Mobile Marketing Issue 10, June 2012 by Mobile Marketing Magazine

Issue Ten | June 2012

News | Views | Analysis

MIDDLE MAN EKTRON’S TOM WENTWORTH ON PUTTING MOBILE AT THE CENTRE OF YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY

ANGER MANAGEMENT HOW ROVIO TURNED ANGRY BIRDS INTO A MOBILE SENSATION

CASHLESS SOCIETY GETTING READY FOR MOBILE MONEY

CHARITY CASE HOW THE THIRD SECTOR IS EMBRACING MOBILE

MACHINE HEADS TAKING MOBILE CONNECTIVITY BEYOND THE PHONE

GET RICH QUICK TAKING RICH MEDIA MOBILE ADVERTISING MAINSTREAM

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contents

ere at Mobile Marketing, mobile technology has been the centre of our world for some time. But mobile is fast becoming central for people other than hacks working in the technology industry – and therein lies the huge opportunity for marketers and people working in other industries. You only have to look at this issue – our 10th – for proof. In our cover interview (p.30), Ektron’s Tom Wentworth puts forward a compelling argument for brands scrapping the digital marketing rulebook and placing mobile at the centre and start of all their marketing activity. Elsewhere, you’ll find evidence of mobile conquering more real-world frontiers. On p.22, we investigate the machineto-machine (M2M) phenomenon, looking at how the world is moving on from the concept of the smartphone, to that of the smart device – whether that’s a phone, a fridge, a TV, or a vending machine. Charities can use mobile to engage people with their work in a personal way that’s just not possible with other marketing (p.12). And the payments industry, for which mobile has been a technological enigma for years, is on the cusp of embracing smartphones fully and bringing mobile payments to the masses (p.6). Less serious, but no less lucrative, Rovio has proved with Angry Birds that if enough mobile consumers like your product and your brand, you can be very successful indeed. We talk to the company’s CMO about the brand’s next steps. Issue 10 also sees us welcome mobile expert Russell Buckley as our new columnist (read his account of his experiences investigating mobile in China on p.17). Add Mr Buckley to the ever-insightful Helen Keegan (p.50), and a host of guest voices from across the mobile industry and around the world, and Mobile Marketing 10 shapes up to be an essential read. We hope you enjoy it. Andy Penfold, Editor

Cover story 30 Mobile at the Centre Tom Wentworth, CMO at digital strategy company Ektron, on mobile-centric marketing

Thought leadership 5

Weather With You The Weather Channel’s Mike Zarrilli on the company’s mobile roadmap

17 Buckley On…

45 That’s Rich from InMobi

How mobile ad network InMobi has embraced rich media advertising

47 Upwardly Mobile

Insight from Propel’s study into salaries in the mobile services industry

The real world 18 Get Rich, Quick How rich media ads are helping mobile rival TV when it comes to consumer engagement with brands

Our new columnist Russell Buckley checks out the Chinese mobile market

35 Aggregate Score mBlox GM Rob Malcolm explores the evolution of A2P messaging

50 Off-Deck Helen Keegan salutes the FT’s approach to mobile

Technology 6

Payment Plan Mobile payments are edging ever closer to the mainstream – is 2012 the year?

Business models 12 Mobile in the Third Sector How charities can use mobile for fundraising and supporter engagement

26 Angry Mob Rovio on how Angry Birds became the hottest brand in mobile gaming

43 Wide Angle View Henric Ehrenblad of ad network Widespace on the premium model Issue Ten | June 2012

News | Views | Analysis

MIDDLE MAN EktroN’s tom WENtWorth oN puttiNg mobilE At thE cENtrE of Your mArkEtiNg strAtEgY

ANGEr MANAGEMENt hoW roVio turNEd ANgrY birds iNto A mobilE sENsAtioN

CAshLEss sOCIEty gEttiNg rEAdY for mobilE moNEY

ChArIty CAsE hoW thE third sEctor is EmbrAciNg mobilE

MAChINE hEADs tAkiNg mobilE coNNEctiVitY bEYoNd thE phoNE

GEt rICh QUICK tAkiNg rich mEdiA mobilE AdVErtisiNg mAiNstrEAm

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22 Rise of the Machines Why consumer devices could be the next frontier for M2M comms

Best practice 10 It’s Awards Time!

Entries for the 2012 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards are now open – find out how to enter here

32 Mobile Marketing Live

Book your place at our essential new event slated for 1-2 October – MM Live!

36 Campaign Showcase

We check out three of the best apps to take on your travels

38 Winning with Apps

Rob Thurner of the Mobile Training Academy explains where apps fit in to the marketing mix

Subscribe today and guarantee your copy If you want to be sure of receiving your copy of the print edition of Mobile Marketing four times a year, you can subscribe today to go on our controlled circulation list. It costs just £30 (UK); or £40 (rest of the world). To take out a subscription, just send an email to: subscriptions@mobilemarketingmagazine.com and we’ll respond telling you what you need to do.

Editorial director: David Murphy – david.murphy@mobilemarketingmagazine.com +44 (0)7976 927 062 Commercial director: John Owen – john.owen@mobilemarketingmagazine.com +44 (0)7769 674 824 Business development manager: Richard Partridge – richard.partridge@mobilemarketingmagazine.com Event sales director: Shelley Dowsett – shelley.dowsett@mobilemarketingmagazine.com +44 (0)20 7183 5308 Sales executive: Lisa Slavin – lisa.slavin@mobilemarketingmagazine.com +44 (0)20 7183 5285 Editor: Andy Penfold – andy.penfold@mobilemarketingmagazine.com +44 (0)7824 645 995 Staff writer: Alex Spencer – alex.spencer@mobilemarketingmagazine.com +44 (0)20 7183 5925 Contributors: Rob Buckley, George Cole, Helen Keegan, Rene Magri, Rob Thurner, Mike Zarrilli Design and production: Alistair Gillan, AQ2 Mobile – info@aq2.info Print: Advent Print Group info@advent-colour.co.uk Special thanks this issue to: Jo Murphy, Rowan Chambers, Alistair Gillan For a paid subscription please email: subscriptions@mobilemarketingmagazine.com One Year Subscription Rates – UK: £30.00; ROW: £40.00 Mobile Marketing is published by Dot Media Ltd., 114-116 Curtain Road, London EC2A 3AH www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com

June 2012

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thought leadership

weather with you The Weather Channel’s international VP, Mike Zarrilli, explains how the brand has approached the opportunities presented by the mobile platform

obile presents unique opportunities when it comes to weather. Consumers demand localised, up-to-the-minute data, and they need that data to help them make all kinds of decisions. At The Weather Channel, we recognised these opportunities early – we believe mobile is the route to becoming the worldwide leader in weather. We launched our first mobile website in 1999, following the launch of weather.com in 1996 and building on the company’s foundations as a cable network, which began in 1982. Already, our mobile platforms in the US attract 32m unique monthly users, ranking fifth behind Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and MSN/Windows Live/Bing, so we’re heading in a very positive direction. Outside of the US, the UK market is vitally important to us, due to smartphone penetra-

The Weather Channel’s mobile apps offer highly localised information – so the company’s mobile ad proposition can reach consumers with relevant, localised marketing messages

tion, cultural interest in weather and the advanced advertising industry. In addition to the UK and Western Europe, we are looking to fuel this growth through global partnerships with handset manufacturers, operating systems and portals, and our plans encompass South East Asia, Africa and Latin America.

unique visitors on the web each month and 12m per day. Mobile is the clear digital growth platform globally. Cisco’s projection of more than 10bn smartphones and Tablets by 2016 – more mobile devices than people on the planet – is yet another sign for us that the future is on a global scale.

