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.

JupiterResearch says that it has found that introducing portable media players (PMP’s) with internet browsing capabilities are likely to stimulate significant growth in the amount of people accessing the mobile web and will create additional opportunity for mobile advertisers, who are expected to spend $2.2 billion on mobile messaging, display ads, and search via mobile technology by the year 2012.

Adoption of internet browsing on mobile phones is expected to climb from 16 percent at the end of 2007 to 19 percent at the end of 2008.

Their new study was completed in cooperation with mobile advertising service provider AdMob.

According to the report, the majority of page views and advertising impressions on mobile phones and portable media players are on a small screen with a mini-browser. Impressions and click-through rates (CTR) per device, however, are higher for mobile devices with full browsers.

“Mobility is adding a time and space dimension to media and advertising that has the potential to drive up CPM’s significantly. We are finding ads with location tags are selling at five to tenfold premiums over basic ads,” said Julie Ask, Vice President at JupiterResearch and lead author of the report. “The ability to tag users with location, demographics, and behavioral data complemented by devices that support rich media to avoid having their role in the advertising value chain made obsolete must continued to push forward.”

In order to be truly successful, mobile carriers must continue to enable access with affordable portable media players, mobile devices and innovative business models while protecting their stake in the value chain by adding information layers to user profiles.

“New mobile devices such as portable media players available on the market with dramatically improved user interfaces and capable of fully rendering HTML web sites are driving consumer demand for Internet access on mobile devices,” said David Schatsky, President of JupiterResearch. “Carriers should continue to enable consumers by rolling out more devices that look like portable media players at affordable prices – perhaps even as a second device – and continue to break down economic barriers of pricing and application restrictions to consumer adoption.”

 Contact Us to see how we can help your company to access the mobile internet.

New Research from InsightExpress Identifies Three Mobile Behavioral Profiles. According to new research from InsightExpress, a leading provider of digital marketing research, mobile consumers can be segmented into three new and distinct behavioral profiles: Mobile Pioneers, Mobile Wannabes and Mobile Traditionalists. This research, the third installment from the company’s ongoing mobile research program, indicates that when it comes to usage, two ends of the mobile spectrum exist.

Internet, unique applications, and/or video. The majority of Mobile Pioneers are under 35 years old, one third of them have a smartphone*, and they skew male, single and minority. The Mobile Wannabe (25 percent of the market) has tried some advanced features and would like to use them more. Less than half are under 35, and only 5 percent own a smartphone. The Mobile Traditionalists (60 percent of the market) are content to use their mobiles for phone calls and texting, and two thirds of them are over 35 years old.

Which behaviors separate the Pioneers from the rest of the pack? Almost two thirds (62 percent) had sent a text message to someone in the same room, compared to 39 percent of Wannabes and 26 percent of Traditionalists. A healthy 57 percent of Pioneers had taken a picture of a product using their phone and sent it to someone to get an opinion, compared to 30 percent of Wannabes and 16 percent of Traditionalists.

While the Pioneers set the trends, the Wannabes popularize them, making these individuals particularly interesting to marketers. This group is likely a barometer of future usage trends that will be adopted on a wider scale. For example, while 79 percent of Pioneers had taught someone else how to use their mobile phone features, Wannabes were not far behind with 65 percent having done so.

Staying ahead of the mobile curve can also be dangerous. Mobile Pioneers were most likely to have walked into something or someone while using their device, and most likely to have thrown their mobile phone at someone or something. Luckily, all three profiles stated that they had added ICE (In Case of Emergency) to their phone’s contact list (35 percent of Pioneers, 25 percent of Wannabes and 22 percent of Traditionalists).

Advertisers should be interested in Pioneers and Wannabes because these groups are more likely to agree that:

• Most advertising is relevant to them
• They believe that products that are advertised are a lot better than ones that are not advertised at all
• Advertising keeps them up-to-date on products they would like to have
• They have told someone about an advertisement they liked

“Knowing which type of mobile consumer you are contacting, or want to contact, is a big piece of the mobile marketing puzzle,” said Joy Liuzzo, Director of Mobile Research at InsightExpress. “The Wannabes are especially fascinating since they are eager to learn about and use advanced features. With this research, we continue to drive the conversation about current usage profiles and where mobile behavior is headed.”

About The Research

InsightExpress fielded an online survey to 1,516 mobile device owners age 18+ in January 2008. The survey data has a margin of error of between 3-6 percent, assuming a 95 percent confidence interval.

* Defined as Blackberry or smartphone (iPhone, Treo, etc).

If you want to know how we can help your company to reach for “Mobile Pioneers and Wannabes”, please Contact Us.

Anyone who doubts how important mobile phones are and will become as a platform and marketing medium needs only to look at the latest Pew Internet & American Life report. Cellphones are now more important to US adults than the internet, television, landline phones, and email. In addition, an increasing number of consumers are using their mobile phones for things other than voice communications, including accessing mobile internet content.

Pew conducted a telephone survey of 2,054 US adults in December, 2007 (500 were reached on their cellphones) and found the following:

Pew segments the data by race, age, and, in some cases, income. Among younger uses, as one might expect, the trends become even more pronounced:

18-29 year olds: Ever done (%) Typical day (%)

Send or receive text messages 85 60
Take a picture 82 31
Play a game 47 16
Send or receive email 28 10
Access the internet 31 14
Record a video 34 6
Play music 38 16
Send or receive instant messages 26 9
Get a map or directions to another location 18 6
Watch video 19 6

Just a day earlier, comScore reported that the number of users who access the Internet through mobile broadband connections (predominantly using a PC) had grown by 154 percent in a year. Currently, roughly 1 percent of the US online population uses mobile broadband to get online but those numbers should increase dramatically as the mobile infrastructure continues to develop — and more people use 3G mobile networks on their cellphones for internet access.

Do you want more information about how we can help your company to use mobile marketing  and mobile internet to connect to your customers please contact us.

2008 will be another year for the mobile internet. More and more applications are getting developed, to make use of the mobile medium. An overview of mobile internet applications that you can use at the moment.

1. Find mobile websites, mark them for later use, and even build a mobile web page with your favorite links for quick access.
2. A search and start page for mobile browsing.
3. Discover, submit, and rate mobile sites to share with others
4. A mobile search engine for all sorts of information including MySpace.
5. A site that allows you to publish videos, photos, and more to both the normal web and mobile devices.
6. trip a site or RSS feed down to the bare bones to make it easier on your phone, also use the site as search engine on the go.
7. Access to email, feeds, update your friends and more.
8. Sync your Google Calendar with your mobile phone or PDA.
9. Access any and all of your email accounts from one centralized mobile mailbox.
10. A widget service for mobile devices that has over 20,000 widgets at your disposal.
11. Publish a mobile blog directly from your phone using SMS or email.
12. Publish your camera phone pictures directly to the web.
13. Publish your photos from your phone quickly to the net.
14. Shoot your video in 3GP format and publish it directly to the web.
15. Publish videos and pictures from your phone to the web.
16. Publish your on-the-go pictures as a life blog and then use it on any number of other websites.
17. Share videos and pictures from moments in your life.
18. A custom RSS reader for your mobile phone that will also allow you to sync with your online subscriptions.
19. Ever feel like you really need to read your RSS feeds on the go? Then this is the service for you. It can be accessed with any phone with 2G or 3G access, and they recommend an XHTML browser.
20. Subscribe to the feeds you want and then access them from your mobile device.
21. Convert any website or RSS feed into one readable by your phone.