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This June's mobile lottery for tickets to the Live8 concerts graphically demonstrated two things. Firstly, it was a clear exemplifier of how different the world is from 1985 when the first Live Aid event took place - thanks to mobile ubiquity, it is simple to open up and run a ticket lottery to a million-plus young people within a week of announcing the concerts were to take place. More importantly, however, it cemented the role of the mobile in the marketing mix. Never before has there been such a mass market call to action tool that also lets the advertiser make money through the response to its advert. £1.50 per text? Welcome to the 21st Century.
This ability to make money from people responding to your ads and then perhaps even spending more money with you buying goods and services hasn't failed to capture the imagination of everyone in the telemedia industry. The rise of MMS - and increasingly mobile video - is also leaving the way open to a whole new tranche of marketing and advertising opportunities that will, by turns, subsidise the roll out of more MMS and video services. And, if protagonists of the mobile marketing fad are to be believed, change the face of marketing forever - finally letting marketeers in to the marketing Valhalla that is mass one-to-one contact with customers.
But before we get carried away, it has to be noted that these dreams are still, largely, just that: dreams. There is, to date, very little actual evidence that mobile marketing actually works and there are a number of creases that have to be ironed out along the way if it is to get where we all want it to go.
What we know so far, from agencies that peddle successful mobile marketing services, is that early SMS-based campaigns are quite successful: "Audience response rates from mobile campaigns and the brand awareness they generate stand out compared to other media and channels," says Katherine Nester from marketing and research company FirstPartner. "Mobile campaigns have an average response rate of 12 per cent - some four times greater than direct marketing [which averages two to three per cent]. The average spontaneous brand recall generated 12 per cent - nearly twice the average rate of spontaneous recall of radio (six per cent) and TV (seven per cent) campaigns."
While these early figures for text based campaigns are encouraging, they are still very limited in scope.
"It is really only the operators themselves that are deploying marketing services to sell their own content to their existing customer base at the moment," says Leora Briam, senior manager, mobile applications at NMS Communications. "This is pretty much a good thing for mobile marketing as it will get mobile customers used to receiving and responding to calls to action through their mobiles. But many marketing people view it with suspicion."
While this works well around the walled garden ringtone, logo and games download market - and will also probably extend through the fledgling sale of music via mobile - it is something of a soft option in terms of marketing as it only really demonstrates that operators can use mobile to sell things to customers who they pretty much already know want the things they are selling.
The real challenge is to open up this marketing opportunity to the wider world: to allow big name brands to use the mobile channel to drive customers to either buy content direct to their phones or, more ambitiously, to buy goods and services through the web or even high street stores.
For today's telemedia companies that are already doing a roaring trade in ringtones and other mobile content, there is an opportunity to start marketing around the services they already have to these big name brands. You, after all, have the customers the brands want to target and the delivery mechanism they want to use.
But you have to know who your customers are. And here we find the first problem with making mobile marketing an attractive proposition to non-telemedia and non-telecoms companies who want to hit the youth market.
"With any mobile service there is a data trail so you can track who is doing what and, more importantly, what they have and haven't done before - especially what they have downloaded," says Beep Marketing's Helen Keegan. "But is anyone using this? We have spent a lot of time looking at companies such as Jamster. They get a lot of people buying content from them, but how much of it is repeat business? How much of it is new business? These companies have obviously built some sort of brand loyalty, but until they know exactly how loyal to the Jamster brand users are then these companies will be unable to offer true mobile marketing services to other brands keen to tap in to their demographic."
This sort of customer data is key to existing players opening up their database to other brands to market other things to. Indeed, it is key to mobile operators up and cross selling to their own customers, but you would be amazed at how little they know about what those customers are doing.
"This is the biggest challenge, certainly for operators," agrees NMS's Briam. "Operators - and to some extent content providers through those operators - currently don't know anymore about their customers than their phone numbers, especially when it comes to pre-pay customers. Currently many operators are focussing on database and customer relationship management (CRM) technology to better do this. But once much of the selling of mobile content goes off portal this will become even more difficult to police and capture data on. This is a real challenge."
The other challenge facing anyone wanting to carry out mobile marketing is privacy. While there are many laws, rules and regulations surrounding opt-in and opt-out of mobile services, as well as EU rules preventing businesses from making any unsolicited contact with anyone, simply bombarding phone users with marketing material could kill off mobile marketing before it has even got started.
"Mobile is a very personal channel. People have it with them wherever they are and, in theory if you know anything about their buying habits and where they are - which will come in time - you can have mass one-to-one ‘conversations' with people," says Keegan. "But you can't bombard people with marketing; you have to build a gentle dialogue with them so that they want to get your SMS or MMS marketing material, because it makes their life better."
Get this wrong and your mobile marketing strategy implodes and you lose business. This is perhaps the finest line that anyone wishing to use mobile as a brand building exercise has to tread. If mobile marketing is successful then everyone will be doing it and before long you will find customers opting for more expensive mobile services that bar marketing spam - you lose and, once again, the MNOs win. A nightmare scenario perhaps, but one that is worth factoring in.
"Mobile marketing offers many new money making opportunities for all concerned," says Keegan. "It is potentially an excellent traffic driver for all other media. But you have to remember that mobile is about moments. If you are playing a mobile game it is a moment, not a whole evening, and marketing has to build around this mobile moment concept if it is to take off."
Author: Paul Skeldon
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w: www.lucent.com
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