On Device Portals – a new report

A new report: On Device Portals & Mobile Content: The way forward for mobile content presentation, delivery and monetisation.

What is an ODP? Why shouldn’t brand and content owners just use WAP portals? Where are the market opportunities for ODPs? What are the challenges in driving consumer take up of mobile services – what are the solutions to those challenges? And what does the future hold for ODPs? This paper aims to provide some insights and answers to these and other questions.

To provide breadth and depth, the following industry experts, pundits and stake holders have been interviewed to provide market insight and first hand experience on the subject of ODPs and their role in the evolution of mobile content delivery.

• Scott Beaumont, Managing Director - Refresh Mobile
• Dominic Bignall, CEO - U-turn Media Group
• Russell Buckley - Mobhappy.com
• Elaine Doherty, Strategic Marketing Manager - Surf Kitchen
• Harvey Kaplan, Director of Mobile Operations, Friend Finder, Inc.
• Helen Keegan, Managing Director - Beep Marketing
• Brad Keeling, Founder and Share Holder - Slice Wireless
• Dr. Geoff Kendall, CTO - Next Device
• Geoff McGrath, Managing Director - July Systems, UK
• Ted Wugofski, Former CTO - Action Engine and former Openwave Executive

Download the full report for free here.

Carnival of the Mobilists #29

Be sure to check out this weeks Carnival host - OpenGardens. Ajit Jaokar’s Open Gardens blog is one of the best in the industry and we're really happy to have him. Read the carnvial!

In case you missed it, the Carnival now has its own website and it’s sponsored by our friends at Khosla Ventures. This means you can win cash prizes for entering and hosting the Carnival every month.

But wait - therei's more! If you post your own article in the next 15 minutes ... Wait... seriously... If you're looking for a very VERY cool way to post your article to the next carnival of the mobilists - follow the link on the right via Blog Carnival - or just go here!

Sorry for the delay in getting this weeks host promoted - just back from a long weekend in Venice! In mobilists need a holiday sometimes!

Definitions: Mobile Marketing and Mobile Advertising Version 0.1

I was recently tasked with coming up with a definition for mobile marketing. Pretty quickly I came to the consulsion that a separate definition for "mobile advertising" would be equally helpful. As I'm active in both the Direct Marketing Association - UK (who gave me the task) and the Mobile Marketing Association - UK where I have been working to help clarify the mission statement, I've actually had quite a bit of input from two sets of industry thought leaders. i,e.; I didn't come up with this all on my own. Nonetheless, it has been a fun process and here is what I’ve come up with. It’s intended to be a version 0.1 definition and I’d welcome your help and comments to make sure it is accurate and helpful.

To start off with I went to the web and looked up some definitions for traditional marketing:

• Marketing: The systematic planning, implementing and control of a mix of business activities intended to bring together buyers and sellers for the mutually advantageous exchange or transfer of products.
  
• Advertising: The paid, public, non-personal announcement of a persuasive message by an identified sponsor; the non-personal presentation or promotion by a firm of its products to its existing and potential customers.
  
• Direct Marketing: Sales and promotion technique in which the promotional materials are delivered individually to potential customers via direct mail, telemarketing, door-to-door selling or other direct means.
  

- thus -

• Mobile Marketing: The systematic planning, implementing and control of a mix of business activities intended to bring together buyers and sellers for the mutually advantageous exchange or transfer of products where the primary point of contact with the consumer is via their mobile device.
• Mobile Advertising: The paid, public, non-personal announcement of a persuasive message by an identified sponsor; the non-personal presentation or promotion by a firm of its products to its existing and potential customers where such communication is delivered to a mobile phone or other mobile device. Examples of mobile advertising would include: WAP Banner ads, mobile search advertising, mobile video bumpers, interstitial ads in on device portals.
• Mobile Direct Marketing: Sales and promotion technique in which the promotional materials are delivered individually to potential customers via the potential customer’s mobile phone or other mobile device. Examples of mobile direct marketing include the sending of SMS, MMS or WAP push messages, Bluetooth messaging and other interrupt based marketing to mobile phones or other mobile devices.

