Mobile Marketing Blog by InMovil Media

Infinita Inc., a consulting firm based in Tokyo, specializing in mobile telecommunications, announced today the release of its new research report “21st Century Mobile Marketing: Global Insights from the World’s Most Advanced Mobile Society: Japan”.

This 188-page market report provides detailed insights into the inner workings of mobile marketing and advertising in a country where the vast majority of the population uses mobile Internet services already - and where mobile marketing is fast evolving into a standard part of the marketing mix, a scenario soon to become reality in many other parts of the world as well.

According to industry data released by Japan’s largest advertising agency Dentsu in late February 2008, mobile advertising expenditures in the Japanese market in 2007 increased by almost 60% compared to the previous year, reaching JPY 62.1 billion (ca. USD 620 million). This result tops even Dentsu’s own optimistic prognosis, published 12 months earlier, by 12%, a significant performance in an advertising market close to saturation - total advertising expenditures in Japan only grew by 1.1% from 2006 to 2007, and by 1.7% between 2005 and 2006.

For the first time ever, online advertising expenditures (JPY 443.6 billion, ca. USD 4.4 billion) exceeded combined radio and magazine advertising expenditures, which each were down around 4% on a YoY basis. Newspaper advertising suffered even more heavily at -5%, and TV advertising expenditures are down for the third year in a row. While the importance of mobile advertising is growing, it still accounts for a relatively small share of online advertising revenues (10.3%) and for a minor piece of the whole advertising pie, which is still dominated by TV, print and sales promotion.

Considering how media usage is developing in Japan, there is still clearly a disconnect between advertising spendings on traditional media and mobile. Between 2000 and 2006, the share of time that consumers spend on mobile (relative to all forms of media) has increased four-fold to 4%, but mobile-related expenditures still only account for 1% of all advertising spendings. 25% of Japanese mobile data users today respond to mobile campaigns and actually sign up for promotions or make purchases as a result. Close to another third click on ads, but do not participate in promotional offers.

Thus, there is no question that mobile advertising will continue to gain in significance in Japan - a market where more than 4 in 5 of a total 100 million mobile subscribers use mobile data services. Which factors have contributed to where we stand today, what are the forces driving the industry at the moment, and which challenges and opportunities does the market face in the coming years? Taking Japan as an example of an advanced mobile society, what developments can be expected in other markets, which are fast catching up technologically and with regard to user adoption?

Do you want an answer to these questions and how to apply them to your business, please contact us.

U.S. brands have integrated mobile marketing into their traditional advertising campaigns, CRM programs and Call Centers in order to increase higher response, enhance loyalty and improve customer relations. When applied correctly, targeted and creatively, mobile marketing gives exceptional results.

“Most people today use a cell phone. Lack of cell phone spam translates into a major channel of communications without the noise of traditional channels,” explained John Spagnuolo, President of the New Media Institute.

“The closer and the more targeted you connect with consumers within their lifestyle, the better your results will be,” noted Bas Vervoort, Director of InMovil Media. “When properly and creatively executed, mobile marketing can increase traditional response rates by 5-20%, Moreover it delivers a higher-level of customer service and enhances loyalty.”
Mobile Marketing Tips

1. Offer an incentive for individuals to opt-in to your mobile campaign.
2. Segment your messaging. Mobile technology makes this task easy and seamless.
3. Measure and refine your mobile marketing program in real-time.

A mobile marketing program may include the following features:
* Lead capture
* Additional touch-points to traditional advertising campaigns
* Pre/during/post event marketing
* Promotions, sweepstakes & contests
* Coupons & discounts
* Lifestyle, loyalty & community brand building
* Multi-media content creation and distribution
* Mobile videos
* Location based marketing
* Mobile polling and voting
* Sales and distribution programs
* Segmented broadcast messaging
* Web and email integration

If you want to know how you can use these mobile marketing tips for your company, please contact us.

