Bringing Magazines to the Mobile

David Murphy talks to Picsel's chief marketer to find out how a mobile productivity solution is moving into the mobile marketing space

Anyone who has ever tried to view PC documents on a small device will know it’s often an unsatisfying experience. Since 1998, Picsel, a Scottish technology company, has been working on a solution to improve the experience.
Its ePAGE software enables mobile users to view PDF, Excel, PowerPoint, Word and other types of document, including web pages, on a mobile device, exactly as they would on a PC screen, with the ability to pan and zoom to see the part of the file they are interested in.
It works on a wide range of operating systems, including Microsoft, Palm and Linux. The technology is already installed  on several mobile phones and PDAs, including some of Sony’s Clié PDAs, and the Samsung D600.
From this description, it sounds like a mobile productivity solution, pure and simple, but as Senior Marketing Manager Zubair Salim explains, there are obvious mobile marketing applications.
“We are working with a number of big brands who pride themselves on the richness of the experience when people read their magazines, to bring those to the handset, bypassing the world of WAP” he says. “People who are used to a certain experience when they look at a magazine or a document on their PC want the same sort of experience on their mobile phone, and that’s what Picsel technology delivers.”

Bringing peer-to-peer to Mobile

Cascada Mobile's TAG technology enables mobile users to recommend applications they like to their friends, as Cascada Director of Product Development Brian Flanagan explains to David Murphy

Earlier this year, Canadian company Cascada Mobile launched its TAG referral distribution technology in North America. TAG enables peer-to-peer distribution of mobile content, making it possible for consumers who have downloaded, say, a game to their handset, to refer the game on to one or more of their friends, giving them the option of buying it for themselves. Cascada believes the technology could help broaden the market for mobile games beyond the approximately 5% of mobile users who currently download 80% of the games.
Konami Digital Entertainment was the first publisher to use the technology, to add referral distribution capabilities to its signature game, Frogger. The TAG-enabled version of Frogger is currently available to Cingular Wireless subscribers, with the intention of rolling out to other carriers over time.
Cascada is planning a European launch later this year, so we caught up with Director of Product Development, Brian Flanagan to find out more about the technology.

MM: Can you tell us about the rationale behind the development of TAG?

BF: Sure. The problem for publishers of mobile games content is that while the top 10 games sell well, if you’re not in that top 10, you’re pretty much out in the wasteland. It’s a few titles that earn all the money. The adoption rate for mobile gaming is low. There are only a small number of people who are aware that they can download content to their phone. In fact, there was a survey conducted by SKOPOS on behalf I-Play, a mobile games company, that showed that only 5% of consumers have actually downloaded a game to their handset. So what we set out to do was to provide a way for early adopter users to educate or handhold their peers and friends to begin using these services.
The concept of peer-to-peer (p2p) marketing is not new, of course. But we were interested in the opportunity that you would create if you could move the p2p distribution of applications into the mobile space. It’s been done very successfully on the web, but mobile is more challenging because of the variety of different operating systems, and the number of different devices with different configurations, so it has required a lot of porting and cross-device management.

 

An Audience with a Mobile Evangelist

As a Strategy Consultant for Logica CMG in the Netherlands, he was instrumental in the creation of text voting. And as a Creative Group Head of ad agency JWT, he knows the big agency world. For the past four years, he has been evangelising the mobile channel, latterly in his role as an Associate Consultant in the TME (Telecoms Media and Entertainment) division of Cap Gemini. So Jim Brooks is perhaps uniquely placed to see how mobile is becoming integrated with other marketing media and channels. Brooks is unashamedly passionate about mobile as a marketing channel, so we caught up with him to find out where the industry is at and where it’s headed.

MM: Firstly, can you define what you understand by mobile marketing? 

JB: For me, things like text voting, text ‘n’ win and raw content like ringtones are out of scope. What’s in scope is brand advocacy, loyalty CRM, subscription, the areas where brands have traditionally used other channels.

