The industry is continually comparing Apples and Pears when it comes to mobile marketing. Witness the following from Jonathan’s recent post on the matter:

Page 12 of NMA (27.11.08) contains a piece by Charlotte McEleny who writes that “Some 65% of young consumers find mobile messaging from brands too intrusive, according to a report by lifestyle research company Tuned In.”

The headline screams ‘Young people alienated by brands using mobile for marketing’

I think its time we nail down some taxonomy here.

Jonathan continues:

Just adding the words ‘without permission’ to the end of the above headline would have shown a more accurate picture. As it stands, at a glance you could argue that mobile is troublesome, anti-productive and interfering.

Jonathan is absolutely right.

What does ‘mobile marketing’ mean. Is that receiving MMS messages — that you HAVE signed up for?

Or is it getting a Bluetooth message sent to your handset automatically because you have Bluetooth turned on and you walked by particular bus shelter with the gizmo activated?

Thus, my suggestion is to clarify for clarity’s sake. Let’s add the context where we can to enable balanced decisions and rational actions based on the full story rather than propaganda.

I nominated you, Mr MacDonald, to write the taxonomy!

Now school’s are a hostile environment (well, at least mine is), and navigating the Sixth Form common room is something like an assault course. But it’s so much more than that too! It’s buzzing with technology, and young people who know things, right?

I’ve been keeping my eye out for mobile news, and reading MIR, and of course the news in general. The Google Android is by no means a small piece of ignorable news at the moment, so how is it then, no one is talking about it?

After the twelve-week summer holiday some people were showing off their new gadgets, namely Sony mobiles, and the odd iTouch; in the three hundred student strong Sixth Form I’ve only seen a single iPhone. That’s just one.

Now before I criticise my peers for being totally unaware about the world of technology, computing and mobile phones; there are some techno-people like myself too; maybe even more technologically experienced. So why then is it that no one is talking?

From what I’ve gathered, no one particularly cares. Of course, I care, the rest of the MIR team cares, and I’ll hazard a guess that you the reader may also care too. The mobile phone industry is of course interesting, fast paced, and constantly evolving. But could this be the problem?

From what I’ve seen is that for those who I know (and you may beg to differ on this), the world of technology is just too fast paced to keep up with; and as a result, they don’t bother to keep up at all. If you ask someone about the new Nokia 5310, you’ll get a blank stare and no hint of excitement at the prospect of free music. Why? Well they don’t know about it!
For me this is quite an interesting piece of news, I won’t buy the phone as it doesn’t actually interest me, or grab me enough to go and spend money on it; but its certainly something of interest, and a product which is really targeting what I do the most – download music.

So back to the Android:
Well, there’s nothing to say. I think the device itself looks good (although for the videos I’ve seen, slightly slower than the iPhone), and if it’s priced correctly it should fly off the shelves. But where is the buzz from the Sixth Formers? The sixteen to eighteen year olds with plenty of disposable income, and a constant desire to keep up with the times just have no desire, or even no knowledge of this remarkable piece of news.

Then I think about this, why don’t my friends know about this? Or even the people who I see everyday, why don’t I hear them talking about the latest mobile phones? I hear them chatting about the new Manhunter game, and Gears of War, and maybe debating what’s best, the Playstation 3 or the Xbox 360? Why, and I’ve said this before, isn’t there more advertising, or promotions for the young people of today?
Obviously there is an issue here. Either my outer-London school and its students are blissfully unaware, or advertising just isn’t doing its job.

For all I know, I could be totally wrong; but in the numerous times I’ve tried to talk about mobiles or something I feel like I’m talking a different language. And, I don’t know about you or anyone else really, but in this day and age, who would expect that? What’s more, how is it, that Nokia with their 5310 which is so obviously designed and aimed at young people, aren’t they targeting us?

So to Nokia, and Google, what’s going to happen? You both have quite possibly big selling devices, but what are you doing about it? The 5310 launches tomorrow and I’m certainly not feeling, nor seeing any of the buzz.

If you have a differing opinion on this, or want my opinion on any particular aspect of the mobile industry please feel free to leave comments or e-mail me at samantha@mobileindustryreview.com

He writes:

Do you know if Bluetooth Marketing is still actively being used or has a been forgotten. Do you know any good Bluetooth Marketing companies that lease kit or software?

You’d have been forgiven for thinking so, wouldn’t you? I’ve not read a lot — nor have I seen much about the field of bluetooth marketing recently.

