:::M-Internet360:::: Mobile Marketing News II

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August 2005

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: Capital Radio Group has launched an initiative to offer advertisers mobile interactivity with radio advertisements via the Capital Radio SMS station shortcode - a five digit number used for all Capital's SMS interactivity.

: eSeminar on “Wireless! The Hottest New Marketing Channel”. Seminar conducted by eWEEK.com Mobile & Wireless Center Editor Carol Ellison, eSeminars host David Coursey, and guest experts Reagan Ramsey, executive vice president of media development at Telenor Mobile Interactive, and Ashok Narasimhan, co-founder and CEO of July Systems for a discussion on wireless technology in the marketing channel. The panel examined the following questions:

- How wireless technologies can be deployed as new channels of commerce

- How entertainment organizations, such as major league baseball, are putting them to work

- What opportunities these initiatives present to other industries

: Nokia introduces Local Marketing solution aimed at bringing localized and timed services to consumer’s smartphones via Bluetooth. With the solution, operators and services providers can advertise their own and partner services in relevant places, at relevant times. Here is a scenario:

…in the morning, the user receives the bus schedule into her smartphone as she approaches the bus station. On her way to lunch, she passes by a local pizzeria, and receives the lunch menu with the day's special offering. In the pizzeria, she can check the local news from her smartphone. On her way home, she receives a bookmark from a video rental store, and decides to go in and rent a movie. Again, when approaching the bus station, she can easily buy the bus ticket with just a few clicks.

The information, that the consumer receives, is filtered according to consumer's own pre-defined preferences. The content consists of service bookmarks and coupons, which are stored into separate bookmark folders in the phone, instead of message inbox. The consumer can then use these bookmarks whenever he/she wants. The bookmarks will contain relevant information of the services, like the description and the price of the service.

Click here for more use cases and here for a more in depth description of the solution.

: Outsourcing and mobile marketing:

We’re all familiar with companies using SMS as a marketing tool. Whether it’s to introduce a new album or to get voters to the polls, mobile marketing is a tool every company needs in its arsenal. Pushing a text message to a cell phone seems simple enough. But what happens when a human can help facilitate the customer response? That’s when mobile marketers turn to live assistance. That’s right, real human beings answering the phone!

Madonna promoted her most recent album to fans via an SMS blast to their cell phones. Consumers got the option of preordering her album by pushing “1” on their phones to connect to a live customer service representative who processed the order. In the past, such live assistance was cost-prohibitive. But by using an offshore call center, companies can add live operators to their mobile marketing campaign for less than half of what it cost before.

: Direct Marketing Association (DMA) to develop mobile marketing guidelines.

: Mobile Marketing firm Puca acquires Mobile-Factor. Puca has expertise in SMS based mobile marketing campaigns and intends to offers its services in China this year.

: La Caixa targets young users:

Spanish Bank "La Caixa" is targeting its young customers with a mobile marketing initiative. In order to strenghten the relationship with over 940.000 people among 18 and 25 years old, La Caixa has launched "LKXA" (it's the way mobile phone users will write La Caixa) a service which will deliver financial and banking information via SMS and email.

: Mike Masnick on Mobile Marketing in the Middle East – Some smoke, but where’s the fire?. A snippet on how operators and mobile marketing service providers should handle spam:

While the head of the company admits that he knows mobile marketers need to be careful of mobile spam, it appears that the only way the company is trying to do this is by making sure the communications are "ethical," and that the privacy of subscribers is respected.

Unfortunately, that's the wrong approach. It's the same approach of operators elsewhere who seem to think that if they hold back a little, and maybe don't overwhelm users, that their messages won't be considered spam. The problem is that not everyone will be able to hold back, and even if they do, there are so many companies that the "spam" factor will add up -- and people will start to judge any text message not relevant to what they're doing right then and there as spam. While there are debates over the definition of spam, the one that matters is how end users view it, and anything that annoys them and isn't relevant is spam. In the case of a mobile user, where messages are more likely to be intrusive, not only do the messages need to be generally relevant in terms of content, but they need to be relevant in a timely sense. They need to apply to what people are doing right at that moment.

Since no marketing firm is that smart or that capable yet, it still seems that the biggest real opportunity for mobile marketing is not in pushing advertisements that run a risk of upsetting users, but in mobile advertising that subscribers pull when appropriate. This may take a different mindset, but unless mobile marketers want to make the mobile phone as useless for marketing as email has become for computers, it's time that they stopped pretending that just a little spam is fine -- or even deluding themselves into believing that because some study says mobile advertisements will catch on, that they really will. That's not only true in markets like Asia, Europe and North America, but in emerging markets like the Middle East, as well.