MM: So when you talk about “evangelising” mobile as a marketing channel, what do you mean by that?

JB: On one hand, it’s looking at the way brands can increase their visibility and knowledge of the channel. Then it’s about educating the channel to speak the language and vocabulary of other media channels. Finally, it’s about helping a brand, like Peugeot for example, to create a mobile marketing example that they can talk about.

The Man Behind The Buying Spree

They spent most of February buying up almost anything that moved in the mobile space. Now they face the task of making it all work. Mobile Marketing Magazine caught up with NeoMedia  COO Martin Copus to find out more about the company, those acquisitions, and its future plans.

MM: Firstly, for those readers who are not familiar with the company, where has NeoMedia come from?

MC: The company was founded in 1995, and floated on NASDAQ in ‘96. We’re based in Fort Myers in Florida, and we were set up to create the technology that has become the PaperClick platform, which enables consumers to link to mobile internet content on their phone by clicking on SmartCodes or entering keywords on their phone. We also established a very strong Intellectual Property (IP) position by looking way out into the future and envisioning a world where the real world could be connected to the digital world. So we have some ‘Early Art’ patents dating back as far as 1996, which provide some extremely strong ground on which our product portfolio stands, involving direct-to-Internet connectivity from real-world identifiers, such as barcodes, keywords and even voice.

MM: Via mobile devices, presumably?

MC: Yes, this is what was so visionary about it. Our Chairman, Chas Fritz, envisioned a world where that was possible on a mobile device, without knowing how it would develop in a real-world, marketplace environment. So when Internet connectivity through mobile phones came along, and then the camera phone and the ability to click on a barcode and be transported to the mobile Internet. It was at that point that the availability of technology caught up with our patent position.

View from the States

Never let it be said that we are too parochial here at Mobile Marketing Magazine. There’s a whole world outside these shores, so when we were approached by US mobile marketing agency Juice Wireless, we thought it was a great  opportunity to see how what they’re doing over there compares to what we’re doing over here.
The company counts AOL, Conde Nast and Gillette among its clients, and in November last year, picked up the Mobile Marketing Association’s 2005 Award for Best Use of Mobile Marketing in North America.
We spoke to Chairman and Founder Nick Desai to find out more…

MM: I guess what most people would be interested in is how the US  compares to Europe and the UK in mobile marketing terms?

ND: Well we have more subscribers than the UK, at around 180 million, but wherever the UK is at, the US is far behind in terms of the broader social acceptance of SMS as a vehicle to respond to any kind of marketing initiative. Here, it’s still something you have to spell out to people, whereas in Europe, I think the concept of using an SMS (shortcode) as a response mechanism on billboards,  movies, TV ads, is much more accepted.

MM: So how do you approach mobile marketing in the States?

ND: We try to do versions of applications that work on your phone, like a system for ordering your favourite pizza on your phone for example.  In the US, the brand and media companies are very excited about delivering those types of applications to consumers, but there are various hurdles that we have to overcome.
The first is that there is not a uniform capability on handsets. There’s a lot of variation between them and what they can do. You also have the carriers approaching the deployment of data services for marketing in different ways. So if I wanted to run a program offering a free ringtone from Starbucks, I can’t do it on Verizon, because they have a closed deck and walled garden approach and they are not in favour of giving away content. These hurdles make it hard to create programs that will work for a broad range of people.

Interview - Bruce Renny (Part 2)

In the first half of our interview with ROK Entertainment Group Marketing Director Bruce Renny, we looked at the company's ROK Player. Here in Part 2, David Murphy talks to Renny about ROK's 2.5G Mobile TV service, ROK TV

There seem to be more than enough Mobile TV services to go around just now. But according to ROK, there’s room for at least one more. So what’s the big idea, and who’s going to buy it? ROK marketing supremo Bruce Renny is the man with the answers…

MM: You’ve already told us about your plans for  ROK Player.  Can you tell us about  ROK TV? Specifically, why are you trying to push yet another Mobile TV service when there are plenty of 3G TV services on offer from the various mobile networks?