Global potential

Going hyper-local

South East Asia is a promising territory because mobile penetration and access to the internet via mobile is high and continues to grow. Furthermore, in many cases the mobile platform is the sole internet access point. China recently surpassed a billion mobile users and India is poised to do the same, so the global potential is enormous. We take a localised approach to weather delivery. Our data is tailored to be culturally and locally relevant to specific markets – it’s important that weather content is both global and hyperlocal. Weather affects virtually everyone in the world, but it affects everyone differently based on their specific location and lifestyle. The approach is to build a standalone global brand, maximising partnerships and opportunities for The Weather Channel app to be distributed and promoted globally. We recently announced a global partnership with Nokia, for example. In the US we reach 153m people across TV, mobile, and web properties every month. This is more than half the US population. 109m of them access our content through more than one platform. We have 56m

Two thirds of the world’s mobile users want to be found so they can receive targeted information – anything from movies to sport – and of course weather data. Users want to be found so that they can receive targeted content and advertising based on geo-location, behaviour or weather conditions. We can offer an advertiser timely access to consumers’ planning and decisionmaking processes. When people are searching weather conditions, there is a highly relevant opportunity to put an ad in front of them based on their location, searched location, the current weather conditions or the forecast. For example, we recently ran a winterthemed advertising campaign for British Gas on weather.com that contained live temperature and location data in real time to reflect and respond to live weather conditions and create deeper, richer brand engagement. We are one of the biggest location-based companies in the world with a content set that is highly relevant. The mobile platform allows us to be everywhere for our users, delivering useful data and relevant, helpful advertising.

February June 20122012

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technology

payment plan Summer 2012 is shaping up to be a watershed moment for mobile payment technology. Andy Penfold reports on the imminent arrival of mobile money

hen it comes to mobile payments, you’d be forgiven for thinking the future might have arrived by now. Mobile payments have been touted as the next, imminent revolutionary use for your mobile phone for a couple of years, and as an emerging technology for even longer than that. So why the hold up? Why are we not zapping our mobile phones all over town to pay for the goods and services we buy? The answer is complicated, but after numerous false dawns, the industry now appears to be gearing up for a mobile payments revolution.

Part of the apparent slow progress has been down to the fact that the market is a sprawling web of companies working on various innovations in various sectors. Near Field Communications (NFC) contactless technology tends to take the headlines, but to take mobile payments mainstream, you need point-of-sale technologists, device manufacturers, credit companies and banks, and mobile operators all on board. Not to mention the hundreds of companies developing payment apps. “What we’re seeing at the moment – which is lots of dif-

ferent providers developing lots of different services – isn’t necessarily what we’d expect to see over the long term,” says Richard Martin, head of innovation at the Payments Council. “Ultimately it will be the consumer who decides which services flourish and which fall by the wayside. It’s such a competitive space it’s hard to imagine that customers won’t continue to enjoy lots of choice.” Competitive is the right word. Anyone who is anyone seems to be making their play in the mobile payments space, from established mobile ad networks like InMobi, to startups such as

the Carphone Warehouse-backed Mobile Money Network. And in recent months, the competition has intensified, as more major players have revealed their hand. Big names such as MasterCard, Visa, Google, and numerous operators are just some of the companies that have recently laid down their ideas to bring mobile payments into the mainstream. The next few months will see both MasterCard and Visa trial major shakeups to their payment infrastructure to accommodate mobile, while Google and ISIS have trials running in the US already.

June 2012 www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com

“the industry needs to be doing its utmost to assure consumers that the payment method is secure” Hwan Chung, Danal CS&F

Olympic athletes and VIPs will be able to trial mobile payments on a limited edition Samsung Galaxy S III at Games venues this year

Olympic effort Visa is leveraging its sponsorship of the 2012 London Olympics to trial its mobile payments solution, payWave – a move that will surely raise awareness among consumers of mobile payments. Ordinary punters at the Olympics won’t be able to use the NFC terminals, though – the trial is limited to athletes and other VIPs (who will be kitted out with a limited edition Samsung Galaxy S III). These devices will be the only phones on Earth with the Visa payWave app installed. After the Olympics, and assuming the trial goes to plan, Visa says it will start to roll out payWave services to consumers by the end of the year. “The global partnership we have with Samsung is helping us to create the technology and drive the availability of commercial mobile payments around the world,” says Caroline Hawkett, VP of innovation at Visa Europe. “The Olympic phone trial is a showcase device designed to demonstrate the full

potential of mobile payments at this unique global event. We are also working with mobile network operators and our member banks in a number of different countries to accelerate commercial availability, so that consumers can access the Visa mobile payment service.” Demonstrating the potential of mobile payments is a key point in terms of driving takeup. For vendors, embracing mPayments means investment in new kit, while consumers have a tentative enthusiasm for the idea of mPayments. On the one hand, their mobile phone is the central item in their life and they demand to be using it in all areas of life. On the other hand, they are uneasy about security. “We’ve all grown accustomed to relying on our phone for more than talking and texting,” says Tom Gregory, head of digital payments at Barclaycard. “Many of us rely on them for everyday tasks such as checking emails, organising our social lives, and keeping up to date with current affairs. It is our belief that we’ll all be using them in the future for paying for things.” However, the industry does have a job on its hands to convince consumers to embrace mPayments. “There is always fear with new services,” says Hwan Chung, CEO of eCommerce and mCommerce company Danal CS&F. “When the ATM deposit feature was

first introduced, consumers were wary of making deposits because they were worried about the risks involved. The same was also true for online banking. Consumers are clearly still uncomfortable being asked to re-send personal payment data via perceived insecure channels such as mobile web and mobile apps, so the industry needs to be doing its utmost to assure them that the payment method is secure. It is a constant balancing act between security and ease of use that must be carefully managed to minimise against breaches but ensure the tool is not so hard to use that it puts people off signing up.”

