Top Ten Mobile Marketing developments for 2009

Around this time of year it seems as though everyone is in the business of making predictions. Sticking your neck out these days can leave yourself open to ridicule later on, but never one to shy away from a bit of controversy, here’s my Top Ten Mobile Marketing Developments for 2009:

• SMS will grow continue to grow
  This may come under the heading ‘no shit Sherlock’. However, it is worth pointing out that in the current climate there will be a move away from mobile internet advertising and ad led content towards SMS. Even in 2008, some ad agencies were declaring that SMS was still the killer app for mobile marketing. With the current climate the move will be towards more direct and functional campaigns, such as Swift Cover’s vehicle insurance quotes by SMS.
  
  
• Bluetooth marketing will grow
  With the change last year in the Ofcom regulations, which saw Bluetooth as a broadcast, not a personal medium, a number of companies started to offer this as a proximity marketing solution. With the growth in these companies and the potential from Bluetooth we will see many more campaigns in 2009.
  
  
• QR
  My scepticism to QR (Quick Recognition) Codes, or 2D Bar Codes has changed this year. Whilst they have been around for some time, I tended to believe that they were useful only in Japan and were too niche for the European market. In the last year, however, the use of QR codes has made the idea more accessible to the public. For example, the newspaper City AM has a QR code on the front page in every issue. Pepsi also ran a QR campaign this year.
  The advantage of using the codes is that it provides the user with very fast access to further information – this could be anything from an SMS to a mobile link to an application download. This offers an ideal way to use mobile to enhance a print campaign.
  The real killer app in the QR world will be when handsets have the readers as standard. Top end Nokias have then as standard, and Google intend to include one in their next release of Android. Although this will represent a tiny percentage of the mobile market, it is likely that other handset manufacturers and mobile networks will follow suit.
  
  
• MMS will grow … but it will continue to remain niche
  MMS has a place in mobile. It is considerably less important than SMS - on a peer to peer level, most people use it very occasionally. However in the advertising and marketing area there is real potential. It offers a neat way of delivering pictures and video to handsets. This is particularly the case with couponing and ticketing (see below), so expect to see a growth in this area in 2009.
  
  
• Mobile Couponing and Ticketing will increase
  The potential in coupons and tickets sent to mobile has not been realised. The biggest opportunity for it’s increase comes from the current economic climate, where the drive to reduce costs will be the overriding factor for many companies. Add to this the need to reduce carbon emissions, and it becomes clear that mobile tickets are an obvious choice. One example of a form of ticketing is the mobile airline check in being offered by British Airways and some other companies. This delivers the 2d barcode that is on web tickets and boarding passes, but offers the advantage of not requiring a print out. If it’s safe enough for airports then it is easily safe enough for any type of event. The barcodes will have to be delivered by MMS of course.
  
  
  
• Location Based Services (LBS) will NOT take off
  Whilst I have always liked the idea of services that are linked to, or based on the user’s location, I have never been convinced that they will take off for one simple reason. Cost. In the UK the two issues are the charges made by the networks for location hits and the cost of converting postcode to Lat and Long data. Unlike most other countries in the world, in the UK the postcode to Lat/Long data must be bought on a yearly basis.
  For both companies and individual users the cost of LBS versus the benefit is not significant enough. If you add to this the fact that Google, for example offer good mobile mapping and location services for free, it hardly seems worth developing your own.
  
  
• Mobile internet overtakes PC based internet use
  OK, maybe not in the UK as a whole, but a combination of flat rate tariffs, better handsets and mobile USB ‘broadband’ will see a significant increase in the number of mobile internet users. Worldwide there will be more people connecting through their mobile network than a land-based ISP.
  Why is this significant for mobile marketing? With more internet users, propositioning content, and especially ad content for the mobile market becomes much more important. Whilst things like ‘mobile search’ will remain limited, applications that use the mobile internet will increase, along with the opportunities for ad funded content.
  
