contact and calendar information online.
There was only one bit of news catching the public’s attention in June – the long-awaited launch of the iPhone 3G. Elsewhere, Blyk announced plans to launch services in Germany, Spain and Belgium in 2009, having already earmarked a launch in the Netherlands.
In July, Apple revealed that the iPhone 3G had clocked up sales of 1 million handset over the launch weekend, across 21 countries, and that iPhone and iPod Touch users had downloaded more than 10 million applications from the Apple App Store within a week of its launch.
Still with the iPhone, AdMob published figures showing that its iPhone network had served 51.8 million ads worldwide in June, a 32% increase on the 39.1 million ads served in May. And the European Commission revealed that it would begin working on measures to reduce the cost of sending and receiving text messages, and surfing the mobile web, while abroad, saying that calls on the industry for self-regulation and voluntary reductions of roaming prices for text messages had not been answered.
August saw O2 UK partner with Sony BMG Music Entertainment UK to launch ‘My Play’, the first operator-supported, major label mobile music store, available exclusively through O2 Active, and powered by Momac’s multimedia publishing platform GoMedia. In the same month, Vodafone UK unveiled ‘Vodafone Music’, which enables Vodafone customers to discover and buy music anytime and anyplace.
And idle screen media company Celltick launched a mobile media service over China Unicom's network in time for the Olympics. The service provided official Olympics-related content directly from Xinhua News, the official news agency in China, including the latest news, results and anecdotes, accompanied by topical games and applications.
The big news in September was the announcement of the launch date for the first Android OS-based phone, the ‘T-Mobile G1 With Google’. Also significant was the appointment of the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) to promote mobile as an advertising channel. We should find out during 2009 what sort of an impact the IAB is having.
In October, mobile agency RingRing Media announced the launch of I’AM, which it described as the mobile industry’s first mobile advertising network optimisation platform that connects publishers to the largest possible pool of advertisers. And the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) revealed that Incentivated, Steak and 20:20 London had been shortlisted for the Mobile Marketing award in the 2008 DMA Awards. (Incentivated would pick up the award.)
In November, digital agency Graphico revealed that it was using on-pack and on-shelf QR codes for Pepsi to drive consumers to a dedicated microsite it had created. There was more good news for the fledgling technology as directory company Yell announced that it was to trial QR Codes on the front covers of two editions of its Yellow Pages directories. In this case, the codes will take consumers to local cinema and weather information via the mobile web.
adidas took the award for Overall Excellence in the Mobile Marketing Association’s 2008 Awards. And independent mobile advertising agency RingRing Media revealed that it had booked over $1 million (£685,000) of search and display mobile advertising for its clients, since its launch in June.
The year ended with mobile social network it’smy.com pledging its support for the embattled US automotive industry with 100 million free mobile web page impressions for brand advertising with banners. The social campaign will be displayed between January and March 2009 on the mobile web for customers of all carriers in the US.
Also in December, Skyfire announced the launch of its mobile browser of the same name in the UK, claiming that the browser is “the only mobile browser that makes browsing on a mobile phone just like browsing on a PC”.
And finally, the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) revealed that its membership numbers had risen by over 40% during 2008.
A nice, upbeat note on which to end the year. Let’s hope the MMA continues its good work in 2009, and that everyone in the mobile marketing business enjoys a successful year. Here at Mobile Marketing Magazine, we’ll do our best to keep you fully updated on what everyone's up to, with normal service resuming on Friday.
We wish all our readers a happy and prosperous 2009.

David Murphy
Editor

Beyond Compare

I love it when you get a mobile application that does exactly what it says on the tin. Take a bow Sccope, the mobile price comparison service which launched in beta a couple of months ago and is now rolling out in earnest.
The idea is a simple one. You’re on the high street, you see something you’re interested in buying, but you just wonder if the price you’re seeing it at is the best you’re likely to find it for. So you send a simple text with the name of the product to a Shortcode, and a minute or two later, you get a return text telling you the price of the product at selected, household-name retailers.
There are three reasons I like Sccope so much. Firstly, texts are charged at the standard network operator rate, so you’re not paying an arm and a leg for the privilege. I called Sccope’s PR to ask if this means that you could use texts from your text bundle to use the service, and they said that depends on the operator; some allow texts to Shortcodes within text bundles, others charge for them separately. But at least Sccope is not making a killing on the exercise. In fact, I rang my network, 3, and they said texts to the Sccope Shortcode would cost 10p each. They could not confirm how much it would cost me to receive the return texts, but the PR could: nothing.
The second thing I like about it is that it is genuinely useful. Last night, I spent maybe half an hour looking at half a dozen websites comparing prices on various things on my kids’ Christmas wish-list so my wife would know whether to buy them on a shopping trip today, or get them online later. Sccope could have done the job in minutes. As could other price comparison sites, for sure, but this one also works when you’re in the shop, rather than in front of your PC.
The third good thing about Sccope is that it’s fast. Trialling the system today, it returned results in less than a minute, so you’re not left mooching round the shop while you get your answer.
Most of all, though, what I like about Sccope is that it works. I’ve lost count of the times when I’ve heard news of a new mobile service and tried it out, only to find that it doesn’t live up to the promise, or doesn't actually work at all.
Based on a quick trial today, this one does, and it’s perhaps no surprise to learn that the company behind Sccope, Cogenta, supplies real-time pricing intelligence to retailers. Sccope seems to have come out of the realisation that the company could turn the thing on its head and use the same information to benefit consumers. It also benefits the company’s retail clients, of course, by driving traffic into their stores when the consumer sees the results of the price comparison. I for one will be putting the Sccope Shortcode in my phone's Contacts book.

