What do Marketeers look for in Mobile?

It is sad to see that with one or two notable exceptions mobile has yet to break through as a standard feature of brand marketing campaigns. To help us understand why we asked Phil Adams from Blonde to the June MoMo Edinburgh to tell us how mobile is viewed from the point of view of the non-specialist digital agencies, and more importantly their clients.

In order to provide a solid base for the discussion Phil conducted a survey of his client base which he has since summarised in a slideshare presentation:

Small scale survey of advertiser attitudes to mobile marketing

Phil started off by giving an overview of the barriers he had identified with the use of mobile in campaigns for his clients:

• mobile is part of digital is part of advertising is part of marketing is part of commercial - a long way down the chain.
• most clients practice "OR" budgeting - if they are to spend on mobile they will have to not spend elsewhere - and be convinced that the mobile spend will provide better results than what it replaces.
• marketing budgets tend to be focussed on time limited campaigns and thus mobile (in common with other digital channels) needs to be packaged up into discrete events as opposed to being considered as a continuous platform with a longer term payback.
• very little mobile casework available.

... before taking us through the highlights from his survey above.

This led to an interesting forty minutes of discussion including:

• Tim Barlow of Attacat asked if it wasn't more natural to consider mobile in the context of customer services as opposed to marketing in order to escape the campaign centric view. One counter-observation was that there is typically a much higher barrier to entry to engage with a business core operational activities than there is in marketing.
• Gavin Dutch of Loc8 noted that there had been a number of success stories in the provision of utility mobile apps within the brand identity - with examples such as the Oakley surf finder and North Face weather app - to give a long lived impact for the investment made. Tim countered that beyond early adopters entertainment was probably more important than utility.
• Ben Hounsell of Tenbu/Nio observed that there was still mileage in the age old model of users accepting advertising in return for some free service, and with an option to pay for a premium advertising free version. The latter would of course be even more likely on mobile where people are in general more sensitive to advertising!
• Bryan Rieger of Yiibu asked the advertisers present about their view of mobile adwords, Admob, and iAds etc. Tim reported a small but growing use of mobile adwords, but it was perhaps indicative of the task facing mobile that there were several agency folks in the room who hadn't come across Admob or iAds yet.
• Anthony Ashbrook of Mobile Acuity struck an optimistic chord when he noted that once brands started to see the less than perfect results their vanilla digital materials had on mobile devices they were likely to quite rapidly raise their game in mobile in order to protect their brand integrity.
• Anthony also observed that perhaps it was an error to focus on mobile as a discrete element of the campaign, as opposed to an additional channel within a multi-channel environment. Phil mentioned a campaign they had run for Grolsch where a character in an online video sends an SMS which the consumer then receives on their handset thus starting an individual interaction over mobile.
  

The credit for the ideas and insights in the above belongs to Phil and the various other contributors listed, while the errors and omissions are entirely mine. Please feel free to correct either with comments!

Predictions for 2010

The first Mobile Monday Edinburgh of the year focussed on the attendees' predictions for the key trends, opportunities and issues affecting mobile in 2010 - and in some cases beyond! This was in part inspired by Rudy De Waele's excellent Mobile Trends 2020 compilation.

• Garry Irvine of Connected Day started us off by a simple prediction that the iPad will have a disruptive effect on the marketplace.
  
• Richard Marshall of Rapid Mobile noted that there is an ongoing huge increase in smartphones in the market in Europe, but that the entrenched nature of the platforms means that this will lead to more fragmentation, not less.
• Alisdair Gunn of Wireless Innovation views the education sector together with the move of traditional print publishing into mobile as being a key combination - with the children in the schools very much leading the way driving the uptake of new approaches and models.
• Ben Hounsell of nio predicted the continued rise of web based platforms (e.g. Palm WebOS, HTML5 widgets, etc) as developers seek to avoid the fragmentation predicted by Richard.
• Rachel Lane of Blonde optimistically predicted an increased understanding of the mobile usage characteristics of the actual audience of mobile apps and services, as well as noting that mobile is simply an extension of the user's existing digital activity.
• Jessica Williamson of nio and StartupCafe predicted an increased prevalence of and more sophisticated use of sensors to allow the phone to detect its environment and thus provide context sensitive behaviour. In particular she hopes by years end that her phone will be able to tell when she is in a bad mood and warn her friends to avoid her ...
• Alan Paxton of Isomaly succinctly stated that in 2010 mobile is now in the mainstream - not a niche any more.
• Gordon Povey of Artillium noted that in Benelux in particular there is an upswing in the number of MVNOs, and that they are more open to taking risks with cool and innovative new services than the traditional telcos - though he conceded that this isn't currently happening in the UK. He also predicted that more sophisticated mobile app revenue models will start to become truly viable this year - e.g. freemium etc
  
• David Richardson of Edinburgh University Informatics expressed a frustration with the large number of companies who want to engage with mobile but don't understand it - an iPhone app is not always the answer - needs to address the mainstream.
• Ronnie Forbes of Mobiqa felt that geolocation will be a key trend this year. He also stated that it is ridiculous that you need to buy apps from the company who sells you the device - and somewhat contentiously stated that App Stores are a passing fad.
• Graham West of Mobiqa stated that mobile web will overtake J2ME this year, with web tech used to create an app like experience for the end user. He also predicted that this will not be the year for NFC.
• Adrian Williamson predicted that this will be the year that end users start to volunteer to pay for content they really want - shaking up the publishing value chain and freeing the industry from the "everything is free" days of the internet.
• Annette Leonhard of Edinburgh University Informatics noted that for many of the big ideas in mobile to succeed data coverage needs to be ubiquitous, reliable, and affordable, including international roaming.
• Paul Wilson of Edgecase will be interested to see how the iPad blurs the distinctions between mobile and personal computing, and between the traditional and mobile web.
  
