iPhone Price Check

An interesting iPhone application from Kigi software. Enter a product UPC code and the application will search for user reviews (filtered to show only those reviews deemed useful) and comparative prices/availability. The next (and logical) step is to have the iPhone camera work as a barcode scanner.


The implications for retail operators are obvious and significant. Imagine browsing books at Borders and entering them instantly onto your Amazon.com wishlist...

Connecting The Dots

Quick Response codes are images which are read by a program that utilizes a mobile phone's camera to translate the code into a Web link. (There is one in the right navigation bar of my blog) The link can then be followed to retrieve online content, hence removing the pain of typing a long URL into a mobile browser. The codes have been in wide use for sometime in Japan to enable easy linking from print or outdoor advertising to the web. The movement is growing in Europe too. The UK's Sun Newspaper, more readily known for its page 3 pinups than its technical innovation is the first of News Corporation's titles to offer the codes to advertisers.

Virgin Freebies

In the high stakes "engagement" game, Virgin Mobile's Sugar Mama program straightforwardly places a dollar value on the time a visitor spends watching and interacting with a sponsor's ad. And, unlike previous versions of this model the Sugar Mama approach is offering users something they already want - minutes - and it does so in a very clear and uncomplicated way. To get your credits, you need to go to the Virgin Mobile site and view ads from Ultramercial. In exchange you will get pre-paid credits to your wireless account. It appears to be working, Ultramercial has had over 450,000 customers subscribe to the program, which has given away over 15 million free minutes. The company says 1,000 new users sign up a day. The program has also found success with advertisers, with relationships as diverse as Dell, United Airlines, E-Trade, Fox and the History Chanel...

Subway. Slowly But Surely....

...Mobile marketing is making significant in-roads in the US. We needn't hold our collective breath for the more innovative applications coming from Asia and Europe, but, progress is being made all the same. The My Subway Mobile program from the people that Jared works for is a cell phone-based opt-in promotional program that sends customers timely product offers and coupons via email and text message. The reported redemption rate was in the 8% to 10% range. Considerably better than the 1% or 2% redemption from local press ads....

Voice Authentication For Mobile

Voice Pay a U.K. based company has created a methodology by which a person's voiceprint (as individual as a fingerprint) can be used as a way to secure credit card payments instead of giving out their card number. Great for making payments by mobile phone for example. Powered by a speech authentication algorithm developed by Voice Vault, the system analyzes 117 voice parameters that are wholly unique to an individual's vocal chords and the shape of the inside of the mouth and nasal cavity.
A customer simply sets up an account with Voice Pay and provides a voiceprint by repeating a series of randomly generated numbers. Authentication happens at the time of purchase. For example, a website might have a Voice Pay icon that the shopper would click to make a purchase. The click would launch the Voice Pay site, which, once the shopper had logged in, would call the customer's cell phone.

The Voice Pay site is here...

My Vote for Site of the Year

The best website I have seen so far this year (best defined as most innovative, fun, engaging, technologically advanced, integrated with mobile, useful - you get the picture) is the sitelet for the launch of the new Volvo C30.

What A HooHaa

A New Zealand based company HooHaa has been successful with a model based on customers receiving mobile phone credits in exchange for providing profile information and accepting up to 4 SMS text marketing messages a day...

According to the company, the HooHaa database had a broad cross-section of consumers, but was strongest in the demographic for people aged 18-30.

More here...

Play

According to a recent Gartner study (More Growth Ahead for Mobile Gaming), mobile gaming revenues in North America will reach $1.7 billion in 2011, up from $716.9 million in 2007.

Once again North America trails Europe and Asia in terms of mobile capability and this has dampened progress.

Nick Ingelbrecht of Gartner said, "One of the things driving mobile gaming in developed markets is the availability of faster processors in mobile devices, which enable faster response times, 3-D graphics and advanced sound capabilities, as well as less-expensive and bigger storage capabilities for memory-intensive games. At the same time, simple stripped-down games that capitalize on location-awareness and personal interaction are interesting for aficionados."

Clean.

This is clearly a little off-topic, but I thought it was smart and amusing. Now with a little bluetooth emitter....

Marketers Slow To Adopt New Paths

A study by Forrester Research (Interactive Marketing Channels to Watch in 2007) has again pointed to a reluctance to innovate in marketing departments. The research finds that while email, banners and search are still a firm favourite, and blogs, podcasts, RSS, social networks, and online video are making inroads -mobile and in-game marketing are left on the side of the road. The most significant gains have been made in the social media space. In 2006 less than 13 % of marketers were experimenting with blog advertising and around 10 % with RSS, while the 2007 report found; "Today, 40 percent of marketers are using or piloting RSS while 34 percent use or are piloting blogs".

The agencies have a key role to play here in bringing these digital paths to their clients and creating the environments in which small scale test and learn strategies enable marketers to see the benefits of opening conversations with their consumers in more enlightened and interactive ways...

ZenZui for Mobile

Following several years of user interface research and a successful internal experiment, Microsoft have announced the launch of a spin-off company called ZenZui. Essentially promising a better way to navigate the mobile web, the user interface is represented by a series of tiles (see image below), selecting one of the tiles takes you to the content associate with it. Each of the tiles is available for relevant sponsorship you could imagine a Tile that launches the Weather Channel being sponsored by an allergy medication provider...

Market Conversations

(optimization is listening)

As Jim Stengel from P&G pointed out recently the future will be built around interactive (conversational) technologies - specifically mobile, word-of-mouth, and customer co-creation of brand experiences. He talks of turning the world's largest marketer into a starter of conversations...

Somewhat earlier, the Cluetrain Manifesto written in 1999, established 95 theses - I have listed the first 10 - the remainder are here:

1. Markets are conversations.
2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.
6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
7. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.
8. In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.
9. These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.
10. As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.