BR: We have been thinking about TV for mobiles for some time. Currently, the only TV available for your mobile is via 3G. There are huge trials going on around DVB-H and DAB, but it struck us that there are limitations with what everyone is doing.
If you look at 3G provision, 3G accounts for, at most, 4 million people in Britain. There are 60 million handsets in Britain, so 3G is only a small percentage of the market. Now even if 3G grows significantly, it will still remain a small percentage of the global mobile universe.
I have seen forecasts of everything from 300 million to one billion people to be on 3G by 2015. I would suggest the consensus is that the figure will be 300 million, worldwide,  by 2010. That’s great. 300 million  people is a lot of people. But when you bear in mind that there will be 3 billion handsets in use in 2010, it’s only 10%. So 3G is a small percentage of the total mobile universe.
Now if you look at the DVB-H and DAB trials, the first problem with those services is that they are many years away. Secondly, they will be very expensive, with 3,000 new masts required for Britain alone. Quite apart from the cost of that infrastructure and the environmental  impact that will have, when you think about the windfall the Chancellor had from the 3G frequencies a few years ago, he’s not going to give those frequencies away. They are going to be expensive. 
But the big problem, I think, and it’s something they have all overlooked, is that they are broadcast, so it’s exactly like your home television, but available on your mobile. Now in theory, this sounds fantastic, and they have now 400 triallists in Oxford and another 300 in the London area. But these are volunteers, given a specially-adapted phone, and they are trying to monitor what they watch and when they watch it. 
Think about this. It’s like giving a hungry man a piece of bread. Just because he eats it, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s his favourite food. Why don’t you offer him a bacon roll and a piece of bread and see what he chooses? Why don’t you offer him a roast swan, a bacon roll and a piece of bread and see which one he chooses? You must question, from the outset, the validity of the trial data that’s being assembled from people who are not paying to view, and who are only seeing broadcast TV.
We think this isn’t a broadcast television platform. With the exception of news, which has value in being live, possibly some sport, possibly a major cultural event, something that has value in being live, the rest, because it’s a mobile phone, has to be a short-watch ‘snack’, made for mobile, content condensed, video-on-demand, and video-on-demand, by it’s very nature, cannot be broadcast.

 

Participation TV Explained

In the third part of her ongoing series looking at the 20 key mobile marketing applications,  Helen Keegan, MD and founder of mobile marketing agency, Beepmarketing, looks at Participation TV...

Unless you never watch television in the UK, then you must have seen programmes incorporating text messaging as an intrinsic part of the television programme. That might be for voting, such as Big Brother, X Factor and even the recent British Comedy Awards. This has been a nice money-spinner for the broadcasters and network operators alike, as the figures below show. If you imagine that each vote costs a minimum of 25p + your standard text charge, and that the broadcaster is probably getting a return of around 11p on each text, the numbers soon add up.

Programme                       Votes Cast by Text

Big Brother                                5 -10m+
I'm a Celebrity...                       10m+
X-Factor                                    5.4m
Big Brother 3                             5.3m
Big Brother 4                             3.1m
Fame Academy 2                       1.6m
Eurosong 2002                          700,000

Source: Text.it/Mobile Data Association  

Quotes of the Year

End of year reviews. Aren’t you sick of them? Well maybe, but we couldn’t let 2005 disappear without a quick look back at some of the choice soundbites that some of the movers and shakers in the mobile marketing industry have given us in the couple of months - is that really all it is? -  that we’ve been online.
Enjoy the quotes, and click on any of the links to see the article they are taken from.

"Mobile marketing could be phenomenally important, if you look at the penetration figures for handsets, and the passion for it. As a way of connecting with our audience, it ought to be phenomenally powerful, and through that lens, we ought to be spending 50% of our budget on it. (But) until such time as the digital platform can help us connect emotionally with consumers, in the way we can with a 30-second TV commercial, we are always going to struggle."
Coca-Cola Marketing Manager James Eadie explains why mobile marketing is important, but not yet that important, to the company.