I decided to delve into my mail account and see what I could find with the keywords ‘bluetooth’ and ‘marketing’:

- ROK Promoter & Geniem — www.rokpromoter.com offer Bluetooth marketing services online

- Pontomobi (a Brazil based marketing agency) are regular Bluetooth marketing users on behalf of their clients — such as Fiat, Motorola (here’s a Youtube on the Moto campaign they did recently)

- Hypertag helped o2 ‘achieve exceptional results’ via their retail channel using Bluetooth or ‘proximity marketing’. Here’s a bit more about them:

Hypertag created the Proximity Marketing industry (commonly referred to as Bluetooth Marketing) in 2001. Hypertag is the most experienced provider in the industry, and since it pioneered using technologies like Bluetooth as a wireless marketing channel, has gone on to run over 320 successful campaigns in over 34 countries. Hypertag brings the benefits of digital to out-of-home and experiential marketing. It works with the top brands to achieve real measurable results again and again. Hypertag is the Proximity Marketing solution that the top tier advertisers choose, and Hypertag’s clients include Coca-Cola, Nike, Unilever, HSBC, BP, O2 and CNN.

- Blip Systems offer Bluetooth mobile marketing services (I remember they’d wired up Copenhagen Airport with some Bluetooth modules. Not necessarily to do marketing in this case but to measure dwell time and help with queue management (by identifying and tracking the unique Bluetooth signatures of individual handsets as they flow throughout the airport).

- Bluepod Media delivered 350,000 bluetooth video trailer downloads in one month for Warner Brothers back in March this year.

If you’re into bluetooth marketing, drop me a note or place a comment here?

Crazy.

The whole point of the Obama VP text scenario was, I thought, to sidestep the mainstream media and win over the doubting electorate by going direct to them. Or maybe it was just a jump on the bandwagon and the ability to sign-up more mobile numbers to try and boost donations?

Next.

i2SMS are working with Encompass Advertising and Marketing — a full service national marketing agency who, in turn, are working for the car markers Scion. Scion are one of their vehicles on site at the Minnesota State Fair. It’ll be filled full with Scion-branded skulls and if you guess the number of skulls, you can win a new Garmin nuvi GPS device for each day of the 10-day Fair. Nice!

If you haven’t come across Scion, check out their site here. It’s rather smart.

There’s a million or so folk due to attend the fair and around 60% of them are in Scion’s target demographic. I think they’ll be dead impressed at how the medium of text performs. It’s already a fantastic method of engaging folk with a view to arranging test drives here in the UK.

I’m told that Scion personnel are ecstatic about the early response of the campaign. I’m not surprised. Here’s a quote from a chap from Scion:

“Thursday night’s winner was standing at a booth right next to ours when he received his message announcing he was the winner of the Garmin,” said Toyota Chicago Region’s Scion Field Manager Kendall Griffin. “All of a sudden, we could hear him cheer and shout that he was a winner.” Griffin continued, “We loved it.”

Excellent, excellent, excellent!

For those of you who are interested, I’m running a one-day course on mobile marketing for the lovely folks at E-Consultancy on 16 September in London near Old Street. It’ll be a small class and we’ll cover all aspects of mobile marketing from SMS to mobile web with plenty of time for in-depth discussion, knowledge-sharing and case studies. And yes, we’ll even talk about the iphone effect. At the time of writing, this is my last planned public course for 2008.

The course is suitable for marketers at all levels, all I ask you to bring with you is a smile, a good attitude and a willingness to take part. It is not a technology course so there’ll be no programming although there might be a few gadgets to look at if I can borrow some in time for the day. Previous delegates have been more than pleasantly surprised at how much they enjoyed the day.

I’m currently updating the case study section of the course and I’m always interested to be updated with new, interesting, relevant case studies. So if you have something to share – with images and some indication of results (why it was a success or failure), then I’m very interested to hear about it. You can contact me via email. Also if you have relevant mobile gadgets or gizmos to lend me for the day, please do get in touch. I’m thinking specifically upcoming handsets, a Flip camera (to demonstrate UGC), NFC handset/demo or anything else you can think of.

The team at txtNation are rightly delighted to be providing the infrastructure for wine maker, Blossom Hill’s summer competition.

Blossom Hill are giving away 20 summer garden parties worth £1k each. Nice.