M:Metrics has published mobile marketing data which reports that young males are a rich target for mobile advertisers, as among mobile phone users 36 percent of 18 to 34-year-old men accessed mobile media in February. Men in this age group are also highly receptive to SMS advertising and marketing, with 9 percent response rate, versus a 4 percent market average.

In Western Europe, the male population is inclined to browse and download content on the mobile Web. A quarter of all male mobile phone users accessed mobile media, like for example mobile websites, compared to just under 19 percent of women. The audience is also quite young: 28 percent of 13 to 17-year-olds consume mobile media, only 12 percent of those 55 and older do.

“Reaching the 18 to 34-year-old age demographic is a real challenge to advertisers, as this group is spending less time consuming print and broadcast media,” observed Paul Goode, senior analyst. “According to TGI M:Metrics data, in Great Britain, young consumers are redirecting that attention to mobile, as 18 to 34 year olds comprise 56 percent of mobile media users, compared to only 29 percent of TV viewers.”

Interestingly, U.S. mobile users are more active consumers of mobile media and they use the mobile medium in a different way. As unlike Europeans they use SMS less frequently for news and information retrieval and are more likely to have data plans, which impacts mobile content consumption directly. Among Europeans, the UK has the highest percentage of mobile media users, at 26.8 percent, while Germany and France lag, at 18.4 percent and 18.5 percent, respectively.

“In Great Britain, mobile media is attracting a highly desirable audience that is 44 percent more likely to be defined as ‘cash rich, time poor’ than the market average,” said Goode. “In fact, data from TGI M:Metrics confirms that one third of all UK mobile media users agree they are tempted to buy products they’ve seen advertised.”

“Since the early days of mobile marketing an advertising, SMS advertising has been an effective way to reach the masses, but advertises are now actively looking at the mobile web to access new audiences,” said Goode. “According to TGI M:Metrics, adding mobile to a media plan increases the efficiency of reaching key target groups, a metric that will continue to improve with the growth of 3G and smartphone ownership.”

Contact us to see how we can help you to reach your target group via SMS or the mobile web.

To give some more information about mobile marketing campaigns, I herewith show you 10 mobile marketing campaigns anounced by the MMA. These are interesting not only for brand promotion, but also for building communities at any organization.