"This is a contractual arrangement we have with all our clients, and all our clients understand that."
mBlox Marketing Communications Manager Ariela Freed explains how mBlox covers itself against being fined for any of the content it delivers on behalf of its clients, and why its client Jamba will therefore be 40 grand out of pocket, despite the fact that mBlox, not it, was fined over the Crazy Frog fiasco.

"The networks are a drag on innovation. They are unable to roll out new technologies in a synchronised fashion, so you get stepped progression of any new technology. SMS was a stepped progression to a situation where companies could easily offer a range of different services across all of the networks in the UK market. That was not achieved until July 2003."
Peter Norman founder of Wireless Information Network and Executive Director of the Mobile Data Association, on why mobile marketing has not developed as quickly as it might have.

"There are not enough (mobile agencies)  with the requisite technical understanding. There are a number of them, but they tend to have to go and seek assistance from technology  aggregators like WIN, and other companies, to understand the technologies and see how they can help put their ideas into action.”
Norman again, on one of the other factors hampering growth.

"Mobile is a hugely exciting space to be in. The potential is enormous. If you look at paid-for services, there are something like 63 million handsets in the UK, with a population of 55 million people. That’s a staggering statistic. Most of the major brands are only just beginning to get mobile into their thinking as a customer care tool, a marketing tool or for paid for content. So while companies like WIN have seen dramatic growth over the last three or four years, there is an awful lot more growth to go after."
And for a third time, Norman  on why, despite the problems, he believes mobile marketing has a bright future ahead.

"I had a little bet with one content owner. I sent him a chip containing some content and he sent me one of his ‘secure’ DVDs and the idea was to see which one of us could rip and strip the other’s content first. We ripped and striped his DVD in 37 minutes flat, and posted it to an FTP site for him to view. Three weeks later, they still hadn’t cracked ROK’s DRM."
ROK Entertainment Group Marketing Director Bruce Renny  on the relative impenetrability of the company’s ‘ROK Chips’ compared to some other types of entertainment media.

"We feel that consent is a very important thing. It’s simply no good talking to customers who do not want to engage with you. In order for a marketing campaign to be effective, the people on the receiving end of it have to be open to the messages, and permission-based marketing allows that to happen. It requires you to think about how you connect with customers in a way that respects them and is engaging, because if you do that, consumers will want to engage with you. I think those who live in fear of opt-outs are those who are not going about things in the right way."
Amanda Phillips, Proximity London Managing Director and Chair of the IPA Direct Marketing Futures Group, on the importance of permission.

"One of the barriers to the emergence of the market is education. Brand marketers are fond of talking about consumer education, but I would shine a light on brand marketer education, around the personal nature of the medium, the need for optins, the relevance of the message. It might sound high-minded,  but as a practical matter, it requires marketers to change their behaviour, and this is not easy.  They acknowledge, intellectually, the point, but struggle with executing it."
Mike Baker, CEO of Enpocket, on the problem with clients.

"I think we have 10 years on SMS, and when it does run its course, we will see SMS being supplanted by commercial mobile instant messaging (IM). There are many hurdles to overcome, and it will take maybe five years before mobile IM becomes a true complement to SMS, but I think it will come, and at that point you will find subscribers dialoguing with brands in a way that is unknown today."
Andrew Bud, Executive Chairman, mBlox, on the bright future ahead for vanilla-flavoured SMS.

"I think (Mobile TV) will be huge. I am sceptical of technology. When a new technology comes up, I can usually see why it will fail. It was obvious why WAP was going to fail, for example. But with Mobile TV, it’s hard to see why it is going to fail, because it is such an obvious and compelling user experience."
Bud again, getting equally excited about the prospects for Mobile TV.

