I don’t profess to be an ‘expert’ in the mobile marketing field, but recently; developments have started to turn my head. And it’s beginning to get exciting.
Since 1999, every year has been ‘the year’ for mobile, without really materialising into anything concrete. But now, 2008 really does seem to have the potential to embrace mobile to its full extend, and for mass adoption to finally take off. Without a great deal of insight as to why, there seems to be a number of key issues that have held back this revolution.
Push marketing via SMS
In the early days, mobile was all about push marketing via SMS, actively pushing sales in an intrusive way. After a not wholly unexpected poor response, MMS was then positioned as the answer. However, even by providing richer content, it was still intrusive and unwanted.
You cant solve the problem of people not wanting to be marketed to with a different form of communication. The underlying backlash still exists, and just because it looks better, doesn’t make it more acceptable.
SMS / MMS is a good channel for CRM type communication (eg banking or automotive alerts) – perhaps informing consumers of their bank balance, or a reminder for a car service. But in itself, it is not a marketing platform, it is a feature, and can’t be used as such.
In 2008, we’ve moved on, and it’s now a world of mobile web with access via the majority of phones. ‘Pull’ marketing is finally a realistic concept, as consumer can access what the want, at what time and wherever they are. The environment in which we find ourselves is a fundamentally different one.
Compact and light issues.
Historically, devices have been judged on how compact and light they were. The ever increasingly smaller screen was simply not conducive to marketing messages.
Now however it is more acceptable to have a larger and more functional mobile as the thought process involved in purchasing a phone has changed dramatically. Believe it or not, there was a time that the phone was just a phone. Handsets may have had a few additional functions like SMS and MMS, but they were primarily used for making phone calls.
Fast forward 6 or 7 years, and now a handset is a fully fledged PDA complete with music, web access, applications, email, oh, and a phone as well.
Accordingly, consumers are more responsive to the idea of being marketed to on their phone, as it is no longer the intimate device it used to be. More and more it’s becoming multi-functioning communication platform.
Faster speeds
Bandwidth has also developed quickly, and it is now quick enough to make accessing the web feasible. When early adopters tried to embrace mobile, it was slow and content was limited – it was frustrating. Faster speeds make web browsing more cost effective, as long load times are a thing of the past.
Consumer reactions
Finally, it is now becoming possible to track consumer reactions to mobile marketing just as you would on the World Wide Web. This means that you can correlate investment to response rates, click-through, and conversion rates. To a marketing director that needs to provide statistics to back up spending huge amounts of budget on what is essentially a young platform, mobile becomes much more attractive.
There are also some additional macro factors that support the idea that ‘this will be the year’:
• Whenever a marketing platform is new, the market is flooded with start-ups. Once the concept has developed enough to become widely adopted, the big players start buying up those smaller companies. With buy-outs from the likes of Nokia (who recently purchased enpocket) and other well-established brands, this signals a change in attitude towards mobile marketing.
• Another example of this reaction from larger players is DoubleClick integrating mobile into its DART Publisher platform. Once mobile becomes easily available on such a pervasive platform, mass adoption is not far off.
• We’re also seeing dedicated mobile teams springing up in mid-sized content publishers, which is yet another preparatory move to manage the predicted surge of interest.
Recently, as I’ve monitored movements in the market and delved deeper into all of the industry’s preparations, mobile has become a lot more interesting to me. As the UK seems poised to fully embrace the mobile space, we’ll have to hold our breath again and see if this ‘phenomenon’ finally comes to fruition.
