| Marketers get up close and personal |
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Marketers get up close and personal By Brad Howarth B&T, 22 June 2006 The mobile phone’s capacity for channelling highly-targeted and personalised marketing strategies has been discussed for years, but are networks and advertisers any closer to realising its potential? Mobile marketing presents a unique opportunity for reaching audiences. There are at least 18 million handsets now in the Australian market, and as the most personal of communication devices, the mobile telephone offers vast potential for tailored marketing campaigns. But in a world where consumers are growing more aware—and in many cases more wary—of when they are being targeted by making best use of the mobile communication channel requires some skilful deployment. The majority of mobile marketing activity in Australia continues to revolve around the direct-marketing capabilities of SMS text-messaging, particularly for voting and as a contest-entry mechanism. Mobile content is still dominated by downloads of items such as ringtones and wallpaper. Figures from the research company Frost & Sullivan show that the mobile-content market, including items such as ringtones, games, email and information services, was valued at $130m in Australia in 2004. Preliminary findings indicate that will increase to between $250m and $300m for 2005. Growth will slow slightly for 2006, due to the exclusion of certain content types from some capped and pre-paid plans, but should still reach above $500m. Adoption of mobile content in Australia lags behind that of some other countries, particularly in Asia. However, research director at Frost & Sullivan, Foad Fadaghi, says he is not convinced that Australia will mimic the Asian experience, where he says mobile content has become a fix to boredom and is influenced by factors that are less prevalent in Australia. “If you’re on a big metropolitan rail system like they have in Asia, there is more time to kill,” Fadaghi says. “If you look at it from a global perspective, the strong growth in Asia is going to be followed by countries in Europe, and then the US and then Australia.” Fadaghi says evolutionary leaps in services and technology, such as the combination of search technology with mapping tools, will drive further content usage. “Then we move into the realm of powerful consumer tools that you won’t be able to live without,” Fadaghi says. “Things like product comparisons, or mobile auctions. Once we start to go into that territory and see what’s really starting to blossom online within mobile devices, that’s when we’ll start to see the true power of the Holy Grail of convergence.” Content is king Further growth in mobile content adoption will depend on the mobile marketer’s abilities to create new and compelling marketing models, possibly subsidising the cost of content with advertising. The group mobile director at content portal ninemsn, Chris Noone, likens this to the same model as television, radio and print. His company is considering adding marketing to the mobile version of its free email service, Hotmail. “At the moment we charge a subscription for Hotmail on the mobile phone,” Noone says. “When we look at an advertising model it might be a reduced subscription or a free service. But there has to be a payoff for the customer in seeing that advertising. We have to be extremely careful that we don’t take over too much advertising on that screen, and we have to make sure that the advertising is extremely relevant and extremely targeted to that consumer.” Much of the efforts of monetising mobile content are focused on third-generation networks—these networks, such as that operated by the mobile carrier 3, are now used by more than one million Australians. Third-generation networks also overcome issues such as ensuring that handsets are able to receive multimedia content and browse mobile websites through wireless application protocol (WAP) technology, which is less likely for phones designed for older networks. According to the managing director for the mobile content developer MobileActive, Neil Wiles, WAP offers a much richer experience for consumers than can be achieved with a 160-character text message. It’s the same as the internet,” Wiles says. “You can have product display, you can have fields that they fill in, and all they have to do is click ‘submit’ and that information is immediately transmitted. But that’s what you’ll see start to grow.” But advertisers beware: Ideal Interfaces’ usability specialist, Oliver Weidlich, says advertising needs to be both subtle and highly beneficial to be accepted by consumers. “We are going to have a lot of brands trying to have direct contact with the customer,” Weidlich says. “Then it will become significantly hard to manage.” Weidlich describes the mobile phone as a highly personal device, but also an interruptive one. People who are attuned to getting messages to their friends and family may not react so favourably to high volumes of commercial messages, even if they have opted to receive them. “Because the communication aspect is so strong, people attend to it. Their reaction is positive when they get an SMS, and then it almost lets them down, because they are expecting a one-to-one communication from a family member, and then it is this thing that is sent out to everybody. And they almost feel taken advantage of, that people would use this personal communication channel for this type of information,” Weidlich says. Peer-to-peer content Still at the early stages of development are more advanced concepts, such as creating and then monetising user-generated content and social networks. Online communities such as MySpace and Flickr have shown how user-generated content can create a compelling destination for large numbers of viewers – and advertisers. Legion Interactive’s Mediacast service, which currently enables consumers to SMS, MMS or email video footage, pictures and text messages to Ten Network’s news service, is an early attempt at integrating user-generated content with mobile channels. Creating online communities and monetising user-generated content and peer-to-peer networks is a strong topic of discussion among mobile marketing and content companies, although few are yet willing to discuss their plans in detail. Wiles says MobileActive is weeks away from unveiling its own mobile social networking service. The company already boasts an opt-in user community of 100,000 members, and Wiles believes that communities are becoming an incredibly important component of mobile marketing. The MobileActive community initiatives will focus strongly on user-generated content, with tools for blogging and other activities. As great as its potential might be, mobile marketing remains only one component of an integrated marketing strategy. According to the managing director of mobile marketing company Communicator Interactive, Jason Jercinovic, consumers will move to a model where their primary concern is having access to the content that they want, regardless of the delivery mechanism. “As technology marketers we have to make it a seamless experience across all channels. We need to be able to see and track conversations across mediums. So I see mobile as core, but also as one of the components,” he says. |
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