Mobile Marketing Blog by InMovil Media

The role of widgets in the mobile Web and other topics, including Google’s Android platform. Let’s see what Nokia is doing with Mobile 2.0.
We heard a lot about widgets at Mobile Internet World this week. What is a widget? What is the unique value of a mobile widget vs. a widget on a desktop?

Widgets allow people to personalize Internet content into lightweight Web standards based technologies that are running on the mobile device.

While widgets have been available on PCs for some time, widgets on mobile devices have particular advantages in that they facilitate internet interaction via mobile devices in a much more focused and manageable way.

When people are on the move, many want instant access to specific information, wherever they are. Widgets on mobile devices allow users to have personalized services and content on their device that is always with them, always connected, and unique to them. Additionally, mobility brings context-aware, location-aware aspects that are unique to mobile devices.

Examples can include local weather information, traffic information before going out on the road, following stock performance, or your internet auctions, etc.

Why is everyone suddenly talking about widgets? Is this the influence of the iPhone?

Actually, in April this year we announced that S60 will be the first mobile software platform with integrated widget support. We believe that mobility will change the Internet as people are able to access, create and share information specific to place, time and experience. Widgets are an important milestone in this development. This is also likely to direct much of the innovation seen on the Internet today to the mobile space for the benefit of the tens of millions of S60 mobile device users world-wide.

Will S60 ever work with Google Android?

Nokia remains fully committed to S60 on Symbian OS, the leading open internet innovation platform for mobile devices. S60 on Symbian OS already has a substantial base of users, applications and developers, offering unparalleled business opportunities. In April 2007 we announced that over 100 million S60 devices have been shipped by all S60 licensees (Samsung, Nokia, LG, Lenovo) we have over 3.5 million registered developers through Forum Nokia with over 5,300 different applications available.

With the Navteq acquisition will Nokia make GPS standard on the S60 platform?

While the Navteq acquisition is yet to be completed, S60 already provides a rich platform for combining location and navigation with an ability to communicate. There are already several S60 devices with a built-in GPS, such as Nokia N95, Nokia N95 8GB, Nokia 6110 Navigator, Nokia E90 Communicator and Samsung SGH-i550.

How does Nokia find and seed developers for widgets? Do you reach out to existing desktop widget developers or do you reach out to mobile-specific developers?

A short answer to this question is both. S60 will be complemented with Web Run-Time, a Web application development environment, enabling the development of widgets and integrated Web applications for mobile devices with familiar standards-based Web technologies, such as Ajax, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.

Web Run-Time offers numerous possibilities for all Web application developers. As the Web Run-Time is built with standards-based Web technologies, developers can create new innovative widgets and also migrate existing widgets from other standards-based platforms to S60 with minimal effort.

In order to help brands and marketers identify key market trends, mobile subscriber usage patterns, and success metrics for mobile marketing in the United States, the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) (www.mmaglobal.com) today announced the results of its third-annual Mobile Attitude and Usage Study. The study provides insights into overall consumer mobile usage by demographic group, awareness and usage of mobile phone features and services, and interest in and concerns about specific applications. The study is available immediately, free of charge, to all current MMA Global members.

The study’s key findings include:

• Interest in mobile marketing remains as high as it was in the previous two surveys. One in four respondents in the 2007 survey expressed interest in mobile marketing. Although some respondents had difficulty readily associating benefits with mobile marketing, those who do say that they value the ability to receive highly relevant information, the coupons and rewards received and the convenience of accessing the desired applications quickly and easily.
• The number of consumers who have experienced mobile marketing continues to grow. One out of 20 respondents had participated in mobile marketing. The highest participation is among respondents age 25-44.
• Sweepstakes and voting campaigns are the most widely used types of mobile marketing. The second most common type is receiving alerts about products, services, accounts. Ten percent of respondents have used their mobile phones to receive and redeem coupons.
• Ethnic groups are key audiences for mobile marketing. For example, African Americans and English-dominant Hispanics indicate stronger interest in mobile marketing than Caucasians. These findings suggest that the mobile channel can be highly effective for reaching specific ethnic groups.
• Teens and young adults use text messaging more than any other demographic. People ages 13-24 send and receive the most – more than 50 messages per week – while half of all survey respondents use text messaging at least once a week. This usage shows that most mobile users are at least familiar with text messaging, if not regular users, making it an effective tool for mobile marketing campaigns.