David Murphy
Editor

What You (may have) Missed - Part 37

It’s December already and Christmas, which seemed so far off just a few weeks back, is almost upon us, assuming it’s not cancelled. So what’s been floating the mobile marketing world’s boat these past few weeks?
Well, QR Codes were in the news, as two big brands got behind the technology. First, Pepsi UK revealed that is was introducing on-pack and on-shelf QR codes as a gateway to a dedicated microsite created by Graphico. Then directory company Yell announced that it is to trial QR Codes on the front covers of two editions of its Yellow Pages directories. In this case, the codes will take consumers to local cinema and weather information via the mobile web. Personally, I’m all for it, but it will be interesting to see how many consumers whose handsets don’t have code readers pre-installed can be bothered to download one. Elsewhere on the technology front, mobile ticketing company Mobiqa struck a deal with US firm ClicknPrint Tickets that will bring mobile ticketing to US theatres, arenas, theme parks, festivals, air shows, museums and sporting events. And 10 mobile search and advertising companies announced that they were forming a working group to drive the metaTXT standard. metaTXT is described as the world's first mobile search engine optimisation (SEO) standard, that will enable search engines to index mobile sites at ease, regardless of their technology domains (m.name.com, .mobi etc.) 
In another move aimed at making mobile sites easier to get to, mobile application portal GetJar unveiled a Visual Bookmark service for WAP publishers. Visual Bookmarks are tiny applications that sit on the phone’s home screen and, when launched, open a specific mobile web page using the phone’s built-in browser, saving the user the trouble of entering the address manually, or searching through their Bookmarks list.
It was a busy month for new launches. Paragon Software Group, released its Handy Weather application for Java-based mobiles. The program enables mobile users to access wireless weather forecasts from anywhere in the world on their mobile device. Yahoo! bounced back from Jerry Yang’s decision to step down as CEO with the UK launch of Yahoo! oneSearch with voice, which enables mobile users to initiate searches using their voice.
Start-up Jeanie Media launched its branded mobile search service in partnership with Itchy City, the youth-orientated publisher of local city guides. Jeanie offers consumer and media brands the opportunity to create a customised mobile search channel that provides listings that are relevant to the brand’s target audience. Another start-up, GotYour, announced the launch of ‘GotYourPriceCheck’, a local SMS price comparison service for the UK. Shoppers text the word PRICE, plus the make and model of the item they want, along with a location, to a Shortcode and within 60 seconds, they will receive an SMS response, containing two local stores with the cheapest retail prices, plus the best web price. And WIN plc revealed that it had introduced voice capability on premium rate Shortcode numbers. The service enables service and marketing companies to use, for the first time, a single, memorable five digit number to handle both incoming voice and data calls on premium rate services.
adidas took the award for Overall Excellence in the Mobile Marketing Association’s 2008 awards.  Category winners included Incentivated for its work for Jaguar Cars in the US, AKQA for its Nike PHOTOiD campaign, and BBH for its Lynx mobile tools. Another company celebrating awards success was Clickatell, which picked up four awards, three of them for its Clickatell Messaging Gateway solution, at the seventh annual Mobile Star Awards. 
On the mobile advertising front, Bango announced a partnership with with e-marketing consultancy Adversitement to enable digital marketers to access rich PC and mobile web metrics through one console. The solution combines Omniture's SiteCatalyst web metrics tool and Bango Analytics.
Satellite broadcaster – well that’s where it started life anyway - BSkyB - revealed that it had begun selling advertising around its mobile content assets, enabling brands to be seen around Sky’s mobile properties, including ‘Sky Sports’, ‘Sky News’ and the ‘Football 365’ mobile portfolio. And independent mobile advertising agency RingRing Media revealed that it had booked over $1 million (£630,000) of search and display mobile advertising for its clients, since its launch in June. Forget all those projections about the value of the mobile advertising marketing in 2011, judging by these figures, it’s alive and kicking, and in pretty rude health today. 
That’s the last one of these for 2008. There’s lots more to report on before the year’s out, however, so check back in regularly to stay ahead of the game. And thanks for your support throughout the year.