1. Nike ID. Nike erected a large, interactive billboard in Times Square. Passers-by could use their cell phones to text in their own custom design and receive a free pair of Nike IDs. In Wheeler and Keenan’s video, individuals went nuts when they saw their own shoes posted live on the jumbotron in front of them. Though Nike gave away 3000 pairs of shoes in this promotion, I had the distinct impression that users were just as excited by their design on the billboard as they were by the free footwear.
2. Dove ‘Campaign for Real Beauty.’ Dove erected a large billboard of a happy, fresh-looking older woman with a text-to-vote number so that pedestrians could choose between ‘wrinkled’ and ‘wonderful.’ The billboard’s live ticker showed the combined results from both text and online voting.
3. Pontiac G6. This cameraphone promotion for the G6 encouraged consumers to look for G6es out on the street. By snapping a photo of a G6 and sending it in, a consumer was entered into a drawing to win $1,000,000.
4. American Express Wimbledon Sponsorship. The Wimbledon bleachers contain a captive audience of ticketholders. American Express promoted a contest in which any audience member could guess at the winners of the next day’s event, and thereby be entered into a contest pool. Wheeler noted that those people who entered were much more likely to come back for all 14 days of the competition. (Or was it simply that those who had planned to attend all days were more likely to participate in the contest?) Even better than brand awareness, American Express had a meaningful number of card applications submitted as a direct result of consumer participation in the mobile contest.
5. Lenovo Mobile WAP. After its aquisition of the IBM PC business, Lenovo ran banner ads on the USA Today WAP (mobiel website) site. The campaign’s clickthrough rate of 6.6% was roughly double the industry average. Lenovo also had an impressive 487% lift in aided brand awareness among consumers who clicked through to the WAP site.
6. NBC ’s Deal or No Deal. The Lucky Case Game integrates mobile into the TV show experience. Viewers can text in lucky case numbers and win cash prizes if there’s a match. NBC has also had some success with its model wallpaper for mobile. The multiple products are not only a good way to access viewers on multiple screens, but also a way to generate additional revenue. According to Wheeler, this mobile content revenue pays for the entire show’s production - and as a result, all of the normal TV advertising becomes gravy.
7. Axe. The company’s ‘little black book’ applet is a ringtone giveaway. Guys can choose tunes that they like, and then associate the tones with particular contacts (presumably, women) in their address books. This provides something of value to the consumer while reinforcing brand associations.
8. Nike Airmax. This aspirational advertising campaign shows athletes getting up early and doing their thing. The mobile campaign worked from this theme, enticing customers to sign up for a recorded wake-up call from a famous athlete such as Maria Sharapova. The campaign managers saw single users setting up multiple calls, and initially thought they were being used for crank calls - instead, they discovered that coaches and team managers were signing up their entire roster. This 8-week promotion exceeded its total target participation by 300% by the end of the first week alone.
9. Adidas 2D barcode Tagging. Mobile 2D barcodes, which turn your phone into a bar code scanner, are everywhere in Japan and Korea. Adidas used these codes on retail merchandise tags and clothing imprints. Potential customers could take a photo of the color code on a sleeve, and the handset would then load up the manaufacturer’;s WAP (mobile web) site. Over the course of the test run, 60,000 people participated in the Korean Adidas program, and Adidas had over 2,000,000 page views. (Note: It’s up to carriers as to when this technology becomes available in the US.)
10. Snakes On a Plane. This inventive mobile promotion may be my personal favorite. Users can generated a customized voice call from Samuel L. Jackson. To set it up, go online to select the recipient’s personal attributes from pull-down menus and submit the necessary phone numbers. As a recipient, it looks like the phone call is coming in from a friend, but when they pick it up, it’s Mr. Jackson. This was phenomenally successful in raising movie buzz, with over 4,000,000 phone calls made during the core promotional period.

Although all of these programs were highly interactive, it was mentioned that WAP (mobile website) banners, bought via CPM, are significant in driving people to promotions and loyalty programs.

Why are these campaigns worth notice? They integrated all or most of these key success factors:

• Relevant to the consumer
• Welcome invitation to participate
• Entertaining
• Drives a specific action
• Integrated where appropriate
• Connects what was previously disconnected
• Simplicity

If your company has mobile on the agenda for 2008, please let us inform you how we can help you to make your mobile marketing campaign a success.

I came across this article by Kenneth Hein made for Brandweek

It gives a good overview of mobile marketing, what can be used in reality and especially the so called “fantasies”, which appear with some irony not to be fantasies.

Those who doubt that mobile marketing hasn’t made headway might want to go amp themselves.

Among the brands that ponied up millions for a piece of the Super Bowl this year was PepsiCo beverage Amp Energy. While its 15-second TV spots didn’t venture far from the proven realms of Big Game locker-room humor—one featured an overweight truck driver starting a stalled-out car via jumper cables hooked up to his nipples—a quieter, related effort was reaching much further out. How far? Well, to people who might not even have had the game on at all. As part of its NFL deal, Amp Energy sponsored Sprint’s exclusive Super Bowl mobile channel, which allowed it to run ads via cell phone. A photo of the Amp can materialized on cell phone screens along with music, swirling green flames and the tagline “Go Amp Yourself.” (Hopefully, none of those cell phone users elected to do it with jumper cables.)

When a Super Bowl ad effort stretches into the cellular realm, it’s surely a sign that mobile marketing has arrived, right? After all, even though the third-screen spot was a timid boil-down of the in-your-face TV version, the very idea of adapting a commercial for mobile distribution would have seemed like an alien concept only a few years ago.

Today it is a reality, sort of. Around this time 12 months ago, experts were busy touting mobile marketing as the Next Big Thing. It wasn’t. And not a whole lot is different. Mega brands like Pepsi and Burger King are still toe-dipping in the mobile pool, testing various forms of advertising and promos even as the bulk of their spending dollars go elsewhere.