Standard issues This points towards the development of standards, and several efforts have been made to do

just that. MasterCard’s PayPass Wallet, announced in May at the CTIA trade show in New Orleans, is a wide-reaching effort to standardise mobile payments. As well as a consumer front end that will allow for oneclick online purchases and NFC mobile payments, it also offers a digital wallet that will support any credit or debit card, and APIs for partners to create their own branded digital PayPass wallets. “This product is the perfect fit for an internet payment solution but also for physical stores,” says Jean-Noel Georges from analyst company Frost & Sullivan. “The other good point is the possibility to use different devices for payment (such as the Tablet or mobile phone) by using a single infrastructure. MasterCard is a little bit late in

Following the trial at the Olympics, Visa says its payWave app will be available to consumers before the end of 2012

June 2012

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technology

The Handset Conundrum The lack of NFC-capable handsets on the market is often cited as a barrier to adoption of mobile payments. However, Frost & Sullivan analyst Jean-Noel Georges argues that this could be overstated. Noting that most newly launched phones will be NFCready, he says: “We estimate that in France, Sweden and the UK, sales of smartphones already account for more than half of total handset sales. Germany is also exhibiting astonishing growth. According to Bikom, almost 12m smartphones were sold in 2011. We believe that in 2012 the sales of smartphones could total around 55 per cent of the handsets sales.” ABI Research analyst Mark Beccue says consumers in developed markets such as the UK and US generally “turn over mobiles in less than two years”, which puts a two-year marker on mass adoption. However, he mentions one phone giant that has so far been silent on the matter – Apple. “New iPhones could accelerate [adoption] if they have NFC, but generally it will take some time to get NFC-equipped mobiles in the hands of enough consumers,” he says. the race compared to Google, O2, PayPal, Visa et al, and a little late in terms of strategy. But the product fits the market expectations perfectly in terms of security, reliability, flexibility and ease of use.” UK network operators have also got together to work on a

The BlackBerry Bold 9900 was the first phone from RIM to boast an NFC chip

standardised mobile wallet system. ‘Project Oscar’, a collaboration between Vodafone, O2 and Everything Everywhere was announced in June 2011 – much to the chagrin of Three. However, Project Oscar now has more than Three’s out-ofjoint nose to worry about – the EC has announced that it is to investigate the venture in terms of competition regulations. The investigation will delay any roll out of cross-network mobile wallet schemes. Mark Beccue, senior analyst on mobile money and NFC at ABI Research, says this is a stumbling block that the US market hasn’t had to worry about. “The US market for mobile payments at physical retail is advancing faster than the UK’s, thanks to the regulatory challenge of the EC,” he says. “Otherwise, the two markets would be even.” But while the hold up puts the UK ‘behind’ the US in terms of roll out, industry response has been mixed. “The news that the European

Should Apple build NFC into a future iPhone model, it could accelerate take-up according to some analysts

Commission is to delay plans for a mobile phone payments platform will come as a disappointment to a number of telecom operators,” says Richard Britton, MD at cloud-based enterprise solutions company, CloudSense. “However the delay is necessary to ensure the long term success of mobile wallet schemes, and will have a positive impact on UK business. “Before consumers embrace a new way of paying and start swiping phones instead of credit cards, it is imperative that all operators sign-up to a common set of protocols that allow for mobile payments to be used across a range of industries. Banks, merchants, wireless carriers and phone manufacturers all need to come together and commit to one platform that provides a secure payment architecture for mobile payments to truly take off.” Danal CS&F’s CEO Hwan Chung disagrees. “Many in the industry believe that until there are standards and agreed

“The Olympic phone trial is a showcase device designed to demonstrate the full potential of mobile payments at this unique global event” Caroline Hawkett, Visa Europe

June 2012 www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com

processes in place, the high number of different payment technologies and industry participants means that the roll-out and adoption of mobile payment services will be slow,” he says. “Historically however, standards have proved too sluggish to keep up with the fast pace of technological change in the mobile industry, and are out of step with consumer demand. “However well-intentioned, Project Oscar will probably be no different. Far from waiting for standardisation of the mobile payments market, we should be looking at ways we can eliminate the need for collaboration, so that the mobile phone can be used to make a payment of any kind, using any payment method, limited only by the user’s preference. This would allow consumers to receive the benefits of the technology now, rather than years down the line.”

Consumer benefit The perception of consumer benefit is a key factor in driving adoption, too. There is the sense in some quarters that NFC is technology for technology’s sake, with more benefits for marketers wishing to use it to gather data than for consumers. “The technology is ready, certified and approved,” says Frost & Sullivan’s Jean-Noel Georges. “The problem for a mass adoption is the benefits that end-user consumer may have. For most users, the advantages are not visible. This is a new service, but it’s a ‘nice to have’ at best. Mobile payment players should find a way to attract end users – with coupons, special prices or real added services.” ABI’s Beccue says mobile operators and financial institutions are licking their lips at the opportunities presented by mPayments.

“The US market for mobile payments at physical retail is advancing faster than the UK’s, thanks to the regulatory challenge of the EC. Otherwise, the two markets would be even” Mark Beccue, ABI Research

“With the exception of fast food merchants and transit players, other merchants are less interested in the speed of payment enabled by NFC and more interested in ‘payments plus’ opportunities – a chance to develop rich, customised offers and loyalty programs and enhanced in-store shopping experiences – such as expedited customer service or enhanced product information,” he says. And from a marketer’s point of view, intelligent use of these capabilities will benefit consumers as well as brands. “Operators, banks and technology providers are all investing heavily in this channel to open up new revenue streams but there is a distinct lag in end-user adoption,” says Danal CS&F’s Chung. “Part of the problem is that the options being offered to consumers at the moment are too limited. Operators are asking end users to set up mobile wallets so that the CSP can leverage their existing relationships. “Over the next few years I think we’ll see that the most successful services are those that not only strike a careful balance between ease of use and security, but make life a lot simpler for the consumer. After all, at its heart, mobile payment should be primarily about convenience.”

PayTag – Stick to What You Know The Barclaycard PayTag is essentially an NFC chip in a sticker. The idea is that you stick it on your phone to create an NFC-ready phone without upgrading. “Barclaycard predicts that by 2016 more than half of contactless transactions in the UK will be made with a phone – however at the moment only a small number of mobile phones allow you to do this,” says Tom Gregory, Barclaycard’s head of digital payments. “We have recognised that there is likely to be a large number of our customers who want the convenience of

mobile payments but do not want to trade in their current handset at the moment or who are waiting for different handsets,” he says. ABI Research analyst Mark Beccue says the move is more about getting customers used to contactless payments. “PayTag is a chance to gauge consumer interest in advancing contactless,” he says. “A contactless sticker could be stuck to anything, including your forehead, and work. I don’t consider it ‘mobile payment’ unless it interacts/ leverages a mobile phone’s capabilities via an app.”