David Murphy
Editor

Wise Council

I’m at a Media Roundtable event organised by the UK arm of the Mobile Marketing Association, where Alex Meisl, co-Chair of the recently-launched UK Council, has just outlined the Council’s priorities over the next 12 months. These fall into three areas: networking, education and regulation.
I was impressed by what Meisl had to stay. The networking initiative, which will be led by fellow co-Chair Scott Seaborn, will concentrate on organising networking events, one per quarter, targeting, in Meisl’s words: “decision makers who will cause the industry to grow”. So what the MMA is doing, quite simply, is introducing client-side marketers to the concept of mobile marketing in an informal environment. Hardly rocket science, but just what the industry needs if it is to move forward.
This initiative segues neatly into the second focus area: education. Here, the UK Council has taken the somewhat brave decision to say that on the whole, the agency world is now pretty much au fait with what mobile marketing is and does. So it is concentrating its efforts, again, on client-side marketers. Meisl cited a study showing that only 8% of Fortune 500 companies had a mobile strategy, as evidence that there is considerable potential to educate client-side marketers in this respect.
To this end, then, the UK Council will organise a series of workshops, one a month, targeted at industry verticals, so one for FMCG, one for automotive, one for retail and so on. These will expose marketers working in those sectors to mobile marketing campaigns, showing how mobile has been and could be used in their sector.
Again, I think this is an excellent idea, with two caveats. The first is the methods employed to get the marketers to turn up. My experience of mobile conferences is that client-side representation is often pretty thin. In this respect, the fact that the MMA’s workshops will be free should help. Meisl also says that for larger corporations, the workshops will come to them.
The second is this assumption that the ad-world now gets mobile. Meisl inferred that the decision to target marketers exclusively through these workshops had not been an easy one, and it seems to me a dangerous assumption to make. But Meisl argued that if the MMA can enthuse client-side marketers, they will then go back to the brands and demand that it is included in their marketing plans.
I hope he’s right, and I do applaud the courage of the UK Council’s strategy to go to the people who make the final decisions and control the purse-strings.

David Murphy
Editor

What You (may have) Missed - Part 36

So here we are with our monthly round-up of all that’s been happening in the world of mobile marketing these past few weeks. This month’s round-up is a somewhat special one, as we prepare to embark on our fourth year of reporting on the mobile marketing business. We’d like to offer a heartfelt thanks to all those readers who have been with us since day one, and indeed to all those who haven’t, but who have discovered us at some point over the past three years. A big thank you, too, to all our advertisers, past, present and future, without whose support we couldn’t continue doing what we do.
There wasn’t an awful lot of advertising activity, either on the site, or in the mobile channel, when we launched in earnest on 31 October 2005, but that all seems a long time ago now. Three years on, in October 2008, mobile advertising was, once again, at the heart of things. Mobile ad network AdMob reported that worldwide ad requests on its network during September 08 were 0.8% down on the previous month at 5.1 billion, while ads served increased 26% to 4.5 billion. The company also revealed  that it had secured an additional $15.7 million (£9.6 million) funding.
3 UK selected 4th Screen and Mobix Interactive to run its ad-supported mobile video service, while Qualcomm and Amobee Media Systems revealed that they are working together to offer mobile advertising on Qualcomm’s ‘Plaza’ widget platform. Meanwhile in Turkey, ROK Entertainment Group and Turkish IT company Basari announced that the Geniem Midlogic On-Device Portal (ODP) content-delivery application is being installed on Samsung handsets in Turkey.
Gofresh announced the commercial launch of itsmy.biz, which the company claims is the largest social advertising network in the mobile space, with a reach of 4 million mobile Internet users. The rich media-enabled network focuses on three mobile advertising formats: animated full colour banners; mobile site and content branding; and mobile video and TV.
Mobile agency RingRing Media announced the official launch of I’AM, which it says is the mobile industry’s first mobile advertising network optimisation platform that connects publishers to the largest possible pool of advertisers. RingRing also revealed that mobile social networking company Moblr was using I’AM, to improve the user experience. And Vodafone and Visa reported an enthusiastic response from consumers to a mobile advertising campaign trial testing customer reaction and acceptance to a promotional ‘Welcome’ message sent to them while they were away from their home country.
For those still unsure whether mobile advertising, and indeed mobile marketing, is for them, help was on hand from the Direct Marketing Association’s (DMA) Mobile Marketing Council, which released a series of Mobile Marketing Help Notes aimed at guiding businesses through the options available to them.
The DMA also revealed that Incentivated, Steak and 20:20 London had been shortlisted for the Mobile Marketing award in the 2008 DMA Awards. The MMA also unveiled the finalists for its Fourth Annual Global Mobile Marketing Awards, which will be presented later this month, while at the BT Digital Music Awards 2008, mobile agency Que Pasa took the plaudits for its Red Stripe Camden Crawl campaign, which picked up the award for Best Mobile Campaign.
There was a lot of activity in Russia for some reason. Consumers there got their first chance to get their hands on the iPhone 3G as Mobile TeleSystems (MTS), the largest mobile phone operator in Russia and the CIS, launched the device in the country. A couple of weeks later, MTS was in the news again as it announced a strategic partnership with Vodafone to provide customers with communications services and to collaborate jointly on future technological developments.
And mobile communications and commerce enabler Netsize announced the expansion of its global mPayment mobile transaction and billing service, with the coverage of all 25 nationwide and regional mobile network operators in Russia. Using Netsize mPayment, international content providers can now reach and bill more than 165 million subscribers in Russia.
Also in the news, as ever, was the iPhone, with content and applications providers queuing up to make their stuff available on the iconic device. Applications developer Coolgorilla launched a London Travel Guide for the iPhone, while ROK Comics announced the launch of the ROK Comics application for the iPhone. Devicescape released an iPhone/iPod Touch version of its easy wi-fi application, while Paragon Software Group released ‘The Talking English Dictionary’ for the iPhone and iPod touch.
On the campaign front, mobile agency Candyspace launched a bespoke, immersive, multi-platform mobile game as part of the promotional push to launch the latest DVD box set of hit US franchise ‘CSI’ and to promote a price promotion across the entire CSI DVD range. Tanla Mobile was selected by The Royal British Legion to run the mobile phone element of its 2008 Poppy Appeal. Tanla is providing a Poppy Download service, enabling members of the public to make a donation to the Appeal using their mobile, and in return, receive a poppy for their mobile phone wallpaper.
Mobile marketing firm Phonevalley rolled out a mobile campaign for PUMA around the Shanghai Grand Prix. The campaign was designed to drive traffic to a dedicated mobile Internet site. Other brands launching mobile sites were skiing website Myslopes.com, which launched what it claims is the first European mobile skiing website, at: M.myslopes.com. And cancer research charity Cancer Research UK, which developed its first mobile site to promote its breast cancer awareness campaign: ‘It’s a girl thing’. The site was created by Flix Marketing.
And finally, the Mobile Data Association (MDA) published its quarterly research findings for UK mobile phone activity from July - September 2008. The figures revealed that Britons sending 6.58 billion texts in Q3 2008, a 38% increase on the Q3 2007 figure of 4.8 billion. They also sent 45.36 million MMS messages, a 20% increase on the Q3 07 figure of 37.83 million.
Conclusive proof, if any were needed, that love affair between people and their mobiles is as strong as ever. Long may it continue.