• Adrian Astley-Jones of Reality Gap agreed with Ben and Graham that this will be a key year for growing mass market acceptance of the mobile Internet.
• Jim Wolff of the Leith Agency predicted a massive rise in the number of "personal apps" based on tech such as iSites. In digital marketing he predicted a move away from simple gimmicks such as iPint, into branded utility apps that will have longer term traction.
• Anthony Ashbrook of Mobile Acuity notes the start of a trend away from simple textual search and towards visual search on mobile - with many examples ranging from simple barcodes, through AR, into Google Goggles, Amazon remembers, and Nokia Point and Find.
  

My own prediction is rather more general and is about how real people (normob - not promob) perceive their mobile devices. I see this as moving away from being about simple communications towards being pervasive connected computing - perhaps towards the form predicted by Ian M Banks in his Culture SF novels.

Interestingly the reaction from the majority promob in the room was one of "so what, that is already here". My observation would be that isn't yet true for the majority, but perhaps by the end of the year we will see the same reaction there too? Only time will tell!

PS. Carnival #209 is up over at WAP Review.

OMTP coming to Mobile Monday Edinburgh

Am delighted that we will be having our first external speakers at Mobile Monday Edinburgh at our next event on 31st August.

OMTP's BONDI has been quietly making progress for a few years now towards defining a standard interface for providing secure access to handset features from inside web apps and widgets. They have suffered from the usual chicken-and-egg problem for such new standards with low developer interest due to small number of supported devices, and low support due to lack of apps, so I was pleased to see recently that a swath of new LIMO devices have been launched with BONDI support, to add to their existing Windows Mobile footprint.

Looking forward to hearing more about their work both at MoMoEdi, and at the mobile barcamp they are running on 3rd September.

MoMo Edinburgh: App stores and mobile payment

An excellent turnout of 18 people (causing issues with getting extra tables - but a nice problem to have ;-) gathered in the downstairs private room of Centotre in Edinburgh last Monday for a pleasant lunch with lots of mobile chat. Some more photos were taken were taken to add to the MoMo Edinburgh group on flickr.

Richard Marshall of Rapid Mobile kicked off an interesting discussion about mobile App stores, initially looking for thoughts about the Nokia Ovi store. This broadened into a more general debate about whether the other stores could replicate Apple's success, supported as it is by the public trust in their brand, the existing billing relationship created by iTunes, and the advantage of minimal hardware fragmentation.

It was noted that the rash of new store launches has created a conflict between operator focused stores on one hand, and platform focused stores on the other. Also, while fragmentation is still a hard problem, the huge numbers of Nokia java phones in the market, addressable via Ovi, represent a huge commercial opportunity.

Gavin Dutch of Hedout then moved the discussion on to the problems of taking conventional credit card payments in mobile apps and web services. It was noted that APIs intended for webapps, e.g. from paypal and the like, could often be used, though security systems like 3D secure can be a problem in some cases.

Discussion then moved on to contactless and mobile payments, and it was noted that the major credit card networks are now rolling out NFC readers in the UK.

The next event is planned for the 6th of July and anybody interested should make sure they are signed up to the google group.

PS. Thanks to Vero at Taptu for giving a mention of my previous post about MoMo Edinburgh in her recent carnival of the mobilists.

Mobile Monday Edinburgh

Way back in Autumn 2005 I sat in a pub with Jim Black of MX Alliance and Michael Ewins of I-Play chatting about the lack of a technical focused gathering for the mobile and wireless folks in Scotland, and came up with the MX Techtalk event.

These ran with moderate success from then until the end of 2007 by which time they more or less fizzled out. Key learning from it was that the initial focus had been a little too narrow, and that the best events had been when the focus was a little less exclusively technical, more about what we can do with it as opposed to just what we can do and how.

Since then I have been humming and hawing about kicking off something new, and after a number of visits to the excellent Mobile Monday London specifically about running something under the Mobile Monday banner up here, but as often happens it never quite made it to the top of the heap!

During February I became aware of several other folks who were thinking along similar lines. Two of the regular attendees of the techtalks, Steve Brown and Justfone and Gary Irvine of ConnectedDay, the latter also one of the original founders of MX Alliance, were talking to the MoMo London committee about starting up a Scottish satalite of that event. In addition Ben Hounsell of Tenbu was talking to the Wireless Innovation team at Hillington about a mobile focussed event for Scotland.

This all resulted in a group of us getting together in the ETTC conference room to chat about what form of event would make sense, both in terms of appeal and sustainability, and also simply fitting into the existing landscape of technical and business events in Edinburgh which has become considerably more crowded since I started the techtalks in 2005! Present were:

• Adrian Astley-Jones, Wireless Innovation
• Ben Hounsell, Tenbu
• Gary Irvine, Connected Day
• Ronnie Forbes, Mobiqa
• Richard Marshall, Rapid Mobile

The formula we decided to run with (taking seeds of inspiration from Mike Coulter's excellent new media coffee morning - see pages on facebook and 38minutes) initially at least is a gathering around an inexpensive and informal networking lunch at Centotre on George Street in Edinburgh on the first working Monday of each month, with mainly informal discussion around topics provided by the attendees, but with the potential for specific after lunch speakers as well in due course. This will almost certainly develop over time!

Our first event on 11th May was semi-closed, with each of us inviting a couple of guests. In the end 12 of us got together in the downstairs boardroom at Centotre and a good lunch and even better discussion was had - and photographed by Richard.

We have now created a google group in support of the event so please do join that to keep in touch with what we are doing! The next meet on 1st June will be open to all - with booking via Amiando by Wednesday 27th. I am looking forward to it!

PS. The latest Carnival is up over at the Mobile Broadband Blog.