"I would be embarrassed about watching on a train. It would attract attention and I don't like being stared at. I would also be worried in case someone gave me a tap on the shoulder and nicked my fancy phone. If you commute every day and get back home too late to watch stuff on TV it might be interesting, but people are going to get serious headaches staring at tiny screens for hours on end."
David Smith, the man on the Clapham omnibus, or at least, a postgraduate student from Cheshire, offers a contrary view.

"There are a lot of clients who are only just grasping online, who only recruited their dedicated online specialist 18 months ago, and who have been busy getting the online strategy right. So while we have done tests and trials and talked about mobile strategy with them, they just have not had the time to make it happen yet. The Internet revolution is not over yet, and you can’t expect an Internet marketing specialist to handle two revolutions simultaneously, so we have to bide our time, but it will happen. Mid 2005 was the tipping point in terms of moving from early adopters to the mainstream. In 2003 and 2004, we could not get meetings with senior marketers to talk about mobile. In 2005, there’s not a single client who does not want to know what’s going on in terms of cost, legislation, technology, everything."
Jonathan Bass, Managing Director of mobile marketing agency, Incentivated, on how clients are starting to take mobile marketing more seriously.

And finally...
We can’t take the credit for this one, but without doubt the most memorable quote of the year for the mobile marketing business came in April when Andrew Robertson, chief executive of BBDO, the third-largest ad agency in the world, said:
"We are rapidly getting to the point where the single most important medium that people have is their wireless device. It's with them every single moment of the day. It’s genuinely the convergence box that everyone has been talking about for so many years."

A nice, positive thought on which to close this review. It should become much clearer over the next 12 months how right, or otherwise, he was.

In the meantime, a Happy New Year to all our readers.

Interview - Bruce Renny

David Murphy talks to the ROK Entertainment Group Marketing Director about the company's efforts to put high quality video content on to mobile phones

Technology company ROK’s big idea is to bring full-length, full-screen video content to mobile phones. Its attack is two-pronged. First, there’s ROK Player which delivers movies, music videos, and episodes of popular TV series to mobiles on pre-recorded 64MB MMC (MultiMediaCard) memory cards, which retail for £17.99 each. Second, there’s ROK TV, which delivers a bouquet of 12 TV channels, including live news from ITN and CNN, and 5-minute content packages from channels including National Geographic and Cartoon Network, to both 2.5G and 3G handsets.
Both services currently work on a small number of Nokia, Symbian-based handsets, which nevertheless, represent a large number of the handsets sold in the UK. And in 2006, the company will roll out services for Microsoft OS-powered devices, bringing ROK technology to Microsoft-powered PDAs. It will also pre-load ROK technology onto a number of popular smartphones.
We recently met with ROK marketing chief Bruce Renny to find out more about the company’s plans. He had so much to say that we’re running the interview in two parts. First, he tells us about the ROK Chip. In part 2, we’ll find out more about ROK TV…

Text ‘n’ Win Explained

Last week, Helen Keegan, MD and founder of mobile marketing agency, Beepmarketing, outlined the 20 key mobile marketing applications, and promised to look at each in more detail over the coming weeks. Here, then is the first part of this mammoth masterclass – Text ‘n’ Win…

I've had a really good response to my previous posting on the Top 20 Mobile Marketing Applications, so as promised, it’s time to start looking at each in a little more detail. First up, it's text ‘n’ win, or is that text ‘n’ lose?
For the uninitiated, a text 'n’ win promotion is one which is usually advertised on a pack of something or other, like crisps or a drink, and the customer is invited to text in to a shortcode for a chance to win a prize.
This is a very convenient way to manage a competition or prize draw, and popular with consumers. The recent on-pack promotion by Walkers to text to win an iPod offered a prize draw every five minutes, and claims to be the biggest ever text ‘n’ win promotion to date. Not only that, thought went into the reply (or ‘lose’) messages, to encourage repeat entry - these messages varied from music trivia, to free content, to details of the previous day's winners. This avoided the campaign becoming a 'text ‘n’ lose' campaign. This successful campaign was run by Big Kick and Sponge.