As mobile expert John Hadl puts it: “It’s hard to get a real read on the value of mobile when you’re only spending $25,000 to $50,000 on it.”

But things are beginning to change. Mobile marketing is “headed in the right direction,” said John Vail, director of the interactive marketing group at Pepsi-Cola North America, Purchase, N.Y. “It’s just taking a lot longer than people thought.” Mobile analytics firms such as U.K.-based Bango are helping companies measure mobile Web site traffic, what devices recipients used and the countries they’re in. In February, 58 million mobile subscribers reported that they’d already been exposed to mobile advertising, per San Francisco-based Nielsen Mobile (a unit of Nielsen Co., which also owns Brandweek). While that’s only 23% of today’s total mobile subscribers, that number will spike as marketers’ mobile experiments continue to grow. And Hadl, who serves as managing partner of Beverly Hills-based BrandInHand, overseer of Procter & Gamble’s mobile efforts, added that a threshold is approaching: “Once there’s direct proof of ROI,” he said, “the spend will shift faster than the industry can handle.”

That might happen as soon as two years from now. Forrester Research forecasts that mobile-marketing spending in the U.S. will surge from the $270 million it stands at now to $405 million in 2009. Then it all goes exponential, doubling every year through 2012, at which point the Cambridge, Mass.-based research firm predicts mobile marketing will be worth $2.8 billion.

Marketers view the mobile marketing explosion as “inevitable,” said Bill Jones, president of Atlanta-based mobile Internet platform provider Air2Web, which counts Starbucks and UPS as clients. Some are “really trying to accelerate” the channel because “properly used it is the most effective mechanism to interact with customers and prospects.”

All of which begs the question: How can marketers profitably use mobile devices to deliver their brand messages right now?

What follows are some of the answers. Like many emergent ideas in the tech realm, mobile marketing’s birth has been attended by as much fantasy as reality, and marketers are learning the painstaking (and, at times, just painful) differences between the two. For instance, studies repeatedly show that many consumers don’t like to get ads on their phones. (A mere 10% of mobile data users deem ads received via PDAs to be acceptable, according to Nielsen Mobile.) At the same time, a third of the same respondents said they’d be OK with seeing ads, so long as the spots offset their mobile bills—say, via free minutes. “That,” said Nielsen Mobile corporate marketing vp Paul Okimoto, “is where we’re starting to see an uptick.”

No doubt, we’ll start to see many more of those. For now, here’s the story on the mobile-marketing phenom today—both fantasy and reality.


REALITY
Customers dig mobile games.
Videogames were once synonymous with geekdom, but one glance at who’s using a Wii these days (including AARP members and the physically disabled, at last check) shows how dated that stereotype is. This love affair has carried over to mobile devices. In fact, some watchers are now predicting that the global revenue from mobile games will eventually surpass that of traditional console and handheld versions. According to U.K.-based consultancy Understanding & Solutions, mobile gaming is expected to hit $6 billion by 2011.

Some brands are already prepared to embrace this passion by offering free downloadable games for mobile devices that keep their brand front and center. The latest is BK City, debuting April 21, an elaborate game with three worlds (five games in each) ranging from a castle to a BK drive-thru. It will be available across all carriers except for Verizon. POP, online ads and mobile ads, of course, will support the effort. BK City is the latest creation of Mobliss, Seattle, whose prior efforts include Nickelodeon’s Rugrats Food Fight and Brady Bunch Kung Fu.

“A lot of what mobile content advertisers throw out there is cheesy,” said Tia Lang, director of media and interactive for the Miami-based chain. But, “as players progress, our game gets more difficult. It’s fun, funny and relevant to our target.”


FANTASY
People will never use their phones to buy stuff.
Think again. Remember when everyone was worried about using credit cards online? Even some tech-savvy shoppers wrung their hands over cyberthieves stealing their identities and draining their savings accounts. (Psst—it rarely happens.) Even as those same worries have swirled around mobile banking and on-the-go transactions, the truth is that a quarter of cell users with mobile Web access have already trusted their handheld devices to do their shopping, according Harris Interactive, Rochester, N.Y. Sixteen percent already use mobile banking services and one-in-five respondents hope their phone becomes a mobile wallet.