By breaking the definition across these lines, a further clarification may be possible offering significant clarity in regards to best practice:

• Mobile Advertising does not require permission.
• Mobile Direct Marketing requires permission.

What about Text-to-Win?

Text-to-win is a “response mechanic” not unlike traditional “bingo cards” or web forms. The consumer is presented with a call-to-action via advertising or some other direct marketing where the action is to send a text message. These campaigns have the unique ability to begin the process of acquiring consumer opt-in permission for future direct mobile marketing in that the consumer inherently offers their mobile phone number as part of the process. (A small caveat here: The French have employed SMS+ whereby all consumers are anonomized to an identifier that is unique to a specific campaign and thus are never actually giving away their mobile number.)

Where does mobile content fit in these definitions?

Ringtones: It all started with ringtones. And then screen savers. And then there were sports scores and stock alerts. Today we have mobile avatars, full-track music downloads, music videos and more. All of this mobile content and it is effectively a product – an accessory or subscription that the mobile-enabled consumer will purchase. Like all products, mobile content must be marketed in order to raise the awareness of the consumer as to the products availability. Marketing of mobile content can be done via traditional advertising, the latest in word-of-mouth-marketing, direct mail, mobile advertising, or mobile direct marketing. Sometimes mobile content can be sponsored offering the content to the consumer at a reduced price or even for free.

Is sponsoring of mobile content mobile direct marketing – or mobile advertising?

Great question – and the answer is: It depends. If the content is being delivered to the consumer via a mobile content company where some promotional content is added – it would fall into the category of mobile advertising. If, on the other hand, the advertiser licenses content to include with a permission-based message to the consumer, that would be mobile direct marketing.

And mobile TV?

Mobile TV – The hype on this is slowing but it was really quite heavy just last month. Mobile TV may include advertising as a way to subsidize the content. Again, as the content is non-personal this would fall into the mobile advertising category. I could go on – but what say we jus keep this simple. A 30 second TV spot is advertising. A 5 second Mobile TV spot is also advertising.

Summary Mobile Direct Marketing vs. Mobile Advertising:

	Mobile Direct Marketing	Mobile Advertising
Specific / Personal	X	O
Permission Required	X	O
SMS, MMS	X	O
WAP Push	X	O
Bluetooth	X	O
WAP Banner Ads	O	X
Mobile TV	O	X
Mobile Search	O	X

So there you have it.

Agree? Disagree? Still confused? Let’s talk about it.

This weeks Carnival of the Mobilists #28

Be sure to check out this weeks Carnival host - the Digital Evangelist. Read the carnvial!

But wait - there's more! And I'm not talking about Ginsu Knives!!!

Carlo has done a great job and the Carnival has it's very own website. Be sure to check out our new home "mobili.st"

But wait - therei's more! If you post your own article in the next 15 minutes ... Wait... seriously... If you're looking for a very VERY cool way to post your article to the next carnival of the mobilists - follow the link on the right via Blog Carnival - or just go here!

So why has mobile Internet taken off in Asia

A colleague was reading my earlier post about how mobile culture was a key factor in the new Zoove service in the US and posed the question to me:

Why do you think the Asian market has grown faster than ours (Europe)?

Have they had interoperability from day 1?

Was text always cheap there?

More to the point why do you think they have adopted mobile internet and mobile services so much readily than we have?

