Updated
I do not normally do this but when Mary Meeker, the iconic Morgan Stanley researcher, came up with her annual economy and Internet trends, this is too good to let it slip (and too voluminous to blog in detail), I had tried posting her presentation here. However, this was subsequently removed by Sribd (presumably) on Morgan Stanley’s behest, so no download anymore, I’m afraid.
A (shortened?) or just another version is here though. Mobile starts in earnest on slide 28 et seq. Enjoy!
Ahead of CTIA later this week, this edition of the Carnival of the Mobilists is being hosted by Tsahi Levent-Levi on his VoIP Survivor blog. This week brings an incredible line-up of topics and contributors: A couple of posts on mobile advertising (including mine pleading for engagement as a crucial factor of ad success), the ideal app store, mobile learning and a whole host on the use of mobile apps in the workplace (including one with a Blackberry in a bakery!) and corporate environment in general plus a look on service and feature requirements for mobile phones in the developing world.
All very good indeed! So head over and set aside a good hour to read! You’ll find it here.
A lot is being said about mobile marketing, mobile advertising, capturing “consumer’s” imagination (if not only their eyeballs). And everyone says: “yes, I get that, social, mobile, always-on, always with them, cool!” Online ad spend outstrips TV already (at least in the UK), and mobile is arguably the next big thing; it is so much cooler, too: personal, accessible, always-on!).
So how do you execute? Banner ads? Text ads? Virals? “Ah, yes, virals are cool, I heard about them!”
There’s a busload full of mobile advertising networks out there, blind, premium blind, premium (check here for a great overview). And what do they do? Well, banner ads, text ads, the usual. Does it work? Anecdotally, sort of… Most developers and publishers I know that engage in this sort of activity make their money in two ways: either they are being commissioned by an advertiser to do it (good because you’re being paid!) or they use it as complementary (sic!) revenue; on a stand-alone basis, it would not feed them.
Why is the conversion not soaring? After all, mobile allows for unprecedented targeting (IF you do it. See here how not to do it): users have their phones always with them, it is always on, you can fall back on historical behaviours, etc, etc.
I would posit that it is because most advertisers still think of it in terms of consumers: beings that sit on the other (sic!) end of the message and who consume whatever I, advertiser, want to tell them. It is not, alas, true engagement, and this is where arguably the future lies.
So how do you engage? Many options. A good one is by being sincere (Zappos, the online shoe retailer that was recently acquired by Amazon, is a great example). Another one is by engaging rather than preaching. Not so easily done with banners. Easier done with something more interactive. Such as – an example – games and apps. On Apple’s app store, there are some great successes for this type of thing: German car manufacturers seem to be good at this! Audi did one, German developer Fishlabs did a couple of games for Volkswagen, Artificial Life for BMW, and then there is Waterslide Extreme, which is basically a Barclaycard ad (and badly executed: they could so easily have accommodated the RFID function, which the original cinema and TV ad is meant to promote; alas, they ignored it!) which despite its shortfalls was incredibly successful. But these are exceptions to what I think might well become the rule. On the app side, there are e.g. Pizza Hut and Gap that were recently featured (for free!) in Apple ads. Wow!
It seems obvious when you think about it: games truly engage (users – not consumers! – interact with them actively) and they can do so in a much more subtle manner (less invasive). At the same time, the user (not: consumer) spends a lot more time with the brand than with a banner ad.
It is, alas, a space of unknown dangers and unprecedented adventure: never-before seen creatures (scil. formats) and strange folks (scil. developers) roam weird landscapes (scil. mobile platforms). This is how brands and their agencies often experience mobile. They "get" it, don’t get me wrong but they are still fairly unfamiliar with it. And because the big pots of gold sit with the brands and they don’t want to risk cutting access, they’ll rather (and rather too often) stick with what they perceive as the trusted old paths. It’s not so good then that the freshest fruit grows on the trees in this new land and no longer in the wastelands of banner ads…
Watch this space then. It will only be a question of time (I hope) before we’ll be seeing a new wave of non-intrusive, interactive, fun brand engagement. And games and apps will lead the way!
This week, the Carnival of the Mobilists is hosted by Phil Barrett on his blog “Burning the Beacon” (I like the title). He gives us the heads-up on posts covering things (seemingly) mundane as SIM cards, a look at augmented reality (also check my post on this here), mobile learning and on how to connect with young users in today’s world. Oh, and speaking of today’s world, he also features a post pondering the implication of technology in our lives. Go on then, head over here and read it!
On today’s is a stunningly beautiful Indian summer morning in England’s North-West and I have been indulging in the Guardian‘s weekend supplement. One of the features was an interview with Dame Judi Dench, the iconic actress of Shakespearean as well as James Bondian fame. It is well worth a read but the little bit that caught my attention for the sake of this blog was to be found at the very end: Dench’s upcoming movie (Jude Law and a few others star, too), “Rage”, a project with arthouse director Sally Potter, will see its world premiere not in some swish viewing room or cinema in SoHo but on mobile phones. The prosaic announcement read:
Rage premieres on mobile phones on 21 September and in cinemas on 24 September. For details, go to ragemovie.com.
And that was that.
I find it noteworthy not only that it would happen at all but also that it appears to be somewhat normal, so that no one would actually bother to point it out specifically. Sometimes, progress moves in indiscernible little steps that can happen on stunningly beautiful mornings. This is one of them.
Consolidation in the mobile marketing space: German mobile marketing group YOC, a publicly listed company with revenues in Q1/2009 of c. €6m announced it has acquired Bluestar Mobile, the people known to British readers as the guys behind all the wonderful girls of the Sun on mobile (and, no, they also work with others such as the Guardian, Motorola or Bacardi). No price was disclosed. However, since YOC trades in the prime segment of the Frankfurt stock exchange, it will have to provide some details of the transaction in due course…
YOC is a giant in the German mobile marketing market (the vast majority of its revenues comes from its home market) where it runs campaigns for a lot of the marquee brands, including Mercedes, Sixt, Walt Disney, Coca Cola, T-Mobile, Sony, etc. However, its international revenues were rather small: its biggest foreign market was the UK with €400k revenues in Q1. Bluestar, which had built a nice business (according to YOC’s PR “profitable from inception”), will nicely add to YOC’s activities.
It seems the two follow virtually identical business models – full-service mobile marketing firms that run everything from concept, planning and execution of campaigns via inventory management and ad-serving solutions to creation and operation of mobile internet portals.
When you look at YOC’s share price, the strategy appears to work: whilst the German small-cap index dropped more than 40% in the last year, YOC’s stock rose by nearly 20%. All good then!
It must be truly bleak: even the best friend of every young telecoms entrepreneur on the fundraising trail whose reports rarely failed to feature as a footnote in an investment memorandum for the next big digital thing now sounds a word of caution. Juniper (whose reports I still cannot afford) issued its latest report on mobile gaming and it actually reduces (for the first time, I’m sure, even if I haven’t checked) its prior predictions on the growth and size of the sector in the next, erm, 20 years…
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