David Murphy
Editor

Discover Ability

Another meeting at the Smartphone Show yesterday was with Brandon Mensinga, Director, Qix at Zi Corporation. He was there to demo the Qix application to me. This is an on-device ‘Discoverability’ client sold to OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers aka handset makers), with server packages sold to network operators.
The idea behind Qix is to improve the discoverability and usability of mobile content, whether it resides on the phone or not. Mensinga says people often misunderstand what Qix is, and to be honest, that’s no real surprise, because it does take a few minutes to get your head round. Once you do, however, you realise it’s really quite clever.
You’ll only get Qix if it is pre-installed on a handset from a specific operator. So far, Qix is only available with one operator, Telus in Canada, on a Motorola and a HTC handset, with other handsets to follow later this year and early next. On the operator front, the only one Mensinga could mention by name was T-Mobile, which is trialling the software, but discussions are ongoing with others too.
To use Qix, you type in the first few letters of the content you’re looking for using the phone’s keypad. This could be the name of someone in your Contacts book, a song stored on the phone, or some content out on the mobile web or on the operator’s portal. The contents of the operator’s portal are pre-cached and stored on the handset, so in this respect, it functions in a similar way to an on-device portal. The content is upgraded by the phone polling the operator’s server, at a frequency set by the operator, so maybe once a day, for example. Mensinga was keen to stress that Qix is not mobile search, so it does not, and is not intended to, work in real-time.
When you search for something on the phone, the results are brought up in a particular order. This order can be customised, either by the handset maker or the operator, but in the example demonstrated to me, items one and two in the search results were the two items most frequently selected after a search has been carried out, no matter what they are. So one could be a contact, two could be a song, for example.
Items three and four were the contacts most often selected after a search. Item five was an ad. Item six was a ‘Discovery Folder’, so pre-cached content from the operator’s portal. So if you search on ‘Sport’, for instance, it will return all the sports content that was available on the portal the last time the pre-cached version on the phone was updated. And item seven was a link to the portal, where you can get up-to-the-minute information. After that, you get all the matching Contacts, followed by all the matching music files and so on.
“It is really all about usability and discoverability,” Mensinga told me. “We are not trying to replace mobile search or on-device portals or anything else. “We are trying to solve device complexity and reduce the number of key-presses you need to get to stuff and discover the different layers of contact on your phone.”
The real beauty of Qix, apart from the intelligence it applies to sorting and ranking different kinds of content, is the fact that you don’t need to fire up an application to use it. Just tap on the phone’s keypad to start searching. Discoverability is a big issue, not only for online mobile content, but also for content and applications that reside on the phone. Handset makers and network operators and mobile application developers have tried various ways to solve it, such as user customisation of the phone’s set-up, the functions that can be assigned to soft keys, and of course, on-device portals. Qix is another neat solution to the problem.