Data issues
Text ‘n’ win has been embraced enthusiastically by sales promotion agencies, as it means that not only do you not have to deal with sackloads of post, you also don't have the post-campaign data entry issues. Customers, by entering the competition, are giving you some of their data - i.e. their mobile number. It's up to you to collect any more data from the consumer if you need it.
It's also up to you as the marketer to make the lose messages engaging too, otherwise your campaign will end up being ‘text ‘n’ lose’ rather than ‘text ‘n’ win’. This might be achieved by offering mobile content for lower-tier prizes, or by varying the replies, so that each time you enter, you get something slightly different, as shown in the Walkers case study. This makes it feel more personal and about you. Personal is a key concept in all things mobile. BeepMarketing has done this in the past for the likes of Foster's lager, Butt Ugly Martians and Tropicana ice lollies.
As a marketer, I think it's also fascinating to identify repeat entries to competitions, as well as peak times, and down times, to help you work out more about your customers and plan your next campaign. And not only that, you can then use the data (subject to keeping within the EU Data Privacy regulations) to communicate with willing customers - something we do for brands like Tabasco. The data is collected via on-pack promotions, we keep it clean against the TPS (Telephone Preference Service) and then use text messaging to promote future campaigns to drive sales. We offer an opt-out as part of every campaign.
Now, that has to be better than delving into a sackload of mail to pick a winner doesn't it?
Helen Keegan

Copyright Helen Keegan 2005. All rights reserved.

Next time out, Helen will look at Voting and participation TV. To read more of Helen’s thoughts on mobile marketing, visit her blog.

Mobile Marketing Defined Overview. Read

Mobile Marketing Defined

When we launched Mobile Marketing magazine, one of the first pieces we commissioned was a piece that sought to define what mobile marketing is.
Now, we are delighted to say, industry veteran Helen Keegan, (pictured) MD and founder of mobile marketing agency, Beepmarketing, has agreed to provide us with her own personal view of what mobile marketing is.
Helen specialises in mobile marketing, She was in at the birth of the mobile marketing industry in 2000, as head of customer experience at ZagMe, the precision wireless marketing pioneer. There, she recruited more than 85,000 customers in Lakeside and Bluewater shopping malls (two of the largest in Europe) and ran more than 1,500 SMS (text message) marketing campaigns for over 150 leading retail clients, agencies and brands, including Esprit, Nike, TopShop, HMV and Waterstone’s.
Before that, she had a varied career covering retail, marketing and consultancy during which time she created and produced a live stage show and training seminar roadshow to drive change within a major UK public transport company, involving 30,000 staff. More recently, Helen created the world’s first mobile marketing course, in conjunction with the Institute of Direct Marketing in 2002.
Today, Helen runs her own mobile marketing consultancy, BeepMarketing, developing mobile strategies and implementing mobile marketing campaigns, using a range of mobile technologies for many blue-chip and agency clients, including Scottish Courage, UIP, Vivendi Universal, Sony Ericsson, Emap, Samsung and Danone.
She is a regular on the mobile marketing conference circuit and runs mobile marketing courses at the Institute of Direct Marketing, Academy Internet and New Media Knowledge. She is also a guest lecturer in marketing at the Universities of Westminster, Newcastle and Hertfordshire and a founder member of Women in Mobile Data, a global association for women working in mobile and runs Swedish Beers, an ad-hoc mobile networking event in London with Steve Flaherty from Keitai Culture.
In this first article, Helen lists out what she sees as the 20 key mobile marketing applications. In the weeks to come, she will take each in turn and look at it in more detail. Over to you Helen…

Interview - Peter Norman

Founder, Wireless Information Network

As the founder of technology aggregator WIN (Wireless Information Network) in 1996, Peter Norman was in at the ground floor of the mobile data industry, and has probably forgotten more about mobile marketing than most people know.
When the company floated last October, he took a step back, and is currently considering his next move, though he is still actively involved in the industry as an Executive Director of the Mobile Data  Association (MDA), within which he is Chair of the Third Party Messaging Group, which looks after the data service interests of bodies outside of the network  operators.
Mobile Marketing caught up with Norman to ask where the industry is headed, and what he might do next.

