by Alan Moore
Benefits of MobilePersonal:
My Media
It’s a fact that people today are more wedded to their mobile
phones than to their wallets. And the mobile is rapidly cannibalising
our wallet too. A Unisys
survey revealed that if we lose our wallet, on average we report it in
26 hours. But if we lose our mobile phone, on average we report it in
68 minutes. Meanwhile a 2006 survey by Wired found that 60% of married
mobile phone owners will not share their phone with their spouses. A Carphone Warehouse survey found that 68% of teenagers won’t let their parents see what is on their phones. It is that personal.
Always Carried: The City in my pocket
It is no longer surprising that we will not leave home without our phone. A global survey by BBDO in 2005 found that 6 out of 10 people sleep with the mobile phone physically in bed with them. A worldwide Nokia
survey in 2006 found that 72% of the population use the mobile phone as
their alarm clock. The phone is taken to the restroom and it was quoted
at Forum Oxford that the bathroom is one of the common uses of both the mobile internet and mobile TV.
No other mass media has this intense a relationship with the audience.
Always On
Some early opinions by the newspaper publishers were that maybe the
internet could offer a rival experience to the printed newspaper, but
the mobile phone screen has so little “real estate”
that it could not fulfil this need. This is also being proven not to be
true. Mobile offers an active screen which, can be far superior to the
static printed paper view of a newspaper or magazine. It just took a
while for the mobile content industry to develop its formats to
capitalize on the power of mobile.
iMedia
For example Japanese mobile operator NTT DoCoMo has introduced iMedia
- a news ticket feed that uses the idle screen mode of the mobile
phone. So whenever the phone is placed on the desk or table for
example, it will scroll breaking news like the CNN
News Ticker on the bottom of the TV. Users can select whether they want
sports news or world news or financial news or celebrity gossip news
and so forth, in any combination.
When the phone owner clicks on the current news, it goes to more of
the story with text, pictures - and video. The service costs 2 dollars
per month and in 18 months from launch, 8 million Japanese were paying
for this service, which amounts to a 16% adoption rate and a massive
192 million dollars per year in Japan alone.
Consider all subscription news services online on the internet, Japan’s NTT DoCoMo
has more paying subscribers on one mobile news service than all online
newspapers worldwide combined. If we assume that the same rate of
adoption happens around the world - and there is no reason to doubt it
- this one mobile news service alone, if used by 16% of the 2.8 billion
mobile phone users could generate over 10 Billion dollars of revenues
worldwide. Can a mobile news service threaten a newspaper? It already
does, the same service was recently launched in Portugal by Vodafone. Coming soon to an idle phone screen near you.
Built in payment
In Helsinki Finland 57% of the public transport single tickets are
paid by mobile. In Croatia over half of all parking is paid by mobile.
In South Africa you can have your paycheck paid directly to the mobile
phone account linked to your mobile banking account.
In Soweto a barber shop has more than half of its customers paying
by mobile. 20% of London’s congestion charge is paid by mobile.
In Slovenia every vending machine, every McDonalds restaurant and every
taxicab accepts payment by mobile phone. In Kenya the maximum limit of
mobile-to-mobile money payments is set to 1 million US dollars per
single transaction.
And in South Korea all credit card companies enable their credit
cards to the owners’ mobile phones by default, offering to send
an optional old-fashioned plastic credit card to the customer’s
home address for free. Where the internet is an iceberg that has
started to rise, and parts of its impacts are already visible, mobile
as the 7th mass media is mostly still submerged. But make no mistake
about it, mobile will be far greater in its reach, much larger in its
revenues, more influential as a mass media, more relevant as an
advertising vehicle and more potent as a creative platform than the
internet.
At point of Creative Impulse: Convergence of User & Creator
In the context of mobile and the web, the mobile web is focused on the user as the creator and consumer of content, as Mobile Web 2.0 author Tony Fish says, ‘at the point of inspiration.’ It is “Prosumption”
(production and consumption). We are using the mobile platform to share
information with a trusted network, we are collaborating, and we are
using our mobile as a media production tool.
Witness the use of mobile technologies in the London July 7th
bombings, witness the use of the mobile to bring down the government of
Joseph Estrada of the Philippines, or SeeMeTV on the Three mobile network, the use of Mo-blogging at Moblog UK, which has recently been incorporated into a project with commercial TV broadcaster Channel 4. MyNuMo allows people to create mobile content and if they can sell it they get a revenue share. Even Al Gore’s Current TV is noted as being a leader in the use of user generated mobile content.
Mobile makes TV interactive: Pop Idol
To illustrate its power, mobile is able to act as the interactive channel for legacy media. A good example is the global Pop Idol format, with its American Idol, Australian Idol, Germany's Deutschland Sucht Der Superstar and the French Nouvelle Star
variants. Pop Idol has had over 60 runs in over 30 countries over the
past five years, gathering a total of 3.2 billion viewings, where
nearly half of that number has been watching the finals of any given
national Pop Idol run.