3.75 million promotional bottles of their Rosé range are already out in the marketplace looking for your attention (and containing full details of the promotion). To enter you simply text your details to the txtNation shortcode. Entrants will receive a reply confirming the receipt of their text message along with a quirky idea to enhance their own garden.

In addition, 1,000 pubs in the UK will be promoting the relateed Blossom Hill MMS picture messaging competition. I particularly like this concept:

Consumers are to take photos of themselves enjoying Blossom Hill wine with friends to be able to enter into the prize draw, in which people will win one of the 10 Garden party kit prizes within their local pub. All they have to do is simply take a photo of themselves and send it in with the word ‘SUMMER’ to 60999. For the other competition they could simply text in their name, address and D.O.B along with the word ‘BLOSSOM’ to 60999 for the chance to win fantastic prizes.

Blossom Hill — via their agency, Pulse Group — purchased mFUSION and mBILL from txtNation enabling them to ensure that their campaigns were set up successfully and delivered perfectly, right on schedule. txtNation also created the website that Blossom Hill is using to host the picture competition.

I can’t get enough of this kind of news. I am really pleased to read about it and I’m delighted txtNation are telling people about it — all too often, we in the industry only find out about successes such as this when you’re in the local superstore. The fact that big, big consumer brands such as Blossom Hill are adopting the medium of mobile to support their big summer marketing push is brilliant news for the mobile industry. Because all of Blossom Hill’s competitors will now be peering at the competition and if they haven’t looked at mobile, they’ll now be a lot more keen on discussing it when it’s raised by their agencies next year.

Bring it on. The more, the better. Nice one txtNation.

Mr. Manzitti blames the fact that recipients often have to pay for text-message ads for much of the opposition to them. “If the carriers offered marketers a different type of pricing, where the marketer paid the cost rather than the consumer, you’d see a different type of response,” he said.

There’s a huge disconnect between real business and the mobile industry.

Real business people — like Mr Manzitti and his colleagues — are left dumbfounded, I’m sure, by the idiotic nonsense expounded by mobile operators.

How can you expect the medium of mobile to take off when it turns out that, in many cases, the people you’re targeting with your $20 annual subscription to the Jelly of the Month Club are actually being charged to receive your texts, because their mobile operator doesn’t live in this space-time-continuum?

We move on.

It’s a great new medium… but with teething problems galore.

(Thanks for the link, Jeremy).

The concept is that shortcode and keywords will appeal in the national press here in the UK, allowing M&S to track the response. All users then get a reply with a link to access the M&S ‘Back to School’ mobile site from their mobile. Smart. I can see this being used by a lot of mums.

The mobile internet site, designed and hosted by Incentivated, and built using its WAPsite publisher tool,
features school uniforms for boys and girls, with photos and prices based on its brochures. Customers are also asked to reply with their email address in order to receive a branded email carrying the voucher codes for online redemption.

Customers wanting to buy the Back to School range immediately can use the ‘click to call’ function on the mobile internet site, which connects them to the M&S Direct call centre. Customers can qualify for discounts by quoting the unique voucher reference numbers contained in the mobile internet site.

Alternatively, the unique voucher reference numbers can be used on www.marksandspencer.com for online discounts.

Excellent. I’m pleased to see big retailers dipping into the mobile medium and giving it decent support. I look forward to hearing how this performs. I reckon it’ll do well.

Way back in 2002 I got my first mobile phone, at the age of eleven. It was on T-Mobile, and I thought it was bloody brilliant to say the least; finally, I had a communication method. Along with T-Mobile, I also found I also received quite a few adverts; and for the most part, I remember them being totally useless (holidays, ringtones, or “Adult Services”), so I didn’t like them.

Then, I changed to Virgin Mobile, and it was much of the same. Except, Virgin are a little more concerned with what they said out to eleven/twelve year olds, and even up to this year, sixteen year olds. I got more ringtones offers, Virgin related offers, and quite a few other promotions too.

In all, they were pretty dull, pointless, and quickly deleted. They were nothing interesting, and they tended to be sent at some of the most inappropriate times (the middle of School, or something), and they would end up getting me into trouble.

Then, as I’m sure quite a few of you know, I joined Blyk. I had previously been asked about a new network being opened in the UK, and it would be funded by mobile advertising; and I was completely against it. I hate adverts; and I’m pretty sure everyone else does too. Yes, they make things free, but they are annoying, and tend to have really catchy jingles – which aggravates me beyond belief.