“The 2007 Mobile Attitude and Usage Study reinforces that the mobile channel remains one of the most powerful tools available for brands and companies,” said Laura Marriott, president of the MMA. “U.S. consumers continue to use more of their phones’ features, creating additional opportunities for marketers to reach them with coupons and other relevant, exclusive to mobile information.”

“What’s exciting about this year’s study is the continued escalation in adoption of the camera phone with 58% (up from 35% in 2006) of all consumers now saying they use this feature,” said Gene Keenan, vice president mobile strategies for Isobar. “This dovetails perfectly with the coming cross-carrier interoperability of picture messaging via a short code. We expect to see some very innovative campaigns this coming year using picture phoning.”

Keenan also noted, “The really exciting news is the importance that mobile plays in the daily lives of consumers, as we’re experienced through the use of text messaging for social interactions.”

Also noteworthy is that 54 percent of 13-34 year olds use SMS for social networking, while 44 percent of 13-34 year olds said they use text messaging for flirting or dating, and 10 percent of 13-34 year olds said they have broken up with a boy or girl friend using text messaging.

The 2007 study, conducted by Synovate, consisted of 1,405 online interviews using a nationally representative consumer online panel of over 1.5 million households. The sampling plan for the main study sample was identical to the 2005 and 2006 survey waves, in order to ensure maximum compatibility between studies and allow for accurate trending. In addition to the main study sample, the 2006 and 2007 surveys included a booster sample of African-American and Hispanic interviews (18+ years of age).

The study focuses on the U.S. market. The MMA also conducted similar studies in Asia-Pacific and Western Europe, results will be released later in 2007.

dotMobi, the mobile industry trade body, has published a list of the top ten mobile-ready websites, but only three of them scored more than three out of five on dotMobi’s scale of “readiness”.

The top ten were Google.com, WashingtonPost.com, Ask.com, Yahoo.com Flickr.com, Live.com, Facebook.com, Overstock.com, Weather.com and USA Today.com. Only Google, Facebook and Yahoo scored well for good practice, but most of the 100 sites tested scored an average 1.3 out of five.

Web pages designed for PCs typically have far more graphics and text than streamlined mobile sites, so end up costing the user more to access on a pay-per-data mobile service. The average homepage costs a hefty 75p to access and takes 40 seconds to download.

BBC.co.uk came in at 28 with a 28 second loading time and a (rather shocking) cost of $1.28, but the BBC.mobi site took 1 second and cost the user 2 cents. It was a similar story for the New York Times ranked at 22: nytimes.com took 87 seconds to load and cost $3.37, but nytimes.mobi took one second and cost 1 cent.

Let us test your own site for mobile readiness. Or let us make a fully complaint mobile website inlcuding our mobile search engine optimization service, to get you on top in the mobile search engines.

As our matriculants currently wrestle under the yoke of final examinations and the fear of failure, it is the time of year to take stock and measure our own performance in mobile marketing, least of all to ensure that we head in the right direction for 2008.

A simple yes or no reply will soon show you where you fall on the scale of things related to mobile and marketing.

Have you acknowledged that the consumer is in control?

Is your brand being built on a truly interactive dialogue with consumers, recognising that they have the power to control how, when and where they interact with you?

Have you taken steps to ensure that the efforts of your agency are tied to client brand performance?

Has your agency delivered some big, game changing ideas this year?

Has your marketing tapped into social networking, word-of-mouth or local event?

Have you used the Internet, mobile and other new media forms to reach and engage reluctant consumers?

Have you become involved in, or embraced the role of advancing national priorities such as diversity, education and health?

Has your marketing department been overhauled in favour of enhancing creativity, strategic alignment and brand stewardship?

Have you insisted that research become more aligned with critical brand accountability goals?

Have you blown up the back room?

Have you set in motion a process of continuous marketing reinvention?

The issue is whether or not one requires a 100% pass mark for this exam. If you indeed do have full marks, then well done. You have grasped the nettle and turned problems in opportunities. If you have not performed convincingly during this year, then best not show your report card to anyone and resolve to work smarter in 2008. Contact us, and we can will make sure next year you will score 100%

The Mobile advertising (M-ad) space is abuzz as industry players vie for a share of this new marketing frontier.

Mobiles becoming 24/7 companions has opened up opportunities to design campaigns aimed at specific sets of users. And the benefits are evident for the stakeholders — visibility at cost-effective rates for advertisers, additional revenue st ream for mobile operators and personalised, non-intrusive information for customers.

Simply put, Mobile advertising is communicating brand value through the mobile. It enables enterprises to overcome a key hurdle — inability to reach well-defined target audiences. The ever expanding telecom subscriber base is the basic driver for M-advertising in the country, says Harish Gandhi, which recently launched SMS 2, a messaging, content and advertising application.