Smarter brands are beginning to respond. In January, Pizza Hut began allowing U.S. consumers to order from any of its 6,200 stores using the mobile Web or text messaging. The chain said it expects half its sales to come online or via mobile devices within the next five years. Papa John’s began offering the ability to text in orders last November.

“If privacy and security issues can be caged, mobile banking and mobile wallet services could launch the next leg up for mobile operators,” predicted Joseph Porus, vp of Harris Interactive’s technology practice. Rajeev Raman, CEO of mywaves, a mobile video destination whose clients include MBW, concurs. In the near future, he said, “purchasing movie tickets, fast food and music via mobile phones will be considered normal, everyday behavior.”


REALITY
Convenience works.
Skip the cleverisms; brands that give consumers information that makes their lives easier are the ones that’ll benefit. “That’s why we bought the phone in the first place,” Hadl said.

Starbucks, for example, makes it easy to find the nearest latte with a mobile-based store locator. When is that blue turtleneck you ordered going to show up? UPS will let you track the whereabouts of your package on your mobile device.

“Too many people pigeonhole mobile marketing as just being ringtones or wallpapers,” said Air2Web’s Jones, whose company created both applications. Brands that sponsor services that tell users things like where the is nearest baby-changing station or where is the store where I can buy what I need, will thrive, added Hadl of BrandinHand. “Soon,” he said, “mobile devices won’t simply be a push medium.”


FANTASY
Texting (aka SMS) isn’t effective.
Like hell it isn’t. While many are looking at mobile video, the mobile Web and other features, the simple, text-only brand campaign often still is what works the best. Why? Because even the oldest, most primitive cell phones out there have the technology that lets people receive a text promo and respond to one. Plus, the practice of text messaging has already been widely adopted.

In December, 1-800-Free411 attached ads sent to users who opted in to receive text horoscopes, diet tips and other information from a company called Limbo. While the free-information service usually gets about 40,000 to 50,000 new callers daily, that volume shot up to nearly 80,000 a day after the mobile ads ran. Overall, Limbo received a 7.1% response rate for text ads it ran for its clients in the fourth quarter.

“The forgotten technology of SMS will be a much bigger factor in digital spends than anyone is predicting,” said Jonathan Linner, CEO of Limbo, Burlingame, Calif., who’s amused that so many marketers are buzzing about putting a movie or banner ad on a cell phone. Those people, he said, “Don’t’ get it yet. You’ll get 10 times better performance from SMS.”


REALITY
The iPhone’s changed everything.
One of the biggest hang-ups (pun intended) for mobile marketers is the lack of “high” in the tech. We’re talking about antideluvian cell phones that everybody was carrying around prior to last summer, when the Apple iPhone hit stores. In January, CEO Steve Jobs had promised the iPhone would “reinvent” telecommunications. Some disagreed. Some still do. But mobile-marketing advocates generally aren’t among them. The average iPhone user over the age of 18 is five times more likely to explore the mobile Web and 11 times more likely to use mobile video or TV, per Nielsen Mobile. An iPhone-toting American also is 70% more likely to use SMS.

“Look no further than the iPhone for proof that improving the device and user interface can radically increase media consumption,” said John Najarian, svp-media and business development at the Comcast Entertainment Group, who oversees E!’s mobile page.

Better still, the iPhone’s popularity has meant lower-price imitators—triggering a new generation of “smart phones” that experts like Chetan Sharma, co-author of the just-released book Mobile Advertising, believe will make up as many as 20% of the domestic market in two years. (More powerful data pipelines as well as all-you-can-eat data plans will help, too.) Thanks to the iPhone, Sharma said, Americans finally think the cell phone “is more than just something you talk with.”