When I was told about Blyk, I forgot about my past resentment, and joined them. “Yay, free texts and minutes for adverts, and you never know they might actually be good!”

That’s where I think I was wrong. So far, nothing has been remotely inspiring, and I haven’t been keen to like new bands, or go to buy new products, or even existing ones. I’ll admit, I’ve got Sun Burn text alerts (I’m in dire need of them), but have I spent any money as a result?

No.

Have I gone out to the shops and looked up a new brand or something I haven’t look at before?

No.

And when I was being sent constant repeat reminders from Blyk to watch “Britain’s Next Top Model”, did I watch it?

No.
I’m not going to say here that just because it hasn’t worked for me, it doesn’t work for others. I know, we’re all individuals in this crazy little world, and we all have the choice to be drawn into the marketing that is sent our way, no matter what medium was used to do so.

What I’m saying is that marketing is something the majority of us try to avoid. I have Ad-Block Plus installed onto FireFox, and before that, I had Norton block the ports I knew advertising was sent through.
Then on the TV, do I sit around and watch them? No.
On the radio do I listen to them? No.

And the same can be said for a lot of young people. No one I know sits around and enjoys or even watches TV adverts – the channel gets changed for four minutes. On the radio, they’ll change the station.

On-demand TV, and the internet has revolutionised the way we watch TV, and yes, this isn’t mobile, but on-demand shows have none of that advertising attached to it. Is then, a coincidence that more and more people are turning to these services to watch their TV?

Now I’ll say this, all the adverts I’ve got from Blyk, I’ll read, and then delete. If they require a response, I’ll respond, but that’s it. I honestly couldn’t care less about their content.

What’s worse is that Blyk knows my interests and age, yet I still get sent offers which are totally out of reach with who I am, and what I like. I still get the occasional offer for a Holiday, or I get informed about competitions they are running which I can’t enter due to my age.

As all advertising is, it’s a multi-million pound industry, and it will make money, and I’m sure it’ll become more overt to the different age groups as it expands. But at the same time, we don’t like them. Many of us use a combination of tools and methods to steer clear of the ghastly things. Therefore I don’t see how it can be that effective.

I can’t say for sure, but I would be shocked if a number of Blyk members, or even normal mobile users, who receive adverts, don’t open and delete as I do.
A lot of people I know are reluctant about joining networks supported by adverts, because they don’t like them. They don’t want to be bombarded with promotions and marketing which will only every annoy them.

Before you debate about how I may wrong, which I accept I may just be, think about this: have you ever heard someone say that they bought or did something because of an advert they received on a mobile?

On Firefox I use Ad Blocker Plus so I don’t even see them on banners – it speeds the download process up no end.

So it’s not really a surprise to any of the friends that have been strawpolled that marketing to your mobile hasn’t taken off in the UK even though the market is saturated.

According to Precision Marketing:

The popularity of mobile marketing has only risen by 9 per cent in that past five years, despite the saturation of mobile phones in the UK, according to a new report.

The research, conducted by G2 Data Dynamics via its panel of 30,000 consumers, reveals only 9 per cent of consumers are more receptive to mobile marketing than they were five years ago.

Despite advances in technology giving marketers more opportunities to target users via their handsets, mobile phone owners still appear resistant to mobile marketing.

The results show that women are mostly more receptive, with 12 per cent agreeing compared to 7 per cent of men who said they were not very receptive to mobile marketing.

G2 Data Dynamics commercial and operations director Alan Thorpe says: “It’s clear that people are still to accept that mobile phones can be used for marketing instead of just communicating with one another. If marketers want to break down this barrier they must ensure their mobile marketing campaigns are based on customer insight into individual preferences to ensure better targeting and reduced consumer annoyance.”

It’s not really rocket science. Marketing is seen by many as an intrusion so get them to sign up for it first. Make adverts have something relevant to the person other than ‘you’re near Starbucks, want a coffee?’ and set them up for Facebook / Twitter first.

Geniem, which sells on device portals, Bluetooth technologies and social media to carriers as well as consumer goods companies, has the likes of Nokia, Volvo, ABC, Pepsi, and SonyBMG already among its customers.

Tuomas Kumpula, Geniem’s CEO, said the company will be rolling out its services to ROK’s customer base and will be introducing a white label mobile social networking product aimed at network carriers in the future. The deal sounds like it could be a hot combination – bringing together two of the most talked about mobile applications, mobile TV and social networking.