  
• Mobile security will become a bigger issue
  With more mobile applications such as banking and payment, along with an increase in mobile internet and marketing, expect to see more debate about security on handsets. An independent survey found that 5.6 million people in the EU already access financial information from their mobile phones, a 23.6 per cent jump from 2007. And with this jump expect to see an increase in scams such as phishing.
  On the marketing side, network operators may also introduce spam filtering for SMS if the levels of marketing increase.
  
  
• Targeted and Niche Advertising will grow
  … just as untargeted mobile advertising will fail materialise. Sticking a banner on a mobile portal is not the way forward for mobile advertising. Neither will the way forward come from PPC (Pay Per Click) models such as Google’s Adwords. The fact remains that the mobile internet experience is not one of search and browse in the same way as a PC.
  Targeted advertising, such as Blyk’s service will be the way forward. Blyk have around 200,000 UK subscribers under 24 years old who receive free calls and SMS in return for receiving advertising content. It’s a clear, simple relationship that both advertisers and the Blyk users know and understand.
  




• The Iphone will become ‘just another phone’
  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been an Apple fan for years … Macs, Ipods etc. They have great products and superb design. The iphone is great too. Well, great for what it is. The fact remains that the iphone is just one product in a smartphone market that represents little more than 20% of users. And in that market there is stiff competition from Blackberry, Nokia and now the Google Phone.
  Underlying this, is the fact that most people want a phone to make calls and send SMS. They don’t want to listen to music or watch videos. That, after all, is what you do at home! Many people do not want to be connected to their email all the time. They actually want to get a way from it.
  I predict that the iphone will be like the Apple Mac – a great product for a niche of highly enthusiastic users. In mobile marketing terms it means that some of the high profile campaigns, such as the Guiness game, will fail to light the imagination of many people. ‘This will change everything’? I don’t think so.

The MMS Picture Frame

Not all technology is good. MMS, for example, has never reached the full potential that the networks hoped. A combination of cost, compatability and need meant that most users didn't see the point, or used it rarely.

However, a neat new application of the MMS system has been employed in a new digital photo grame.It can receive pictures directly from a mobile phone to be instantly displayed on a mantlepiece.

The 7-inch Parrot DF7700 Digital Photo Frame claims to be the first to market that accepts photos sent to it via MMS.
The device has an integrated SIM card with a dedicated call number and a log-in or password is not required when sending photos to the Frame via MMS. It also features a USB connection and an SD card slot for more conventional methods of photo transfer.

Photos are automatically resized to optimize memory which has a capacity of storing over 500 photos in its internal flash memory. These can be displayed on its high-resolution TFT screen in slideshow mode, or as a single picture. It includes automatic image rotation and a built-in light sensor that adjusts the LCD’s brightness as room lighting changes.

Given that digital picture frames were one of last Xmas's biggest sellers, the MMS Frame may well capture people's imagination.

Chiltern Railways has become the first train company in the UK to sell mobile phone tickets to their passengers.

Passengers can buy Chiltern’s £5 online Eday ticket for journeys between London Marylebone and Birmingham Moor Street or Stratford –upon-Avon via the website www.chilternrailways.co.uk. The Eday ticket is available only on certain off peak trains.

Passengers receive their ticket in the form of a barcode sent directly to their mobile phone by an MMS. Staff on board the train and at the station will be able to check the ‘mobile ticket’ with barcode scanners. If the phone can't display the barcode then the journey details can still be read in text only format.

Commercial Director for Chiltern Railways, Neil Micklethwaite said: “We are happy to be leading the industry as the first train company in the United Kingdom to sell this new format of mobile phone ticketing to our passengers. We have listened to our passengers and what they want is a simpler and easier way to purchase tickets for their travel. "

“The next step is to install new scanning gate technology at Marylebone station which will allow passengers with mobile phone tickets to scan their own ‘mobile tickets’ as they walk through the ticket gates,” Mr Micklethwaite said. Cubic Transportation Systems is supplying Chiltern Railways with the new gate technology, due for installation next month.

Mobile phone ticketing is now available for Chiltern passengers for the next three months with the aim of develop this as a service permanent. Ticket purchases on the move from mobile phones will be possible at a later stage, as well as through the internet .