More revealingly, those 3.2 billion viewers have voted a staggering
1.9 billion times, and almost all of the votes were on mobile phones,
mostly using SMS text voting. The Pop Idol reality TV format alone has
generated more than 600 million dollars of revenues out of viewers
voting. (For more see SMLXL 2006 White Paper on Pop Idol)
Accurate Audience: The Holy Grail of marketing
The Holy Grail
for Mass Media is to clearly identify an interested audience. We know
what gets measured gets made, and so the more accurately we know who
the audience is, the more precisely advertising and marketing can be
targeted. With magazines and newspapers those who subscribe can be
identified, usually by name and address.
But then we don’t know exactly how many in the given household
actually read that publication. And for those issues bought at the
newsstand, we have no idea. With radio and TV we can only measure
audiences by Nielsen ratings, a sampling of 1000 families telling us what millions watch. With cinema we know even less about the actual viewing audience.
The internet promised “a segment of one”
– that we could identify by the IP address of the computer, the
actual user base. This proved very inaccurate due to corporate
networks, firewalls, multiple PCs, and multiple users on a given PC
such as a family PC shared by teenagers and parents, or a university
computer lab shared by thousands. Not to mention internet cafes. The
internet industry has gone to great lengths such as the use of cookies
installed in internet user computers to try to track usage. But even
with the best of methods, only a tiny fraction of internet users and
their usage is accurately captured.
That is the exact opposite with mobile. With the 7th Mass Media,
every phone is identified and all web traffic and service content usage
can be tracked. There still are imperfections, in that some mobile
phone users have two phones. But for example the fact that over half of
the world’s phones are “prepay” accounts
(where the user name is not known) often surprises people outside the
mobile telecoms industry, that these accounts are perfectly and
uniquely identified and can be tracked perfectly.
The only element not known is the actual name of the person. But for Playboy
page views by phone number 0123 456 7890 can be tracked use after use,
day after day, month after month. And we can see which other pages this
user consumed, at what time of day, from which address, eg., home or
work or hotel, etc that access was made.
AFM Ventures illustrated the degree
of accuracy in 2007. On TV only about 1% of audience data is captured.
On the internet this is about 10%. But on mobile, about 90% of audience
data is captured. This is totally unprecedented accuracy in any mass
media ever. And that is what’s has aroused the interest of brands
and advertisers as they see the effectiveness of traditional marketing
communications as a pale shadow of its old self.
Data the Next Intel Inside
From who consumes our media content, to what the user consumes. The
first level of audience understanding is who is our audience. That is
easy to understand. Who is my audience. A magazine subscription or Nielsen rating or internet profile or cookie can get us that information. But a more powerful element is what that customer consumes.
Some internet services can capture that level of information, such as which YouTube
videos a given customer has watched, but this has the internet
draw-backs of incomplete user data to begin with. On mobile perfect
user-information can be collected. As every click of a mobile web page
is transmitted over the air (and may incur a charge to the phone bill),
the mobile network operator already collects total usage information on
its millions of customers, all day and all night. Perfect usage
information. This is much more valuable to the media owner or the
advertiser than just knowing the size of the audience. Which pages of
the news feed were consumed, which were ignored, etc.
Social context of consumption
If we can understand every click and as mobile is also a communication tool, we can apply “social data analytics”,
to the massive flows of data. Not only discovering what we consume, but
with whom. If we like a joke, to whom do we forward it to? If we
receive a mobile coupon which friend did we share it with who retrieved
our coupon? Only if the users are accurately identified, their actual
usage is measured, and the media allows sharing, can we map out social
networking dimensions accurately.
This is far more valuable to advertisers and media owners than only knowing the size of an audience.
One of the first discoveries out of the social networking analytics was the concept of the “Alpha User”, as discussed in Ahonen & Moore’s book Communities Dominate Brands.
When communities of interest can be identified by their communication
patterns and, members each be accurately identified, then it becomes a
matter of tracking their communication to identify who are the
influencers of the communities.
These are called Alpha Users and they are vastly more relevant to any service adoption than the previous concept of the “Early Adopters”
from the marketing theories of the 1970’s. Commercial social
networking techniques were launched only four years ago and one of the
pioneers, Xtract of Finland,
reports that by using social networking insights, mobile operator
Swisscom was able to increase its sales by of a new product launch by
90%.
The mobile device is the perfect platform for this to happen. Also
it provides advertisers to provide relevant, contextual information and
services that are “Just in Time” vs. “Just in Case,” avoiding the huge wastage that is incurred with “Just in Case marketing.”
Further more social data analytics enables the receiver of
information, driven by commercial need to see that information as
timely and relevant. It is a critical component in the migration that
is occurring from what advertising was, Interruptive, to what
advertising is becoming, Engaging. Engagement marketing
is a very broad term, and purposefully so. At its heart, is the insight
that human beings are highly social animals, and have an innate need to
communicate and interact.
Therefore, any engagement marketing initiative must allow for
two-way flows of information and communication. We believe, people
embrace what they create. Engagement is about connecting large or small
communities to content that they care about and, delivering that
content in such a way that is always an emotional and valued
experience. Something that interruptive communications cannot do. For
more information download the SMLXL little book of Engagement Marketing.