4 strategic spheres According to Bas Vervoort, CEO, InMovil Media, the mobile marketing ecosystem comprises four interconnecting strategic spheres. They are: product and services (brands, content owners and marketing agencies), applications (discrete application providers and mobile ASPs), connection (aggregators and wireless operators), and media and retail (media properties, ‘brick ’n’ mortar’ and virtual retail stores).

M-advertising campaigns include: banner and contextual advertising on mobile Internet or WAP, advergaming (using video games to advertise a product, organisation or viewpoint), CRBT-brand tune association (where CRBT is caller ring back tone), lead generation zones, polling, contests, mobile video, MMS (multimedia services), etc.

For that personal touch The mobile phone can offer advertisers a level of immediacy, intimacy and personalisation that cannot be matched by other mediums. “Being a personal device, the mobile phone offers emotional appeal, context and time sensitivity. Improvement in the quality of handsets and network infrastructure that enable delivery of rich media advertisements to users’ handsets at a lower cost will give the required impetus to this industry,” says Manoj Dawane, CEO of Mauj Telecom.

The mobile medium enables to ascertain spending patterns and personalise advertising. No wonder that content companies have found a click rate of 3-3.5 per cent on their mobile WAP portal as against 1.5 or 2 per cent on the Internet. Says Anil Nair, head, Wireless Media, Cricinfo, , “By the end of the year, we expect 10-15 per cent of global revenues from our mobile business to be driven by m-advertising.” (Click through rates measure what percentage of people clicked on the ad to arrive at the destination site)

Threat to Net? Globally, mobile advertising is emerging as the biggest competition for Internet advertising and it may even jeopardise the latter, according to a study by analysis firm Thomas Weisel International.

Even though the m-advertising marketplace is presently miniscule in size, it has the potential to grow at 200 per cent a year. The availability of high-end handsets supporting GPRS and 3G will help mobile advertising to grow considerably in the coming years.

Bullish on scene No wonder the industry sees big things ahead. Research firm Strategy Analytics is forecasting that advertisers will spend $1.4 billion globally on mobile media this year. “The global M-advertising industry is expected to reach $11 billion in 2009 and India should account for more than 1 per cent of this overall value chain,” avers Narasimha of Telibrahma. With advances in networks, advertising capabilities and growth in advertising inventory, the outlook for mobile advertising spend has significantly advanced in the past 12 months, according to Prasad of Reliance. Some global brands, such as Pepsi, are talking about up to 5 per cent advertising budget being allocated to this new medium. CBS, Coca-Cola, Cadbury, Suzuki, ICICI, HDFC and Castrol are some of the brands active in this space.

“M-advertising is poised to take off in the next six months or so and within the next two years it will become a full-fledged industry.”

Since this is a medium that is still in its infancy, there is no single revenue generation model. There are several strategies for monetisation, which include brand sponsorship (taken out of advertising budget), premium SMS (Consumers paying for the service) and transaction-based monetisation (pay per transaction/click/view).

Bas Vervoort, CEO, InMovil Media, says corporates spend on branding/lead generation as they would on other mediums via banner advertising, SMS promotions, contests, etc. On mobile web pages, advertisers pay on a CPM (cost per impression) basis for banner ads and on CPL (cost per click) basis for brand zones. Or advertisers pay on a per impression basis on SMS and on a per click basis on WAP. “There is a school of thought that believes that the market will be free in the next five years, wherein all downloaded stuff will be subsidised through advertising,” according to Vervoort.

Mauj, which currently does advertising only on its WAP portal, will be rapidly expanding into SMS-based advertising first and eventually into voice, says Dawane. Agrees Nair of Cricinfo, who believes that the advertising-subsidised model will overtake the consumer-paid model for mobile entertainment in the next five years.

Target ‘em “While there is a real opportunity and value for brands, the true potential of mobile advertising will unfold when advertisers deliver time-sensitive ads based on the context of targeted consumers,” says Tim Ruisbroek, CEO, InMovil Media. InMovil Media is a provider of ad-funded mobile content and communication, to bring mobile advertising solutions and ad-funded mobile entertainment content to the Spanish market.

Roy of Hungama is further of the view that the biggest challenge in mobile advertising is preventing unsolicited advertising or spam, which has the potential to kill the opportunity.

“Advertising has to be contextual as the potential in ‘push’ marketing is fairly limited and is largely viewed as spam. Thus there is a need to get into ‘permission’ marketing and ‘pull’ marketing to deliver value to marketers.”