For more mobile ticketing see txt4ever

Mobile Content Revenues on the Increase (again!)

SMS and multimedia messaging services will account for more than half of total revenues for worldwide mobile operators in 2011, a research firm has forecast.

Based on the latest research, SMS and MMS will represent more than 50% of the total revenues for operators from 2010.

Mobile access to the Internet will be the driver for the explosive growth expected in this market. The research company Informa Telecoms & Media, has predicted the market for content will be $150 billion by 2011.

In 2006 revenues for SMS etc was $60 and $67.4 in 2007.

Content management systems, such as Ping Corp's immedia24 will help drive the increase.

In particular, revenues from music, TV, games, gambling, adult content, together, would more than double - from $18.8 billion made in 2006 to $38 billion over the next five years.

The returns from this huge growth would be shared by new players – content providers, publishers and associated technology and service providers, which would become part of the industry over time. User-generated content and user communities, expected to eventually become common features on the mobile space, would also account for $13.2 billion over the period, the report said.

Music would continue to be a major revenue earner in the mobile entertainment market but its role would be diminished by growing demand for mobile TV and video services. Informa estimates music, which last year enjoyed a 40 percent share of this market, would decline to 36 percent in 2011.

A large part of this growth can be credited to the arrival of broadband mobile services and technologies like the High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) which allow users to enjoy surfing and watching online videos while on the move. The download speed and streaming experience made possible by these technologies are comparable to those seen on desktop PCs and notebooks.

MMS now quite popular

Picture messaging reaches a respectable one million a day in the UK.

Although it is clear that the predictions that MMS would replace SMS are now best forgotten, operators have been slow to release figures for the number of MMS messages that users were sending. This led inevitably to conclusions that the number of messages was well below exectations.

Now the MDA has ben able to secure the agreement of UK operators to issue a combined total from them of the number of P2P MMS that are being sent.

Earlier this year the MDA revealed that over half of the UK’s phones are picture-capable with the UK’s first five megapixel camera phone now available from LG, and one and two megapixel cameras becoming commonplace in handsets

As the number of people using camera phones grows, more and more users are sending and receiving the photographs they take. It won't be overtaking SMS anytime soon, but we extend a warm welcome to MMS into the family of mobile messaging products.

An alternative to MMS is WAP Push or URL sending. It costs the same as SMS, and can be sent from web-based messaging system, such as txt4ever.

Mobile Data Charges

One of the major issues for mobile downloads, such as videos or music is that users are charged by their mobile operator for their data. I
Take a 3 minute song - it will be just under 3 meg in size.
The operators have blurred the issue, but if your on a basic contract, there will be a monthly allowance of a few megabytes after which they start charging.
If you're on pay as you go you'll be even worse off. Networks charge up to £3 per megabyte of download even though the cost to them is pennies. And because you don't get itemised bills you will never know how much a download has cost you.
Essentially this is a complete scam by the mobile phone operators but it presents a major problem for content providers.
Take our 3 megabyte song - lets say you buy it on a £1.50 premium SMS charge. You will then pay another £9 in data charges if you're an unfortunately pay as you go user.

Is there a solution? Well there are two:
1. Use MMS for delivery. The problem with this is two-fold. Firstly not all networks support MMS and all file formats in the same way - it doesn't always work. Secondly for it will cost the content provider up to 30p to deliver the MMS.
They could use a video shortcode (or MMS shortcode) - but currently the costs of this are very expensive and only likely to be used for the largest content providers.

2. Pre-pay for the data
The system works like this: you send a link to the file, or a wap link to the mobile user in the reply to the PSMS request.
That link is to a URL which does not incurr data charges to the networks - the data has been prepaid. The cost of this data is a few pence per megabyte and can be included in the cost of the download.

Right now, the second option is not widely available, however we have managed to incorporate this in our mobile content management system, immedia24.
My plan is to promote this 'fair data' policy so that mobile users understand that we're not ripping them off but that the mobile operators are doing that.