Interview - Mike Baker

CEO, Enpocket

Although based in the US (with a London office), when Enpocket launched in 2001, it chose to go to market in the UK ahead of the US, because of the advanced state of the infrastructure, and the higher adoption rate of mobile messaging, in the UK.
In the early days, it was heavily involved in broadcasting acquisition campaigns to opted-in lists of mobile users. Heavily involved too, in establishing best practice guidelines through its involvement with the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA).
These days, the company spends more time working in richer media,  including MMS and mobile Internet banner site advertising. It has also developed an extensive practice, and a reputation as a world leader,  in helping operators to use mobile marketing as a direct marketing tool to their own customer base, for up-selling, cross-selling  and customer retention.
The company recently appointed Mike Baker as its CEO, and we caught up with him to ask him for the Enpocket take on where mobile marketing is headed, and how things in the UK compare with the US.

Interview - Andrew Bud

The future’s bright, the future’s SMS

David Murphy finds the mBlox Executive Chairman in bullish mood about vanilla-flavoured SMS

3G, the mobile internet - it’s a reality now for millions of UK consumers, so you could be forgiven for thinking that the mobile marketing community would be preparing to unleash an avalanche of 3G marketing material onto an unsuspecting public, with their permission of course. Not so, says Andrew Bud, Executive Chairman of mobile transaction network mBlox. Far from being close to obsolescence, says Bud, SMS is where it’s at.
“SMS is the best customer interaction medium on the planet” he says. “So you would think that every company that runs a call centre must have an SMS solution. But companies are very conservative about changing their customer interaction model, so we are only now starting to see the widespread use of SMS as a customer service and customer relationship channel. It’s the maturity of the technology that gives companies the confidence to use it. Now that it is well rooted in the market, it is a good choice for mature companies to use as a customer relationship medium, which 3G will not be for many years.”
So how long does Bud feel SMS has to enjoy its time in the sun? Some may find his opinion surprising.
"The growth is really going to come now, because people are comfortable with it, and applications are coming on line" he says. "I think we have 10 years on SMS, and when it does run its course, we will see SMS being supplanted by commercial mobile instant messaging (IM). There are many hurdles to overcome, and it will take maybe five years before mobile IM becomes a true complement to SMS, but I think it will come, and at that point you will find subsciibers dialoguing with brands in a way that is unknown today."

Learning Curve

As O2’s Mobile TV trials continue in Oxford, O2 Vice President of Research and Development, Mike Short, who is also Chair of the Mobile Data Association, took time out from attending the Nokia Mobility Conference 2005 in Barcelona to tell Mobile Marketing a little more about the trials, and what the company hopes to learn from them. He didn’t have long to talk to us - yes, this is a Short interview - but we felt what he said was interesting enough to share it with you.
The technology being trialled by O2 is not the 'on-demand' video offered by Orange, Vodafone and 3. Instead, it uses a Nokia 7710 handset equipped with a tiny digital TV receiver, which receives live TV pictures via the DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting – Handheld) standard. It’s live TV, but on a phone.
400 triallists can access 16 TV channels, including the five main terrestrial channels, plus ITV2, and programming from British Eurosport, Cartoon Network, CNN, Discovery Channel, MTV, ShortsTV, Sky News, Sky Sports News and Sky Travel. The trials are being run in conjunction with Nokia, Arqiva (NTL Broadcast, as was), and with the co-operation of several terrestrial and satellite broadcasters.

Mobile TV - Who Wants It?

