Mobile Marketing Ecosystem Panel at ad:tech Sydney 2007

What’s next for mobile marketing?

Firstly, in Australia and New Zealand, SMS/TXT is here to stay. Using the capabilities of video and photo phones in a campaign is still very difficult partly due to low penetration of 3G handsets (about 12% in Australia) and partly because the mobile phone companies still make it very difficult to provide a consistent experience across different networks and handsets. I worked on a project last year in the US where this problem was magnified by the number of different networks and handsets. Even more complicated is that the mobile phone companies pre-install different firmware on the same handset which turn on or off functionality. So you could get everything working fine on a Motorola RAVR on the Vodafone network, and then find that it is different on the same device that came from Optus or another network. So to ensure the most people possible can enter, you should still use SMS, but then it can be used as a gateway to richer content. For example, they txt in initially and then are sent back a link to a mobile web site with photo, music or video content.

Video and photo phones have been used effectively as devices for getting content from consumers for campaigns. Perhaps the biggest campaign in Australasia is the Street Idol campaign run by Telsta in Australia. Entrants could send in their video from their phone and then supplement the entry with a description etc online. There would have been some technical issues doing this, but it it is pretty cool. YouTube supports content being uploaded via a phone, but as mentioned above, only certain networks will let this happen. Vodafone doesn’t support it for example as it will only send a link, not the actual video file itself. Once this becomes widely available, it will make it very easy to do a campaign like this by leveraging YouTube’s platform and avoid a complicated negotiation with the telcos.

Mobile commerce and mobile payments are going to emerge this year, but I don’t believe we’ll see widespread adoption. Banks are already starting to trial this and once one or two jump in, the rest will follow quickly but it is going to be a slow start I think.

The concept of “brand subsidy” is probably going to be a reality this year. That is a brand paying for or subsidising handsets or services in return for branding and advertising. Google has already indicated that they believe people would accept a Google branded device with advertising if it were very cheap or free. Another example, would be a brand providing a branded application or service that is given away to consumers.

Mobile TV will probably not be widely adopted as the networks are busy recouping their investment on expensive 3G networks so are charging for data and the content. I don’t believe that many people will want to watch long videos on their phones. I do believe that consumer generated video content which is generally much shorter in length and free will be much more popular. Although Telstra has just launched wotnext.com.au where consumers can submit video content via their phones and if you want to download it, you pay $1. The interesting part of this is that the person who created the content gets $0.50. This will be one of the first regional examples of monetisation of consumer generated video and so will be very interesting to watch.

There is “Mobile Phone Lifestyle Index Third Edition” due out in Australia on 6th March which has deep qualitative research as well as hard numbers on how consumers are using their phones and mobile devices and what they are wanting to do in the future. We’ll be keeping an eye out for this as it will be probably the most detailed research done regionally in recent times. You can register for the launch event if you’re in Sydney. Thanks to Oliver Weidlich for pointing me in the right direction.