So – after giving it some thought – here is my point of view…

• Lack of Choice: In China the majority of the population doesn’t have internet access at home. It has always been far easier to put up a single mobile network tower than to run copper to 100,000,000 homes in the middle of a giant rice paddy. And having no other access to the Internet, people quickly learned how to use their mobile phone for this access.
• Mobile E-mail: Japan launched their mobile internet service with mobile e-mail. The majority of messaging in Japan is mobile imap. Consumers appetite for e-mail was quickly realized on their mobile phone. This made the leap to mobile websites much easier. The majority of messaging in Europe was SMS based with no direct connection to mobile Internet.
• Better revenue sharing: The European model doesn’t give enough of the revenue back to the content owner. I-mode was –arguably- more successful in Japan because the best content owners were actually making enough money to market the services themselves. They also had a unified platform to operate from (NTT Docomo I-Mode).
• Single culture. The entire population of Europe – with multiple countries and cultures – approximates the population of China with a single unified culture. When the right model is found it naturally spreads across the entire culture more easily than in Europe. For instance, the Norwegians use phones far differently than the Italians – who use them far differently than the Germans or the English.. etc. etc. etc. This means that there will always be an order of magnitude market factor that will apply to both success and failures in new service launches in a huge single culture ( China, Korea, Japan ) vs. multiple smaller and very distinct cultures such as those here in Europe.
• Sex Sells – and educates! Higher social acceptance of basic instinct marketing ( more acceptable to market sex and adult content ). The same is true in South and Latin American territories. Sex was a huge driver in the days of the VCR – and the Internet. China and Japan and Brazil etc all have a huge culture of adult mobile content. The more conservative Christian cultures in Europe mean there are fewer of these types of services. The fact is that people will learn how to do virtually anything if they can satisfy the base sex instinct – and when they have mastered using the mobile Internet for sex, all the other content types are equally accessible. VCRs were first used for XXX videos – and only later became mainstream for home videos and recording your favourite sitcom

Why has there been a greater adoption of mobile Internet in China, Korea and Japan? It’s a great question and one that I feel very strongly about. For too long MNOs and software vendors have been trying to tout the successes in Asia and Japan mobile services as the baseline as to how and what and why services will grow here in Europe. I have consistently said, “bullocks”.

Show me a service that works well in Sweden and we can talk about it working well in Norway – but not necessarily in Spain or Italy. Show me a service (like MMS and photo messaging) that is huge in Japan and I will contend that it has very little ability to predict how well it will go down here in the UK. (How many British do you see with 4 cameras slung around their necks when they go on holiday?)

But what was the real question?

I think the underlying question of my colleague was one of “How can we achieve greater success of mobile Internet here in Europe?” The answers, if we want to follow a successful model of Asia would be as follows:

Make mobile Internet more ubiquitous and cheaper than fixed line Internet

Turn off SMS and make e-mail accessible only via your mobile

Improve revenue sharing with mobile content owners

Convince everyone across Europe to want and like the same thing

-and/or-

Make all adult content free to everyone when accessed from their mobile…

Consumer preference – it’s a local thing.

This week's host for the Carnival of the Mobilists is Steve Jones over at 3G Portal. Be sure to check out Steve's excellent summary of the latest insights, happenings and general goings on! Don't just sit there... Read the Carnival!

Organic and Free Range Lists

Oraganic is not just a word used to describe chicken and beef, it is also a way to describe a list of consumers and their content information that is grown through good old-fashioned hard work. No additives or preservatives and no chemical treatments. In list speak that means no burying permission in dodgy terms and conditions and no using lists past their sell-by date (which is 3 months since last communication in case you were wondering)

And free range - you know - out in the wild as opposed to in tiny cages stacked one on top of another with narrow scary halls and hideous screams coming out from the blackness. In list speak that means that you don't buy lists from people that can't show you the credentials that were used to capture the opt-in and that it clearly states 3rd party permission.

Making, and Marketing, a Mobile Campaign: "As for SMS or other 'push' communications, the same double opt-in procedures used to build e-mail lists should apply when a mobile offering will require repeat communications. 'Consumers must know what they're signing up for, and know about any charges that apply,' said Darracott."

If you want to communicate via mobile (or e-mail for that matter) it's best to grow your own list and to do so using organic and free range principles. If you're going to buy your lists, make sure that your supplier has followed the same best practices.

Every name and contact information should have the following:
Time and date stamp as to when permission was acquired
Access to the exact verbage covering 1st and 3rd party opt-in
Statement showing that opt-in was express and not implied. i.e.; the consumer has to actively opt-in (tick a box or take some other action) as opposed to have opt-in apply as part of the terms and conditions.

And if you don't?

Well - you might be within the letter of the law but you certainly won't be within the spirit of the law. Consumers are a fickle bunch and just like produce that isn't organic and free range - it may have a long shelf life but the quality won't be nearly as good.

Mobile Culture affects Mobile Marketing

How Mobile Culture affects Mobile Marketing

As an American living in Europe I always find it interesting to see cultural differences drive completely different behaviour even when then underlying technology is fundamentally the same. The mobile phone in both America and Europe is fundamentally the same, but creating a compelling mobile call to action (MCA) is actually quite different.