David Murphy
Editor

Walking Miracle

I’m spending the afternoon at the Symbian Smartphone Show, where you’re usually guaranteed to see some cool mobile applications. So far, the coolest one I’ve found, by some distance, is TapRoot Systems’  Walking Hotspot.
The concept is simple. Take a wi-fi-enabled Windows Mobile or Symbian S60 Smartphone and a mobile data plan, download the Walking Hotspot application, then next time you need to get online with your laptop and you’re nowhere near a wi-fi hotspot, fire up the app on your phone and it creates your very own hotspot for you, and your friends, to connect to.
It’s really just the same principle as connecting your phone to your laptop via USB or Bluetooth and using it as a modem, but the idea of carrying your own wi-fi hotspot around in your pocket is, to my mind at least, genius. Sure, if you have a data card or USB dongle, you could argue it's unnecessary, but a one-off fee of £15 is a small price to pay for the peace of mind of knowing there's another way to get online when you're out of wi-fi coverage and your data card has no signal. Especially if your data card and your phone's data plan are with different networks. I often find I am unable to connect on my Vodafone data card, while my phone is pulling in a strong signal from 3.
The only flaw I can see is that some networks’ flat-rate data tariffs come with fair usage policies that expressly prohibit the use of the phone as a modem in conjunction with a laptop. Whether the network can tell the difference between surfing the web on the phone or using it as a means to surf on a laptop, for billing purposes, is, however, a moot point.
In any event, TapRoot’s VP, Business Development, Sean O’Leary, told me that when the company told mobile operators of its plans, none raised any objections. Initially, he explained, the company tried to sell the product as a white-label offering to mobile operators, pitching it as another way for them to sell mobile broadband data packages. When none of the operators went for it, the company changed tack and decided to market it direct to consumers. Who said mobile operators didn’t know a good idea when they saw one?
“The operators wanted us to validate the solution, and this is what we are now doing,” O’Leary told me.
Since the launch of the beta version in April this year, the company has signed up “thousands” of satisfied users in the US. Now, it is making Walking Hotspot available worldwide. One other change to the original business model is the introduction of a one-time purchase pricing option. Users can either pay a monthly subscription of $6.99 (£4), or a one-off fee of $24.99 (around £15) for the lifetime of the phone they are using it with.
O’Leary demoed the solution to me and it worked perfectly. After firing the application up on his phone, I selected it on my laptop as the wireless network I wanted to use. He then gave me permission to do so on the phone and as I surfed around the web, the amount of data I had consumed was displayed on the phone.
TapRoot plans to sell the application via online and bricks and mortar retailers. I’m already putting it on my Christmas list. If I can wait that long.

David Murphy
Editor

ps
I should also have said that up to five people can connect to the Walking Hotspot at the same time. Now that really is social networking.

Flat Rate. What Flat Rate?

Sorry, I realise two Ed’s Blurbs in one night risks turning this into a proper blog, but it’s funny sometimes how things converge.
At the AIME event earlier, I chatted with mobile analyst Nick Lane, and said to him that I liked the format of the evening. He was less impressed, saying that he thought he’d heard everything said by everyone on the panel several times before.
Between us, we sort of agreed that part of the reason for this was that you have a lot of people all thinking that there is real money to be made from mobile marketing, but failing, so far, to have worked out how to do it yet. So you get lots of talking shops where everyone tries to work out what needs to be done. And no-one seems to have the answer.
So then I have a couple of drinks, talk to a couple of people, and then head home. And on the train on the way home, I bump into my friend Michael. And we get talking about what we’ve been doing this evening, and Michael shows a real interest. And he says to me:
“I like the idea of getting stuff on my mobile, but the screen is too small and I would just want the headline and a phone number I could ring to get the rest of the story, but even then, I would be worried about what it would cost me.”
So I show him the mobile version of Mobile Marketing Magazine, on which you get the headline and the first paragraph, and then click through if you want the full story.
“Sounds great,” he says. “But how much does that cost you?”
When I tell him it’s only £5 a month, he is genuinely shocked. When I tell him he could probably get a similar deal from his own operator, he is even more shocked. In fact, his attitude towards using the mobile web is similar to my own towards downloading my emails to my phone when I’m abroad. I have no idea what it might cost me, so I don’t do it. Now you can argue that I should know. But surely, that’s the point. If it won’t cost me and arm and a leg, why doesn’t my network (3, by the way, who in most other respects, I find excellent), tell me?
When I go on to share with him my view that mobile network operators are dinosaurs who are being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century, by smaller, smarter companies (discuss), he is even more amazed. So yes, mobile operators, the advertising and the branding are working. But only on a superficial level. He finds it hard to believe you’re not as cool as he thinks you are. But he wouldn’t browse the mobile web if you paid him. Or, more to the point, if you convinced him that he wouldn’t have to pay through the nose for it.
For me, the message is clear. Offering flat-rate data plans is not enough. The operators need to tell people about them. Really tell them. Put serious marketing money behind it. I realise in writing this that one or two of the mobile operators may argue that they have done exactly this. But based on my conversation tonight with the man on the Clapham Omnibus, or the man on the 9.54 from Waterloo at least, the message is not getting through.