Building the infrastructure The big question is: do we have the neccesary infrastructure and ecosystem in place? For SMS-based or operator portal-based advertising, there exists a well-established eco-system. In areas such as bluetooth and search, advertising is still blooming and the ecosystem is being built.

M-advertising is evolving as a unique and unknown medium is bringing together carriers, ad agencies, publishers, mobile ad technology companies and brands.

“There is limited corporate knowledge of this medium, so it will take a while for all the stakeholders to get a better understanding of the opportunity,” Mittersain of Nazara says. Improved relationships between technologists, advertisers and operators will help bridge this gap, concludes Gandhi of Airtel.

Over time marketing and advertisement activities transform as new digital media streams emerge. The first major digital transition took place when advertisement extended from broadcast media such as television and cinema, also called the first screen, to the PC Internet, referred to as the second screen. In the last couple of years we have seen an expanding transition into the third screen represented by the mobile handset. What distinguishes this new channel from digital predecessors is the ability to influence consumers at the very moment they are ready to take action, thus closing in on the last mile of transaction.

Brands and marketing agencies play a key role in the nascent mobile marketing ecosystem. Their decisions on the distribution of advertisement spending ultimately decide the total monetary value of mobile marketing. Global advertisement expenditure in 2006 was approximately € 303 billion (US$ 435 billion) and global Internet advertisement expenditure reached € 18 billion in 2006. The year-on-year growth rate was reported to be 26 percent in H1-2007. Online media consumptions today accounts for 21 percent of overall media consumption, hence it is not difficult to realize why Internet advertisement is the fastest growing advertisement media.

In the last 12 months there has been an increase in the momentum around mobile advertisement. As the market is starting to move mobile operators are now partnering with mobile advertisement and content stakeholders to build competitive new business models. An important note is also that free content has never wiped out paid-for content in any other media channel and the most probable scenario will probably be a mixture of the two business models in the mobile channel.

SMS is currently the most widely used messaging vehicle for mobile marketing. Overall the worldwide SMS traffic increased with approximately 50 percent to more than 620 billion messages in the first quarter of 2007. However, only a small fraction of messages consists of commercial messaging. Another emerging marketing channel within mobile is the mobile Internet. Historically advertisement has played a critical role in driving the mainstream adoption of PC based Internet services. The service areas that are beginning to take off on the mobile Internet are very similar to the online world and consist of search, communities and web mail services. In addition, more and more mobile operators all over the world have in the past several years introduced location-based services in their service portfolio. We believe that the ability to target consumers based on their position will have a significant effect on the way that companies advertise, not just in the mobile medium but it will also impact on their entire advertising strategies and channels. Our technologies enable the offering of such services.

The shift of advertisement expenditure into new digital channels is a very complex process where traditional thinking clash with new, innovative and unexplored advertisement and marketing territory. The mobile marketing ecosystem is very multifarious and far from being mature. Since the mobile advertisement channel is still fairly new there are a number of new ventures entering the market space. The supply side is consolidating with major corporations positioning themselves to take substantial market shares on this emerging marketplace.

We estimates that mobile channels will account for 0.8 percent of the total digital advertising expenditure worldwide in 2007. By 2012 the share for mobile media is expected to have reached 7.5 percent, while at the same time the digital advertising market more than doubles in size. In monetary terms, the value of all mobile channels combined is forecasted to grow with a compound annual growth rate of 79.8 percent from € 192 million in 2007 to €3,606 million by 2012.

Contact us and:

• Identify tomorrow’s most profitable advertising opportunities in the mobile space.
• Understand the fundamentals of the ad-based mobile media revenue model.
• Recognise the key barriers restraining the growth of the mobile advertising market.
• Comprehend the relative importance of digital channels compared to other advertising media.
• Learn about the early experiences of mobile marketing campaigns by top global brands.

And Discover:

• How to become a winner with mobile advertising
• What changes in the mobile industry and end-user behaviour are required before mobile advertising can become a multi-billion euro market
• How are Google, Microsoft, Nokia and Yahoo positioning themselves to become leading mobile advertising networks
• Who are the remaining independent mobile advertising providers and aggregators following the recent merger and acquisition spree
• How are the traditional players in the advertising industry approaching the mobile channel
• What are the initial experiences from mobile marketing campaigns
• Which advertising formats will become most successful in the mobile environment
• How is the ad-based revenue model going to impact mobile search, location-based services and social networking communities
• What long-term effects will the rise of mobile advertising have on the telecom industry