The PayTag offers contactless payments by sticking an NFC chip to a handset

June 2012

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best practice

IT’S AWARDS TIME Campaigns at the ready – it’s time to get your entries in for this year’s Effective Mobile Marketing Awards

categories •20Global •No entrycompetition fee •Multiple entries allowed •

he 2012 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards are officially open for business. As ever, we are looking for the most effective mobile marketing campaigns and solutions on the planet, across 20 categories. This year, there are three new categories: Most Effective Mobile Affiliate Campaign/ Solution; Most Effective Mobile Augmented Reality Campaign; and Most Effective Mobile Search Campaign. As ever, our judges will be looking for hard evidence of success, whether that’s in increased signups, sales, awareness, or whatever objectives the campaign or solution was tasked with meeting. And what a panel of judges it is. Once again, we have recruited the best and brightest minds in the business to help us assess the entries, including Russell Buckley, the leading practitio-

A selection of last year’s winners (l-r): Flexion, Rippl and The Guardian

For more information, head for www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com/awards Any queries, address them to: awards@mobilemarketingmagazine.com

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th August 0 1 e Entry Deadlin ive:

Categories for the Most Effect ner, speaker and thinker on mobile and mobile marketing; mobile specialist and Mobile Marketing contributor Helen Keegan; Peggy Anne Salz, chief analyst and founder of MobileGroove; Stuart Dredge, who writes The Guardian’s Apps Blog; Jon Mew, head of mobile at the Internet Advertising Bureau; and Andy Favell, editor of mobithinking.com. To name but a few. The Awards Ceremony takes place on 29 November at the London Film Museum. Before that, though, there’s some hard judging to be done, and one or two entry forms to be filled in. As in previous years, there’s no fee to enter, entries are welcome from anywhere in the world, and you can enter a campaign or solution in more than one category, if appropriate. Head for www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com/awards to enter today.

Award Sponsors

Mobile Application – b2c Mobile Application – b2b Tablet Application Mobile Advertising Campaign etwork Mobile Advertising Platform/N tion Mobile Affiliate Campaign/Solu mpaign Mobile Augmented Reality Ca ct Response Campaign Mobile Sales Promotion/Dire tor Campaign from a Mobile Opera mCommerce Solution ging Campaign Mobile CRM/Enterprise Messa ign Location-based Service/Campa Mobile Search Campaign Campaign Mobile Couponing or Barcode Mobile Site tion Mobile Charity Campaign/Solu Mobile Ticketing Solution Mobile Payment Solution Mobile Publishing Solution ion Mobile Travel & Tourism Solut

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business models

Mobile in the third sector How is the charity fundraising industry taking advantage of the mobile channel? Alex Spencer investigates

f you’re wondering to what extent the third sector is using mobile as a fund-raising tool, you only have to look around you the next time you’re on public transport for the answer. Posters with SMS calls-to-action are everywhere. And by all accounts, they’re very successful too (see Christian Aid Engages Mobile Users Outdoors, p14). “SMS remains an important mechanism for charities,” Save the Children’s strategic innovation manager, Joe Morrison, tells Mobile Marketing. “There is still potential to increase our ability to reach new donors through this established and well-understood channel, as well as using it to deepen our relationship with existing supporters.” But is SMS the only way that the mobile channel can be worked into charities’ fundraising strategies? Not according to Macmillan Cancer Support, which created a mobile site in 2011, and has developed both promotional and enterprise apps. As with any organisation, as a charity sees more and more people coming to it via mobile, it gets harder for them to ignore it as a fundraising and promotional channel.

Marie Curie takes to the streets – but the cancer charity also leverages mobile

That’s a large part of the reason Macmillan was so quick to create a mobile site. “Macmil-

lan recognised very early on that they were getting a lot of hits from non-PC devices,” says Phillip Clement, sales director of mobile web and app company Bemoko, which developed the charity’s mobile site. “But the drop-off rate was quite high, and they understood the user journey wasn’t a good one.” Since the launch of its mobile site, Macmillan has seen mobile’s share of web traffic shoot up from 10 per cent to 24 per cent – with traffic to the mobile site accounting for 11.5 per cent of total traffic.

User journey It’s clear that some charities, at least, are thinking strategically when it comes to mobile – and given their limited budgets in comparison to, say, retailers and banks, it could be argued that it is imperative for them to do so. But, for budget-conscious organisations, why risk spending money on the mobile channel, which is arguably less proven than more traditional channels such as online and even, for the third sector, direct mail? In terms of collecting donations, mobile’s direct calls-toaction are priceless – it’s easy to see the value of donors being able to make an immediate text donation the moment their heartstrings are pulled. Macmil-

June 2012 www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com

lan sees “very high levels of people making calls to our Support Line directly from the site, or leaving it to make text donations”, according to Andy Nash, digital media project manager (mobile) at Macmillan. “It also grants us access to two hard-to-reach audience segments,” Nash adds. “Younger people, between 15 and 34 – a group that is quite active in terms of fundraising challenge events, for example – and the economically challenged; those people without a computer in

“we’ve got to act now to make giving a central part of how we consume and use technology” David Erasmus, Givey the house, but who do tend to have a mobile phone.” Added to this, mobile remains the most personal of channels. For charities, that means the chance to build relationships, which can then be revisited. “The hardest thing is to get someone to give,” says Bemoko’s Clement. “The next hardest is to keep them and get them to give again. Mobile gives charities the chance to remind donors on a regular basis, we’re still here, still doing good things.” One of the most successful mobile donation campaigns of

recent times was organised by mobile aggregator OpenMarket, working in partnership with the Disasters Emergency Committee to raise money for those affected by the floods in Pakistan. The campaign has, to date, raised £1.5m on mobile alone, and deservedly took the award for the Most Effective Mobile Charity Campaign/Solution at last year’s Effective Mobile Marketing Awards.