David Murphy
Editor

The Right Message

I’m at an early-evening seminar organised by AIME (Association for Interactive Media & Entertainment). It’s a regular event that I’ve not had the opportunity to attend before, and it's a bit like an episode of Question Time where every question is about mobile marketing. Naturally, that’s not a concept I have a problem with.
We’re only two questions in, but already, some interesting points have emerged. The first related to the likely impact of the credit crunch on the nascent mobile marketing business. While there was one dissenting voice, the consensus seemed to be that mobile was in a better position than it might at first appear. Scott Seaborn, Head of Mobile Technologies at Ogilvy Group, noted that some of the Group’s clients, such as BP and Fanta, have budgets set aside for innovation. He noted too that when someone is cutting something back, “it makes sense to cut away the stuff that’s dead and dying, and let the good new stuff come through. We can’t stop learning how to use this channel.”
Mark Brill, Mobile Council Representative from the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), noted that when times are tough, brands tend to use direct media. And Sally Weatherall, MD of New Media at event sponsor WIN, noted that in a downturn, brands are likely to place their funding more intelligently. She also cited a Gillette campaign in which 98% of the people who downloaded a mobile coupon went on to redeem it, as evidence as the power of mobile marketing done well. 
The second question began by talking about data, but turned into a discussion of what works on mobile. Here, the consensus was that it’s all about the consumer, and that it doesn’t necessarily need to be incredibly clever or incredibly convoluted. When AIME Director of Communications, Andrew Darling, asked the panel when mobile was going to get away from banners and SMS, Seaborn jumped in, saying:
“I moved right away and I’ve come all the way back. Mobile has been technology-led for too long. It needs to be consumer-led.”
He received support in this view from Dan Rosen, Head of Mobile at AKQA, who noted how, with the advent of 3G, we were all going to be making video calls to each other Star Trek-style, and brands would be using video shortcodes with a vengeance.
“That didn’t happen,” said Rosen. “In fact, what you have is services like AQA (Any Question Answered), which I think has just answered its 10 millionth question. I don’t think video shortcodes have had that much use.”
I’ve no idea what the composition of the audience is, but whether its client-side marketers, or agency people trying to find out more about what mobile marketing is and can be, if they only take away these two messages: that mobile is a medium worth investing in; and that what you do on mobile doesn’t need to be rocket science, so long as it meets a consumer need or desire, that will be no bad thing.

David Murphy
Editor

Much Ado About Not Very Much

When I first saw the results of O2’s survey into major brands’ plans for spending on mobile marketing (see story below), I must admit I was a little sceptical. A 150% increase in any budget in the current climate looks slightly optimistic at first glance. Then I looked a little closer and thought again. The projection is over the next five years. Seen against that timeframe, a 150% increase hardly seems like something to shout about.
To put things in perspective, in 2002, online advertising in the UK amounted to £196.7 million, according to figures from the Internet Advertising Bureau. Take a 150% increase in that figure over five years and you end up with a figure of £491.75 million for 2007. In fact, online ad spend in the UK last year was £2.81 billion. Yes, billion. Or 1330% more than it was five years previously. The figures are so far out, I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve got my maths wrong; percentages were always a bit of a nightmare at school. But I don't think I have. 
Yes, you can argue that online has boomed over the last few years, as brands have finally ‘got’ the web and started to plough serious money into it. But isn’t that exactly the outcome that everyone in the mobile marketing business is working towards too? Seriously, if a 150% increase in already-small mobile marketing budgets over the next half decade is the best prognosis on the table, I think we might as well all shut up shop and head home.

David Murphy
Editor

VoIP Time

Just out of a meeting with Vincent Potier, MD of VoIP company Vonage. He’s a man with a couple of bees in his bonnet. The first is the somewhat negative perception of VoIP call quality.
“The media lump all VoIP services in one bucket,” he told me. “But there’s a big difference in quality between a peer-to-peer network like Skype and a service like ours, which is more akin to a regular landline experience.”
To prove the point, Potier is having a Vonage box sent round so I can try it for myself. For the moment, having called a friend who I know uses it, he confirms that call quality is indeed excellent. I suggested to Potier that perhaps the VoIP industry needs to come up with a better name for what it offers, perferably one that sounds less like something designed exclusively for geeks.
If your perception of VoIP is calls made over the web on a PC, then Vonage is a little different. You plug the Vonage adaptor into your modem or router and then your phone into the adaptor and make calls as you would on a regular landline.
Potier describes the Vonage offering as a “nomadic landline”, because if you take the Vonage box with you, you can plug it into your modem wherever you happen to find yourself and still retain the same number. So for example, your business contact with the central London phone number could actually be based in the Outer Hebrides for all you know.
Vonage customers can also have two or more numbers on the same phone. So, an American resident in the UK for example, could have a UK and a US number tied to a single Vonage box, enabling friends and family in the US to call on that number at local rates. The cost to set up a US ‘virtual number’ is £2.99 a month.
The other bee in Potier’s bonnet is call charges. He feels that the UK fixed line telecoms industry is rife with unfair practices, noting, for example, that BT quotes its prices exclusive of VAT, and rounds up call charges to the next 0.5p. When you apply the rounding up to the billions of calls made on BT lines, says Potier, it mounts up.
Vonage offers a range of price plans designed to enable consumers to pay only for calling the countries they need. A UK calling plan, for example, costs £5.99 per month including calls to all UK landlines, with calls to mobiles charged at 12 per minute anytime with per-second billing.  For an additional £1 per month, you can include the US and Canada, including landlines and mobiles. The reason mobiles are not included in the UK plan, according to Potier, is because the cost of mobile termination rates in Europe are “a killer”. For £18.99 a month you get calls to 45 countries, mainly landlines only, but with calls to mobiles included in the US, Canada, China, Hong Kong and Singapore.
The one sticking point from a mobile perspective comes with mobile broadband. You can use Vonage with a mobile dongle, says Potier, but it won’t work in all circumstances, and the set-up is not for the faint-hearted. That aside, however, in these credit-crunched times, Vonage looks worth a look.