Models For Mobile (advertising) bis...

The fact that the last 3 posts have been focused on mobile marketing is more a reflection of where relationship marketing is going rather that any personal preference I may have.

Nokia have announced the launch of a revolutionary way to advertise on the mobile – removing the barriers of working with many different operators across different markets (and of course within the same market) and increasing essential targeting and optimisation capabilities…. The Nokia ad service can potentially work on all Nokia handsets regardless of the operator. So advertisers get one company to deal with and they can target customers effectively because the gateways are run by Nokia… The keys are:

• Virtually global reach
• Simplicity for the advertiser
• Advertisers can optimize their spend by delivering specific ads to target groups in specific markets
• Consolidate metrics
• Relevant (and therefore effective) messages to the customer

Read more here.

Models For Mobile (advertising)

One of the most discussed mobile advertising models is to offer subscribers incentives for viewing adverts. Virgin Mobile in the US has been testing this model with its Sugar Mama program. In its first seven months of operation, more than 3 million free voice minutes were granted to over 250,000 registered customers. The model requires the users to watch TV commercials or music videos and to answer a short questionnaire after each (brevity is the mother of attention). Users can also answer questionnaires or agree to receive texts twice a week in exchange for free minutes. There are other models which are emerging such as location-based and search related. The nice thing about this one is its opt-in nature. A further development will make it more effective - targeted ads and questionnaires based on the mobile users profile and usage... A suivre

Why The Mobile Is The Biggest CRM Platform Ever

Apart from being the most broadly adopted channel. The mobile offers several advantages for relationship management over any other platform.

In an interesting post on the Communities Dominate Brands blog the authors discuss mobile as the 7th mass media. Inherent in their findings are massive opportunities for relationship marketers.

• It is the first truly personal mass media. IT'S MY PHONE....
• It is the first always-on mass media. The mobile is the ultimate alert and news media, faster by several orders of magnitude over any other media.
• It is the first always-carried mass media.
• It is the first mass media with a built-in payment mechanism. Even on the Internet, payment always required setting up a separate payment system like Paypal or giving long number series of credit card info etc. Hardly "click-to-buy". But on mobile, it is that
• It uniquely offers the media audience the input tool at the point of inspiration.

Mobile in Barcelona

Lots of fun stuff going on at the 3GSM get together in Barcelona this week. Much movement around online advertising from Yahoo and moves in mobile search from Microsoft.

Yahoo has begun offering its brand advertising to reach mobile phone users across 19 markets in Western Europe, South Asia and the Americas. The company has signed up major advertisers including Hilton's Embassy Suites, Infiniti, Intel, Nissan, Pepsi and P&G.

By expanding onto mobile phones, Yahoo aims to offer coordinated campaigns that reach both online and mobile audiences, this builds on an exclusive partnership deal it struck in November with Vodafone to provide corporate brand ads in Britain.

In the mobile search space, Microsoft announced Live Search for Windows Mobile and Live Search for Java providing advanced local search and mapping capabilities on a compatible mobile device.

Payments by Cell Phone....Priceless

Visa announced at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas the launch of a global cell phone payments system. In the initial phase the system will work by customers passing the phone near a scanner. The company stated that they will make services such as: contactless payment, personalization of mobile services, coupons and other marketing features available at launch. Additional functions would roll-out over time.
IBM, Nokia and Verisign were amongst the partners who helped in development of the system. Actual launch date is yet to be announced. This announcement follows the Visa Wave Payment Pilot in Malaysia last year, where 200 consumers were given specially equipped Nokia phones which they could use to make payments at 2500 outlets equipped with a special reader. A suivre...

A Boost for Mobile Marketing?

Will the iPhone change the face of mobile marketing and provide the injection of energy and focus that the category is yearning for? The new device's ability to handle high quality video could become the killer app of mobile marketing....

Reading the press, you would be forgiven for thinking that the iPhone was the only announcement of any note made this week -Monday saw the launch of a plan by Verizon and Qualcomm's MediaFlo to stream live TV to cell phones, which should also provide a leg up for the development of mobile video ads.

In short the iPhone (and the numerous similar devices which will surface in its wake) could become the key platform for both mobile marketing and the emerging mcommerce sector.(more about this later).

Relationship Marketing on the Mobile Phone

Mobile CRM in the shape of sales force automation has been around for a while. Is 2007 the year when real and relevant consumer-centric programs come to the mobile platform? The tools to allow consumers and brands to interact in a meaningful way (i.e. beyond the SMS) are starting to show up. The recent announcement of the deal between Cingular and MySpace to offer enhanced functionality to all Cingular customers via their mobile phones is a good example of the type of platform that relationship marketers will be able to deploy to offer meaningful interactions to consumers. Cingular customers will, in effect, be able to edit MySpace profiles, view and add friends, post photos and blogs, send and receive MySpace messages etc... all from their mobile phone.

Marketing and the cell phone

2 new initiatives from Vodafone will attempt to increase the 0.5% of the global advertising spend that is dedicated to the mobile platform
Google will bring its AdWords approach to the Vodafone platform., where advertisers will pay to have their ads placed alongside search results.
Vodafone has also initiated a deal, again in the UK with Yahoo to provide targeted ads in various formats to Vodafone customers who opt in. Customers will initially provide Vodafone with demographic information such as age and gender, this will be married to other demographic and behavioural data based on actual phone usage. Over time, this will provide a pretty good profile of an individual and her specific areas of interest. Well targeted ads are more likely to be relevant, and relevance leads to engagement...
I am convinced that because of the personal, highly targetable and interactive nature of the device, the mobile plhone will become the channel of choice for digital CRM programs in the next couple of years.