OK, so this is hardly a truly representative survey, but with all the hype around Mobile TV, Mobile Marketing thought it was time to find out what ordinary people thought about the idea, so we asked a random selection of people from different backgrounds and in different professions to share with us their thoughts on the following issues.
We asked them to answer five questions:

Would you ever consider using your mobile phone as a TV? Or have you already done so?

What sort of monthly fee would you consider reasonable to be able to watch TV shows on your mobile?

What sort of programmes would you expect for this money? Everything you can get at home? A small selection? Full length versions or stripped-down versions for mobile viewing?

How long do you think you could watch TV on a mobile phone for at one stretch, assuming it has a reasonable size screen, say 3 or 4 inches?

Would you be comfortable watching TV shows on your mobile on a bus/train or embarrassed in case anyone thought you should get a life?

The answers make for interesting, if perhaps uncomfortable reading, for those pushing the idea of mobile TV. But in the interests of helping those same people make the right decisions, we present the replies here. Think of it as a free mini Focus Group…

 

What is Mobile Marketing?

It's a good question. Isn't it? How do you define mobile marketing? What does it embrace? And what does it not?  Rather than giving you our spin on the subject, we thought it would make more sense to ask some people at the sharp end. We invited half a dozen, four came through.
First up, Jonathan Bass, managing director of mobile marketing agency Incentivated, then Andrew Jones, who runs another mobile agency, Aerodeon. Next up is Troy Norcross, a Senior Telecoms Messaging Consultant, and co-founder of Pocket Reach and, more recently, Mobile Soul. And finally, the open mic. passes to Emma Coss, Managing Director of 12snap UK. Over to you guys...

Mobile Marketing Dos and Don'ts

There is a lot of confusion around what you can and can't do with a mobile marketing campaign. So who better to clear things up than Robert Dirskovski, Head of Interactive Media at the Direct Marketing Association. Over to you Robert...

The bare facts
Mobile marketing is regulated by legislation originating from the European Union and implemented in the UK in November 2003 – the Privacy & Electronic Communications Regulations. It places mobile (and other electronic media, including email) under an opt-in regime, which means consumers must provide their prior consent before you may send them marketing information via their mobile.

Data collection
In the UK, the Government implemented the Regulations to allow companies to communicate with their existing customer base, provided an easy to use unsubscribe mechanism is provided. Companies may communicate with those who have made a purchase or have made a purchase enquiry, until such time they state they do not wish to receive further information. This element of the Regulations is often referred to as the soft opt-in. It is important to remember that the unsubscribe mechanism must be used on each and every occasion you send a message.
If you are collecting customer data with a view to sending marketing material, there are a number of requirements which you must observe.
First, you must consider whether you plan to market your own goods/services only, or whether you wish to market third party goods/services as well. You must make it clear at the point of data collection how the data will be used. You may not revise the consent at a later date.
You must demonstrate that consumers have given a positive indication that they wish to receive mobile marketing messages from you. This may be achieved in a number of ways. For example, they may tick a box next to a statement which says" Please tick here if you are happy to receive mobile marketing messages from ABC Ltd" Or "Please provide your mobile number if you are happy to receive mobile marketing messages from ABC Ltd"

Interview - Jonathan Bass

Managing Director, Incentivated

Incentivated managing director Jonathan Bass formed the company in 2001 along with James Hubbard and Craig Jamieson. Hubbard’s background  was PC infrastructure, Jamieson’s, network infrastructure  - he was a senior member of the team that designed and deployed Vodafone’s 2.5G and 3G network – while Bass himself has a grounding in media and marketing from his time at US media company, Clear Channel. Inspired by a seminar presented by Flytxt, Bass saw an opportunity to go for the mid-tier companies below the levels of the ones that Flytxt itself was targeting, and Incentivated was born.
Four years on, the company has several hundred customers, and runs campaigns across Europe, the US, New Zealand and Australia.
Mobile Marketing Magazine caught up with the youthful 32-year old to ask about the current state of the market.