David Murphy
Editor

People to See

We’ve had a busy but thought-provoking day today, meeting first, ex-Nokia stalwart Christian Lindholm, now a Director at design/user interface (and much more besides) company Fjord; and then Mark Curtis, who used to be at Fjord, and indeed is still on the board, but now runs mobile and online (mainly mobile) flirting (flirting not dating) service, Flirtomatic.
If like some, (me included, admittedly), you tend to be a bit sniffy about mobile social network/dating/flirting services, then you should make a special effort to check out the interview with Curtis, which will go up tomorrow (Thursday) afternoon. It’s a very candid piece in which he talks openly about some of the mistakes the company made and how it put them right, and in which he also explains, to my satisfaction at least, why sane, sensible people are happy to spend money on virtual gifts. It’s something I had never understood before today, but with the help of a cunning reference to hot dogs, Curtis made it almost make sense.
As for the interview with Lindholm, goodness knows when we’ll get the time to write that up. The man can do blue sky thinking in his sleep, and he had lots to say about Android, data roaming charges, and plenty more. When we get a spare three days, we’ll put it up. In the meantime, tune in tomorrow for all the latest news, and check out the Flirtomatic interview at 3pm.

David Murphy
Editor

Aggregate Lead

An interesting briefing just now, with not one company but two. At one end of the sofa, mobile social networking firm Moblr. The company has 160,000 registered users, but according to CEO Christophe Hocquet, is currently attracting around 600,000 unique users per month to its site, most of whom don’t register. There are no membership fees, in the absence of which, it has two revenue streams: virtual gifts that members can buy to give to each other. And advertising. Which is where RingRing Media, sitting at the other end of the sofa comes in.
RingRing launched in May and has just clocked up its 100 millionth ad impression. It’s a specialist mobile media planning and buying agency, and its trick is to aggregate the ad content from eight different ad networks, including AdMob, Decktrade and Admoda, though not, at this point, the ones that sell space on a CPM basis, such as Fourth Screen Media.
The ads from these networks are then placed on the mobile Internet properties of its publisher-side clients, which include Moblr, Taptu and Mobango. Around 40% of the revenue from the ads goes back to the originating ad network, with the remainder being split roughly 80/20 in the publisher’s favour.
Moblr boss Hocquet is already impressed with the revenue that RingRing is generating for the company.
“When we started out, we looked at Google, Yahoo!” etc., but they did not work for us,” he told me. “They don’t seem to understand that mobile is not just an extension of the web.”
RingRing Managing Director Ben Tatton-Brown concedes that virtually all the ads the company is placing are for mobile-centric companies like Jamba, Dada and mobile social networking services looking to drive traffic to their mobile offerings. But he believes those who constantly ask when the big mainstream brands will join the mobile party are missing the point.
“There is plenty of money being spent on mobile advertising,” he told me. “Our clients are spending between £10,000 and £400,000 a month. We are just focusing on where the opportunities are today, but come the day that Land Rover or other mainstream brands start spending money on mobile advertising, rest assured, we will be there.”
Using RingRing’s I’AM platform, says Tatton-Brown, mobile web publishers can sell all their advertising inventory, rather than the 20-50% he claims they currently sell. RingRing has also developed a solution for publishers who have an agreement in place with a mobile ad network to sell space on a CPM basis. This sets the CPM network as the default network to serve the ad if the required CPM is achieved, with RingRing’s aggregated network kicking in if not.
“Our theory is that you might as well make some money as no money,” he says.
It sounds sensible in theory, and from the noises Moblr’s Hocquet was making, RingRing’s publishers like what the company has to offer too.