High rewards A fantastic result, but according to Andrew Darling, associate director of marketing and communications at OpenMarket, that’s not even the best part: “A few years ago, charities were worried that SMS donations would stop people giving in other ways,” he says. “But, interestingly, it didn’t cannibalise the other streams at all.” The SMS donations didn’t just draw new donors in – they also attracted additional donations from some of those already giving by direct debit. “The success of that campaign certainly laid to rest any remaining scepticism as to whether texting works as a fundraising mechanism,” says Darling. Digital agency Profero, meanwhile, received a Highly Commended in the category for its work with Marks & Spencers and Oxfam on the One Day Wardrobe Clearout, which asked customers to recycle old clothes in return for a money off voucher. Banner ads informed people about the event, but also asked if they’d like to have a reminder placed into their iPhone calendars – a perfect application of mobile’s unique properties. The week-long campaign generated over 3.5m impressions, and reached over 422,000 unique users. Of the 35,000 that clicked through, 73 per cent consented to having the event added to

Third Sector in Numbers

2 Macmillan’s website now gets 24 per cent of its traffic from mobile devices

their calendar. Overall, 400,000 pieces of clothing were donated, and Oxfam raised over £1m in a single day – a tremendous effort. The breadth of approaches to mobile giving shows that there’s no one solution for charities looking to use mobile. Like the rest of the industry, it’s still growing and evolving, and it’s encouraging that charities acknowledge that fact. “I don’t think any digital journey, mobile or other, has an end,” says Laila Takeh, head of digital engagement at UNICEF UK. The aid agency is currently working on optimising its main site and donation pages for mobile, and launched its first mobile campaign – Speak Up for Children – in 2011. This combined a mobile site, SMS gateway, and IVR (Interactive Voice Response) phone line, and was promoted via mobile ads. “Specifically with mobile we know there’s more to explore,” says Takeh. “We’re changing the way we work so that mobile is always considered in our approach to projects. We want to be there when our supporters want us, where and when it suits them – so mobile is an obvious choice for us.”

Earning trust While charities continue to evolve their mobile strategies, there are plenty of learning points, challenges, and obstacles. Trust is a common concern. For most charities, the ‘product’ is intangible, and that requires a leap of faith from donors.

June 2012

Percentage of the £2.9bn donated annually to charity that’s given online

£10,000

At it’s peak, the amount OpenMarket’s DEC campaign was raising every second

Percentage of non-profit organisations that don’t know how to market via the mobile channel, according to a market survey from Kaptivate

Percentage of 18-24 year olds that expressed interest in using their mobiles to give to charity, according to research by the Charities Aid Foundation. However this age group makes up only 7 per cent of donations on the JustGiving platform

£10.6bn

Amount raised by the 28m Britons who make charitable donations every year

Percentage of the UK adult population that donates to charity in a typical month

percentage of the population that contributes 47 per cent of total charitable donations

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business models

“I don’t think any digital journey, mobile or other, has an end” Laila Takeh, UNICEF UK “Some people are sometimes concerned as to where their donations are going. Some may think that the operators are taking their cut, without faith that the charities are getting 100 per cent,” says Darren Daws, managing director of Textlocal, a mobile messaging firm that works with over 60 charities, including Marie Curie Cancer Care, Christian Aid and St Richards Hospice. This isn’t the case, however, as UK operators started covering network and third-party costs themselves in 2010. The third sector is, of course, affected by many of the same

issues and pitfalls as any other in mobile. In fact, they might even be more vulnerable, as they lack the infrastructure to move over entirely – and in some cases don’t want to. As Bemoko’s Clement points out: “Shaking a tin under someone’s nose in a shopping centre is still more likely to get people to dig into their pockets, as opposed to a poster with a QR code. There’s going to be a long crossover period – they can’t stop doing what they’re doing and just switch over; they have to do it all.” It should come as no surprise that transitioning operations into mobile isn’t easy for charities. But what about organisations designed with mobile giving in mind from the ground up? David Erasmus, founder of mobile giving platform Givey, says that should be the aim.

Charity reinvention “Our action won’t be seen immediately, but in five, 10 years,

when cash, cheques and direct debits start dying out, then the inability of some charities to innovate and reinvent themselves will show itself,” says Erasmus, whose Givey ‘central giving platform’ ties together SMS and Twitter-based mobile donations into a single account. “What I’ve realised is that a truly mobile attitude is about identity,” he says. “Mobile is about you, it’s your personal device, and when you give through carrier- or bill-based methods, that’s not integrated with the rest of your life. They offer a bit of ad hoc giving here and there, but it’s not joined up.” Initially, Erasmus and his team built an iOS app, called Get Giving, which enables one-click donation for users. It was blocked due to Apple’s issues with in-app donations, but Erasmus says this was a blessing in disguise. Givey eschews a single approach, letting users make donations by sending a text or tweet including

Christian Aid Engages Mobile Users Outdoors SMS was used successfully as a call-toaction for donors in Christian Aid’s Nets Now campaign. Following a couple of tests in June 2010 with print ads in The Independent, The Guardian and The Telegraph, Christian Aid rolled out a third phase in March 2011, which moved to outdoor advertising – placing posters on trains and in motorway service station toilets. “At that stage we were the only charity in there,” says David Conway, supporter engagement manager at Christian Aid. “And we basically cleaned up.” The campaign has seen 35,000 responses. The charity gets in touch with 50 per cent of those, and converts 10 per cent of those they contact to regular payments, averaging £80 a year. “It’s one of the few exercises that saw a positive ROI in year one, at least in the washrooms,” Conway adds. Christian Aid has also been able to go back to those who don’t sign up for regular www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com

donations, in one-off circumstances such as the East African Food Crisis in July last year, with an average 5-7 per cent success rate. “Mobile is definitely the most significant recruitment and fundraising device that we’ve come across. There’s an immediacy in how people react to an SMS, it’s an emotional response and that’s what makes it so powerful,” says Conway. “But it’s just a mechanic. Without a strong proposition, it won’t work, whatever the medium.”

The Nets Now campaign encouraged consumers to donate to buy mosquito nets in areas where malaria is prevalent

The Speak Up For Children campaign was UNICEF UK’s first on mobile, and brought together a range of digital mediums and technologies

the name of the charity and the amount they want to give, which is then charged to their PayPal account. Givey accounts can also be tied into Facebook profiles, and there are plans to expand into further channels. “My mantra is we’ve got to act now to make giving a central part of how we consume, and use technology,” says Erasmus. That point, at least, certainly isn’t one in contention. Mobile is the future, and everyone involved wants to make sure charities don’t fall into the past. “We have to keep pace with society and learn to evolve,” says Save The Children’s Morrison. “For example, if initiatives like Pingit and technologies like NFC result in less people carrying cash, we need to find ways to enable our volunteers and staff to collect donations in ways that are relevant to supporters. Charities owe it to their cause to evolve with the times, otherwise the public will naturally gravitate away from them, towards those that are able to keep pace.”

June 2012

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Buckley On...