Why don’t consumers in the US “get” text-ing?

It is widely accepted that text messaging has not seen the adoption rates in the US as it has across Europe. Some people attribute it to the fact that we American’s are just not very bright... or we are just very caught up in always doing things our own way. But there are actually two main factors that have inhibited growth of text messaging in the US. It didn’t work for everyone until April 2003 – and it had no financial driver.

1) Ubiquity: Until April 2003 there were no inter-carrier agreements for text messaging. So if you were on Verizon you couldn’t send a text message to a subscriber on the Sprint network. The problem in the US was further complicated in that there are at least 3 different mobile network technologies in use. GSM, CDMA and IDEN. Across Europe nearly all communication is via GSM (Although the good people at Qualcomm have a vision to change this…)

2) Cost: Mobile calls in Europe are expensive. When the European operators first introduced text messaging they had no idea the demand that it would generate. And as such they priced the cost of a text message fairly low. The actual price set made sending a text message cheaper than making a 1 minute voice call. Cost conscious consumers grabbed onto this fact and the service really started to take off. By setting the price the way they did, the consumer adoption was fantastic.

In the US it was a different situation. Mobile billing models in the US offer consumers hundreds – sometimes thousands – of free minutes for calls. And, having seen the huge business potential of text messaging in Europe US carriers priced text messaging at a price that was good for business, but bad for adoption. It was cheaper for consumers to make a phone call than to try to figure out how to send a text message. There was no financial incentive to text.

European MCAs

Today more and more brands and marketers are implementing MCAs into their traditional marketing. Yesterday’s trend was that ever ad had to contain a URL to access from the Internet. Today every add contains an MCA giving consumers a key word and a short code. i.e.; “Text SPORTS to 88800”. For consumers that have grown up sending text messages since they received their first mobile this is a trivial thing to do. Consumers regularly order ringtones and other mobile content all by sending text message. And from everything we see, this trend is not going to slow anytime soon.

But what about a US MCA?

A recent consumer study from Zoove shows that US consumers are more likely to engage with mobile marketing by placing a phone call that is associated with a special way of dialling. Zoove’s StarStar™ dialling takes advantage of the cultural traits in the US. Rather than trying to get US consumers to learn how to text and then to remove the fear of cost associated with text messaging, get the consumer to make a phone call by dialling a special number. This is cool.

Dial by name

One other cultural difference between the US and the rest of the world is the trend to “dial by name”. Since marketers first started trying to get consumers to call to place an order they have been trying to find a way to help consumers remember their number. The longest running – and most successful – was the dial by name.

If you look at any telephone you’ll find that there are a series of letters associated with each of the numbers except for 1 and 0. For instance, the number “2” is associated with the letters “ABC”. The number “8” is associated with “TUV”. If you want people to remember your special toll free number you could say “Dial 1-800-469-2653” or you could say “Dial 1-800-4-MY-COKE”

In the UK, SMS short codes are currently restricted to the range from 60000-69999 and 80000-89999 – so that means you can only spell words that begin with “MNO” or “TUV”. In the US the full range of short codes is available so you can spell any 5 letter word you want.

The Zoove solution shows how this is implemented by asking consumers to dial **CAR from their mobile phone. The Europeans would say, “That’s confusing – how would you do that?” – The Americans will simply pick up their phone and dial **227 and then hit the dial button.

Culture – Work with it rather than trying to change it

What I’m getting at is that it is really nice to see someone (Zoove) working “with” the current culture rather than trying to change it. Rather than trying to educate American consumers on how to text they have capitalized on the way their consumers already think, behave and respond.

For those marketers trying to run “global” campaigns you need to think about more than the fact that the word Nova in English might be a great name for a car, but when your consumer base is at least 15% Mexican – and the word Nova in Spanish means “No Go.”. You also need to think about how people behave and interact in their own world. Mobile marketing is a global thing – but it isn’t the same thing across the globe.

Related Press Release:

Zoove Corp. Releases Mobile Marketing Study; Results Call for Changes in Mobile Marketing Campaigns