David Murphy
Editor

What You (may have) Missed - Part 35

Even in a 30-day month, the news came thick and fast during September. The big news of the month was the announcement of the launch date for the first Android OS-based phone, the (un)memorably-named ‘T-Mobile G1 With Google’. Poor old HTC, who made the thing, don’t get a look in. It may not quite have set the world on fire in the way that Google et al might have liked, but the consensus seems to be that it’s not a bad start.
Another piece of news that could be just as significant, even if it didn’t grab quite as many headlines, was the appointment of the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) to promote mobile as an advertising channel. If it has half the success it has had in promoting the web, a lot of people in the mobile ad business should be very happy.
One thing everyone agrees is needed if brands are going to use mobile is statistics, and there were no shortage of those last month. Bango released figures showing that mobile web usage is on the increase in the US, to the point where it soon will surpass the level of traffic the UK. Bango also reported a corresponding rise in US WAP billing revenues.
A report from Portio Research suggested that 80% of the world’s population will be using a mobile phone by 2013. But they probably won’t be using it as much as they could, if WDSGlobal is to be believed. It commissioned a study that found that only 20% of a phone's services and features are used regularly, and that up to a quarter remain completely undiscovered.
Staying with stats, online and mobile dating service Flirtomatic revealed that it had signed up its 1 millionth user, while mobile music discovery firm Shazam was crowing about the fact that it had been used by 20 million customers to identify music tracks across the world. Separately, Shazam disclosed that its iPhone application had been downloaded by over 1.5 million people in the first six weeks of its availability on the Apple App Store. 
Elsewhere, the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) was busy, finding time to launch a Whitepaper on Mobile Search, another on Mobile Applications, and a set of guidelines on Bluetooth marketing.
Also busy was FuturLink, which unveiled Wimob 2.0, a free, web-to-mobile platform that enables consumers to transfer multimedia content from websites to their mobile phone via Bluetooth, infrared or USB, without paying network data charges. And 3-ple Media, which launched Mercury ViralTrack, which it says is the first solution to offer full viral tracking for image, audio and mobile video content that is passed between subscribers. 
The busiest mobile network by a long chalk was O2. It started the month by hailing its NFC (Near Field Communications) trial in London, which saw a Nokia phone used as a mobile wallet and oyster card, as a success. Not content with that, it then confirmed details for the launch of the Pay & Go version of the iPhone 3G, which went on sale on 16 September priced at £349.99 for the 8GB model and £399.99 for the 16GB model. Finally, it revealed that its customers in Scotland would soon be able to use their mobiles on the Glasgow underground system. Nice work.
As ever, there were deals aplenty. Mobile ad firm Amobee Media Systems signed a Global Framework Agreement with Vodafone. Perhaps not a massive surprise as Vodafone became a minority strategic investor in Amobee Media Systems at the end of 2007.
Mobile search company Medio Systems announced a partnership with mobile ad network AdMob, under which AdMob will deliver targeted mobile search ads to consumers, using Medio's mobile search service.
NVIDIA Corporation and Opera Software revealed that they are collaborating to bring "the full desktop web-browsing experience", including support for JavaScript, accelerated vector graphics, and video content, to Smartphones and mobile Internet devices. 
And mobile marketing firm 2ergo revealed that it had secured two major deals in the US. Proof, if any were needed that even a company from the frozen north can make it big in mobile. 2ergo may have satellite offices in London, Mexico City, Bogota, Buenos Aires and Arlington, Virginia, but I love the fact that Global Head Office remains in unloved, unglamorous Rawtenstall, just a few miles from where I grew up myself.   
On the campaign front, digital solutions agency Jigsaw launched a campaign for clothing retailer Topman, including in-store vouchering and redemption pods, plus mobile interactivity, to drive footfall for flagship stores. In the US, FunMobility announced that it was working with Access360Media, to create a mobile destination to build brand loyalty among fans of the Vans brand. And in Ireland, mobile payment solutions company Macalla announced the launch of permanent tsb's mobile banking solution, powered by the Macalla Platform. Mobile banking? Let’s hope they remembered to include a ‘Withdraw Everything Now’ option. 
That’s it for now. Stay tuned throughout October for all the latest news.

David Murphy
Editor

Good Connection

I’m at the ad:tech exhibition in London, fresh out of a briefing with lead generation company Clash-Media to tell me about its Txt Connect offering.
The company’s day job is generating leads for partner companies. It’s staffed by people from data generating companies such as DLG, Experian and IPT, so they should know what they’re doing.
It generates the leads by driving consumers to websites such as its prize draw site, www.ukprizedraw.co.uk. Once there, they are presented with a range of offers from partner companies, and each time they click on one, Clash earns a bit of money through a standard affiliate cost-per-lead deal. Recently, it occurred to the company that there was a mobile opportunity in the lead generation game, hence Txt Connect.
In principle, it’s exactly the same deal, but this time round, the offer is free texts, with no time or usage limit. So typically, a user sees a banner on a website offering free texts, clicks through, and is presented with details on how to download the Txt Connect application to their phone, as well as a range of offers. The user is under no obligation to click on any of the offers, but according to Clash-Media Marketing Director, Diana Herriott, will typically click on around four, so generating the revenue with which the company subsidises the free texts, and giving their agreement to be contacted via their landline, email or SMS.
The cynic in me was surprised at this number, but as Herriott pointed out, if the offers are targeted and relevant, it’s not unreasonable. Once the user has downloaded the application, they invite their friends to sign up too, and once signed up, they can all text each other merrily for free from within the application.
At the show, Clash-Media is, understandably, promoting the lead-generation aspects of the service to marketers. But it also looks great from the consumer angle. For users with a set group of friends engaged in a specific activity each week, like the guy saddled with the job of checking how many people are going to turn up for the weekly game of 5-a-side football for example, the appeal is obvious. I know someone in exactly this position (actually, it’s me) who spends a small fortune on texts each week doing exactly this.
It’s not difficult to see how the application could be used by any closed group, or company, so save money on sending texts. Or just a small group of friends who spend a lot of time and money texting each other. Users can set up as many different groups as they wish and there’s no minimum number of users.
Eventually, says Herriott, the texts themselves could carry advertising, and there could be white-label opportunities for other brands, though neither is offered at present. For Clash-Media, Txt Connect is, first and foremost, another way of generating leads for its partner companies. For heavy texters, however, it looks like the deal of a lifetime.

David Murphy
Editor