China Mobile marketing expert (and our new columnist) Russell Buckley reports on the burgeoning mobile marketing scene in China

’m on a fact-finding tour of China at the moment – basically, I’m having a look around and meeting people. It’s clear from the outside that China is a big opportunity, so I wanted to explore it a little for myself. Here’s some first impressions if you want to find out a little more about the “riddle wrapped in an enigma”, with the added complexity of the Great Firewall. I’m going to start with the obvious. Yes, China is big. With over 1.3bn people, it’s the biggest country in the world, with about four times the population of the US and 20 times the UK. It’s a very mobilecentric market too and that’s only going to accelerate. China has just passed the 1bn subscription milestone, though many people have multiple phones, so it’s not accurate to use that figure to reflect market penetration. In contrast, landline penetration is in freefall and currently stands at less than 300m. My preconceptions of China, gleaned from the media, were of an “emerging market” in a fairly oppressive society. I’d read about the success of the middle classes, but had assumed that it was a small elite. But that’s not my impression having spent a few weeks in the country. I ought to add at this point, that I’m not being given some sanitised tour. It is true that I’ve only been to Shanghai, Beijing, and Zhejiang province – all in the most progressive and wealthy areas. They’re not going to be representative of all of China and I’m not suggesting that they are, just putting my impressions into context.

Luxury society China is a vibrant, successful and sophisticated place. Great infrastructure (roads, rail, airports and hotels), cars in abundance

(including many ultra-expensive ones such as Bentleys, Rolls Royces, and Ferraris) and many consumer goods on sale ranging from the basic up to high-end luxury. If you hang around, say, a Louis Vuitton store, there’s a steady stream of ordinary looking people coming out clutching as many bags as they can carry. So if you’re thinking that China is a fairly basic place with some future potential, think again. The future seems to be here already. If you moved here, you’d enjoy a lifestyle akin to that of the US – not some hardship posting.

If you think hiking the Great Wall of China is hard, try getting around the infamous Great Firewall

One trip I made was to the province of Zhejiang, generally one of the wealthiest and progressive provinces. I met with members of the local government and had a tour of the tech park that they’re building. When complete in a few years, it’ll provide housing and offices for 700,000 people – about the size of the UK’s second city, Leeds, or just

February June 20122012

“China is a very mobile-centric market, and that is only going to accelerate” smaller than San Francisco. And not only are they building a new town that size, it is just devoted to tech businesses.

The Great Firewall On the downside, there is no Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube, and Google only works intermittently (for me anyway). While the local equivalents Weibo, Tencent and RenRen do exist (and locals are just as addicted as we are) they are censored and can go offline if something controversial happens. Otherwise, mobile marketing practices are remarkably similar and on a par with the best of the West. SMS marketing is in decline, mobile advertising is rampant and highly competitive, branded apps are big and many brands are building mobile websites. For app developers, the story is less interesting. Nearly all paid-for apps are pirated almost immediately and eCPMs are low, making it hard to generate advertising revenues. In the last 20 years, many western companies have lost billions investing in China, but the business climate that caused this is changing. Many more are doing very well today – especially those in a luxury consumer goods industry. My view is that any company with any kind of consumer focus has to consider China as a serious market and I’ll certainly be continuing to study it very closely. You should too.

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get rich quick Mobile advertising is growing up, and the consumer experience is getting richer in the process. Alex Spencer investigates

f you haven’t seen a mobile ad in the last 12 months, then you probably don’t know what a modern mobile advertising campaign looks like. Gone are the days of the static display ad, when advertising on mobile meant being restricted to a small thin banner which, if you clicked on it, might lead to a mobile-optimised site, if you were lucky. Because while this type of advertising still exists, brands now also have the choice of deploying a new type of mobile ad unit – something broader, sleeker, and more engaging. Something richer. Click on a mobile ad today and any one of a number of things

could happen. It could lead to an image carousel, video content, a map, or even an entire bespoke game. It could initiate a phone call, place a diary entry in your calendar, or generate a ‘Like’ on a Facebook page. It could even do more than one of these things. All of which is great news for advertisers, who can now use mobile to deliver the same sort of rich engagement experience that they’re used to delivering online, and on TV. As a result, mobile advertising is no longer the exclusive domain of mobile content

companies and handset makers. The, er, richness of rich media mobile advertising has attracted the attention of brands – and creatives – who once wouldn’t have been seen dead working on mobile. Today you’re just as likely to see an ad for a car, a beer or a movie on mobile, as you are for a ringtone.

“When Celtra got involved in rich media advertising, a couple of years ago, we looked at what was available on mobile and thought, we should be hoping for a little more than this,” says Jonathan Milne, general manager, Europe at Celtra, which builds rich media mobile ad units. “When you have that

Rich media ads offer a greater level of engagement between the consumer and the advertiser brand

June 2012 www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com

rich touchscreen interface, the medium offers a much bigger and better opportunity.”

Smartphone catalyst The growth of rich media mobile ads started, as is so often the case in mobile, with the first smartphones – in particular the first iPhone in 2007, and the popularisation of apps and touchscreens that followed. The launch of the App Store a year later saw the amount of potential ad inventory – and the number of eyes on it – rocket. As the number of platforms and app stores increased, however, the issue of fragmentation reared its head. It’s likely to be a familiar story to anyone involved in mobile marketing – the range of non-standardised SDKs available led to inconsistency between publishers, and limited measurability. In response, platform-agnostic standards were developed – first ORMMA (Open Rich Media Mobile Advertising), and now the IAB’s MRAID (see MRAID Raises Standards).That’s not the end of the story, though. “There’s no one ad that can run everywhere,” says George

Dixon, mobile and digital media manager at Mediacom. “There are still problems with standardisation, especially in terms of tracking and adserving – we have to wait to get reports from the publisher, so most of the time you’re waiting a day to pull a report. As an industry, we should have learned from digital advertising’s mistakes a lot quicker.” And MRAID? “As I understand it, it’s still a work in progress.” But all in all, rich media mobile advertising has undoubtedly gone mainstream. Rich media ad units are now supported by virtually all of the major mobile ad networks. A recent report from mobile ad network Mojiva showed a 235 per cent spike in impressions for rich media ads between November 2011 and January 2012. The continued growth of the apps market increases the amount of available inventory and, together with adoption of the mobile web, drives the number of impressions into the billions.

Rich media, rich data While rich media ads might be more expensive to create and

“Most big apps draw in larger audiences than tv shows. That’s an established base of users that will only increase” Paul Childs, Adfonic

serve, it seems that there’s an increase in the ROI to match the price tag. Ad network Greystripe recently found that full-screen ads – which rich media can deliver through expandable banners or interstitials – earn five times as much revenue as standard banner ads. According to Smart AdServer, rich media banners see an average 8.9 per cent clickthrough rate (CTR) – 22 times that of a standard mobile banner, and 68 times that of an online banner. And the audience that can be reached via mobile is, of course, huge.