FANTASY
It’s getting easier to run mobile marketing programs.
Dream on. It still takes about two months to get a major carrier like AT&T or Verizon to approve a text program. And that, according to Gene Keenan, vp-mobile services at Isobar, San Francisco, and vice chairman of the Mobile Marketing Assn., Denver, is “ridiculous.”

“You can by a URL and have a Web site up in two hours,” Keenan said. “It’s still way too hard for brands and agencies to do mobile.” Even worse: “Until it’s easier for big brands to participate, you won’t see the big money.”

Keenan and experts like him have likened carriers to walled gardens: nice to be part of, but good luck getting in. They exert authoritarian control over their on-deck content (that’s the proprietary stuff available only to subscribers) and move with Soviet-style bureaucratic slowness in approving marketing programs.

For instance, WAP sites and banner ads have to be customized by handset and by carrier. “It introduces a lot of complexity,” Sharma said. “You can’t press a button and have a program launch nationwide. You have to negotiate everything and get your content approved.”

But stay tuned; fantasy might turn to reality by this time next year. “You can get over the wall,” Hadl said. “You’ll get hot and sweaty doing it, but you can get over. AOL already proved that this [walled approach] is a model for failure.”


REALITY
The mobile ecosystem is evolving rapidly.
Quick as the pace of technology is, sometimes it never seems quick enough. But mobile advocates hamstrung by tools that haven’t kept pace with their marketing dreams may soon be doing a high-tech jig. In November, Google announced Android, a new Linux-based operating system for mobile. Microsoft just inked a deal with Nokia that’ll bring its Silverlight platform to mobile. And this quarter, Yahoo! will launch what it calls onePlace, a mobile bookmarking tool that will allow better control of information. These developments come on the heels of AOL’s ‘07 purchase of Third Screen Media, a company that serves banner ads to mobile Web sites. Nokia bought the mobile agency Enpocket last year, too.

All of it, said Sharma, means that “there’s a cautious optimism” out there. “Optimism, because of the uniqueness and reach mobile presents. Caution because of the enormous fragmentation in the industry.”


FANTASY
There is one killer application.
Just like Gilda Radner and Dan Aykroyd debated whether New Shimmer was a floor wax or a dessert topping (it’s both!) on Saturday Night Live, each marketer seems to have his own miracle claim for mobile marketing. And so far, nobody’s quite nailed it.

Take GPS-enabled initiatives, which some see as the potential holy grail of mobile marketing. CBS Mobile announced a test earlier in the year that’ll pinpoint ads to customers based on where they happen to be standing, and Burger King’s Lang has been lovingly nurturing the idea of “serving customers an ad at lunchtime, asking them if they’re hungry.” The problem? “Those kinds of things are fantasy.”

Hardly the only one. “My fantasy is offering Pepsi Smash [music programming] as video-on-demand optimized for the third screen for millions to view,” Vail said. P&G, General Mills and others are currently in test with Cellfire, a company whose technology allows customers to store e-coupons on their cell phones.

There’s the dream of direct-to-consumer mobile video, alive in the mind of BMW Mini as it kicked off a program with mywaves in January. Still others are excited about mobile search; more than 46 million used their phones to search for information in the third quarter of last year, per Nielsen Mobile.

Alex Muller will tell you that GPS-driven mobile marketing won’t be a fantasy for much longer (then again, he’s CEO of GPShopper, which enables mobile-using customers to track down the best deals on stuff they want to buy.) “There will be a point,” he said, “where flipping through a paper circular won’t make sense.”


REALITY
There needs to be standards.
Mobile marketing is still a lot like the Wild West: a landscape of many players of various reputes, each a competitor peddling his wares and promises. “We need to develop more standards to reduce the friction out there,” said Jordan Berman, executive director of media innovation at AT&T Mobility, New York. “There needs to be more uniformity about how programs get off the ground. I’m on the MMA board of directors and we all agree it is a confusing marketplace out there.”

Then again, people said much the same thing about the Web itself when it was new. The growing pains, Berman said, are natural: “Online is like a toddler; mobile marketing is still in the womb.”

 Contact us to see how we can make these Fantasies and Realities make work for your company.