“It’s now probably fair to say that most big apps draw in larger audiences than TV shows,” says Paul Childs, CMO at mobile ad network Adfonic. “That’s an established base of users which will only increase.” Numbers like that make for a pretty convincing argument. But rich media ads offer a much wider selection of data to be played with than simply clickthrough rates. Depending on the exact content of an ad, a peek at the analytics might be able to tell you what users did in the ad, how long they spent with it, where and when it was

Engaging Results – Two Mobile Rich Media Case Studies Vampire Weekend

True Blood

Pop band Vampire Weekend saw impressive results from a rich media ad campaign to promote its Contra album. The ad, which featured on the NPR app, drove multiple levels of engagement. 26 per cent of users viewed the video, while 23 per cent shook the phone, which changed the video content. 18 per cent viewed details of the album, while 4.5 per cent clicked through to iTunes.

This campaign promoted the start of season three of vampire TV drama True Blood. The ad delivered more than 1m impressions, and achieved an 11 per cent engagement rate. Viewers spent an average of 20 seconds with the creative, and 9 per cent of viewers clicked to watch the preview video. The campaign also generated significant buzz in social media and ad circles.

June 2012

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the real world

accessed, and whether they came back and interacted with it again later on. These metrics are beginning to attract more attention, as they represent a user’s engagement with an ad – and it’s here that rich media ads can truly excel. “If it’s done right, with creative intelligence, and uses some unique functionality, like LBS [location-based services] or accelerometers to engage the consumer, there’s the opportunity for much deeper engagement than a standard banner ad,” says Mojiva CEO Dave Gwozdz. “If you understand the consumer and the device, rich media ads can be an extremely rewarding experience.” Of course, it’s not a guarantee – as Gwozdz points out – “you pick apart any campaign, rich or not, and there’s 20 reasons it does or doesn’t work” – but a well-handled rich media ad tends to hold the attention of a user much more closely. Take for example Mobext’s in-app campaign for Volvo, promoting its S60 Sedan. The ad presented users with a video clip and an option to click through for more content, including an interactive model

study on behalf of Sparkler and the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) found that participants shown an expandable banner were 25 per cent more likely to remember rich media advertising than a static ad. These kinds of metrics are much less tangible than mobile’s traditional dependence on CTR; they represent a move towards softer and less directly measurable concepts of success, like brand awareness. In fact, they’re closer to the way ads are evaluated

Volvo’s rich media campaign for the new S60 Sedan achieved an average of one minute’s ‘playtime’ when consumers engaged with the ad

of the car. 3.91 per cent of users chose to access the additional content, and those who clicked through spent an average of one minute with the ad.

Quantative to qualitative Rich media also provides brands with an opportunity beyond the initial interaction with the consumer – an On Device Research

in other media – such as television, for example. “Mobile ads need to take a step towards telling more stories and giving consumers more of an emotional experience,” says Scott Seaborn, mobile technologist at full-service agency Ogilvy. “TV, as a medium, is very emotional. Rich banners are very interactive – they offer a direct response: ‘Click me for a test drive’. Whereas TV can say: ‘Buy this car and you’ll get laid’. That’s why brand dollars go

that way – brands want to tell stories and get people to love the brand.” Rich media, if handled right, offers the opportunity to take mobile ads into that space. Where banners have traditionally been about broadcasting a message to consumers, the best

This Starbucks ad, used to promote the coffee shop’s Signature campaign, enabled users to draw on the cup using their finger – and followed it up with a gallery of signatures and video content

John Lewis Brand Benefits on Mobile In August 2011, the IAB, in partnership with On Device Research, carried out a study on a John Lewis mobile ad campaign. Using a live clearance sale campaign, managed by Manning Gottlieb OMD for the department store, half of the 1,000 participants were

shown a static display banner, and half an expandable rich media ad. Roughly two thirds of both groups found the ad they saw initially eyecatching, with rich media proving only marginally more successful in this regard. In terms of consumer recall and awareness of the brand, however, the rich ad saw much better results. Those shown the expandable banner were 25 per cent more likely to remember the advertising than those

that saw the static ad, and the rich ad gave a 30 per cent uplift to unprompted brand awareness. The rich media ad proved to have a stronger effect on those in the 18-34 and over 45 demographics, as well as men, who were just as likely to recall the static ad than women, but 45 per cent more likely to recall the rich media.11 per cent of all consumers, though, said they found the rich media ad annoying – nearly double that of the non-rich ad.

June 2012 www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com

rich media mobile ads move towards engaging them in a dialogue with the brand. “With a rich media ad, you can engage an audience physically – through touch – and emotionally. The way you do that is using innovative ad formats and features,” says Celtra’s Milne. “The consumer has a high expectation for their experience on a smartphone, where they’re used to cool apps. If we can meet that expectation, then the brand can deliver a much better perception to consumers.”

Creative inspiration The opportunities rich media ads have started to unlock have attracted the attention of more and more creatives, who might have been previously turned off by how restrictive the mobile format can be. “The real estate from a standard advertisement is very small,” says Ogilvy’s Seaborn. “The most volume is about 10-20 characters of text, and a logo – you can’t do anything from a creative perspective.” Such a limited format doesn’t offer much chance for creatives to get, well, creative. Rich

This Celtra-created rich media ad for Pepsi Max featured an animated banner, which could be expanded to watch the TV ad, or purchase and download the Calvin Harris single which appeared in the ad

advertising, by contrast, provides more space to breathe – once opened, an ad can encompass almost endless space, and the full range of media. Rich media ads are, as Adfonic’s Childs puts it: “a blank piece of paper for you to do what you want with”. With the opening of more creative shops specialising in mobile, that means more talent being aimed at the medium. And if that in turn raises the benchmark for what’s being done on mobile, then it could be the answer to mobile marketing’s biggest concern. “The real challenge that’s left to solve is brands becoming more serious about wanting to reach a mobile audience,” says Celtra’s Milne. That’s the most exciting opportunity rich media ads provide, for everyone who’s spent years evangelising mobile’s potential as a marketing medium – to draw in everything great about mobile, from location-based targeting to touchscreen interactivity, and beat online and television at their own game. “Rich media mobile advertising combines the best of all channels – the emotion of TV, the quality of press and the social and interactivity of digital, all combined with the power of physical touch,” says Mark Brennan, head of mobile at media agency Carat. Rich media mobile ads, then, are cooler, smarter, and more engaging than the traditional mobile display ad, but with all the accountability that makes digital marketing so appealing to advertisers. Many mainstream brands have already seen the light and are mining rich media mobile ads for all their worth. For those that haven’t yet, the question surely has to be: What are you waiting for?

MRAID Raises Standards Rich media advertising has been a somewhat fragmented space up until now. “There’s an issue with mobile where it moves so quickly that no-one wants to stand still and worry about polishing the foundations, and getting it right,” says James Chandler, head of mobile at Mindshare. However, with its MRAID (Mobile Rich-media Ad Interface Definitions) initiative, the IAB has tried to overcome issues of standardisation by defining a common API (Application Programming Interface) for mobile rich media ads. “The problem was that there were loads of SDKs, and each was written in a different way, meaning that each ad would have be rewritten again and again for each publisher. That’s a lot of unnecessary leg work,” says Amit Kotecha, IAB senior mobile and networks manager. “What MRAID is doing is defining a common language for rich media mobile ads, across those SDKs.” HTML5 and JavaScript rich media ads written to the MRAID specification will run across all apps from any compliant publisher. And, even as the number of companies applying MRAID 1.0 is growing, the IAB has been working on its successor. “MRAID 1.0 was kind of the starting point,” says Kotecha. “The MRAID 2.0 document brings in standards for if you’re using audio and video, a device keyboard, or location-based functionality, and a range of screen sizes.” At the time of writing, the standards are undergoing a month-long process of public comment, where ad servers and networks have the option to raise any issues, before launching officially – but that’s still not the end of the line. “Any further changes we need, we’ll make them as we go along,” says Kotecha. “With these documents, they’re always works in progress.”

June 2012

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the real world

Rise of the machines Mobile is the perfect platform to take machine-to-machine (M2M) communication mainstream. George Cole reports

n the US, owners of Ford Focus Electric cars can download an app onto their smartphone that lets them ‘manage’ their cars. They can check the battery charge level, locate the nearest charging station, plan journeys, receive alerts when the charging process is not working correctly, and even remotely lock or unlock the car doors. The MyFord Mobile app is an example of what many see as the next big development in the mobile world: M2M or machineto-machine communication. At its most basic, mobile M2M involves using a wireless connection to transfer data from one device to another, where the data can be displayed and analysed.

“M2M has been around for a long time,” says Gilli Coston, head of M2M at Telefónica UK (O2). “But in the past, it was about connecting things that were effectively dumb, like energy meters. It’s also essentially been a B2B phenomenon – but not any more.” All the pieces are in place for an explosion in mobile M2M. Millions of smart mobile devices are now in the hands of consumers, and mobile broadband is widely available. Many services are now based in the cloud, and advances in technology mean that sensors and wireless modules can be crammed into smaller and smaller devices – Tablets,

“in three to five years, our homes will be full of connected devices – M2m is going everywhere” Kim Bybjerg, Vodafone

eBook readers, digital cameras, televisions, and digital photo frames for example. Sony’s PlayStation Vita portable games console even offers optional 3G connectivity. “The ‘internet of things’ is coming together,” says Kim Bybjerg, Vodafone’s head of M2M, Northern Europe. “In three to five years, our homes will be full of connected devices – M2M is going everywhere.” Mobile M2M also opens up new ways of connecting with customers, and could become a powerful mobile marketing tool for manufacturers, brands and retailers. Imagine getting instant feedback from the user of your product or the purchaser of your service, and being able to engage with them. The Swedish business intelligence company Berg Insight estimates that M2M devices currently represent 3 per cent of worldwide wireless connections, although this figure is closer to 10-15 per cent in some advanced markets, like Japan. “There are around 30m connected devices in Europe, and we expect that figure to grow by 20-30 per cent on an annual basis,” says Tobias Ryberg, the company’s senior

analyst. “The volumes will be in B2C and B2B2C markets, and a lot of this volume is being driven by the automotive sector.”

Motor city In the US, General Motors’ OnStar service uses a wireless module (which can be built into a car mirror) to provide drivers with numerous services and information, including roadside assistance and automatic crash response (if your car is involved in an accident, a call to the emergency services is automatically activated). An app, OnStar RemoteLink, provides smartphone users with information such as the amount of fuel left in the tank and the tyre pressure, as well as the ability to remotely unlock doors, switch on lights and sound the car horn. Other car manufacturers, including BMW and Mercedes-Benz, offer similar M2M features on their premier models. Marc Overton, vice president wholesale and M2M for Everything Everywhere (the company behind the Orange and T-Mobile brands), says his company is focusing on a handful of M2M vertical markets – logistics, automotive, consumer con-

June 2012 www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com

uses NFC (Near Field Communication) short-range wireless technology to enable consumers to pay for items with their smartphone – and then tell their friends on Facebook where they are and what products they’ve just bought.

Pricing options

Ford’s MyFord Mobile app lets you manage your electric car using your phone

nected devices, energy (such as smart utility meters), plus health and well-being. Mobile M2M could touch almost every aspect of our lives, from being able to defrost the car windscreen from our bed on a cold winter’s morning, to enabling a doctor to monitor our health remotely (and send advice back

to us on our smartphone), and from tracking our pet’s movements to using smart meter data to reduce our energy bills. We’ll also encounter mobile M2M services and products on the street: Everything Everywhere and Nokia Siemens Networks have demonstrated a smart vending machine, which

The potential for mobile M2M is huge, but there are challenges for mobile operators. “We are at an early stage and the business models are not clear,” says Ryberg. “For example, if you’ve got lots of connected devices in the home, you don’t want to pay a subscription for each of them.” But mobile operators have developed new business models for mobile M2M, which are designed to help the market grow. Vodafone for example, has developed a SIM card that can be switched on and off by the device manufacturer, allowing the cost of connectivity to be built into the price of the product. “This is already happening with eBook readers,” says Bybjerg. “When you download an eBook, you are using a wireless connection, and the price for this service is built-in. Consum-

June 2012

ers want predictability when it comes to costs.” Another trend that’s helping reduce the manufacturing cost of mobile M2M devices is the development of global SIM cards that can be used on a wide range of networks around the world, allowing the same SIM card to be used for devices destined for multiple territories. New price plans have also been developed so that, for example, the mobile operator only receives payment whenever the M2M SIM card is engaged, or the operator takes a small slice of every transaction made on the mobile M2M device. There is a danger that networks will become swamped by data generated by millions of devices connected to them, but mobile operators point out that the data produced by today’s M2M devices is relatively low, and runs on 2G. “Mobile operators can avoid the risk of network overload by putting in place smarter approval processes and specifying how devices should behave on the network,” says Bybjerg. Some point out that mobile M2M could mean that mobile operators simply provide the data pipe for the connectivity

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the real world

Olly and Molly Social M2M idea births lovable robot Not all M2M devices are designed for serious applications. London company Mint Digital (http://mintdigital. com) has developed Olly – a “web-connected smelly robot”, which can generate scents that are triggered by your Twitter activity. Olly (short for ‘olfactory’) is a non-commercial product that can be constructed by downloading plans that come with Creative Common Licence conditions. You also need to purchase some off-the-shelf components, and download an app and other software. You decide the smell or smells you would like Olly to produce. After constructing Olly – a small white box that houses a fan – the robot is connected to your PC via a USB port. Olly is signed USB-connected Olly will dispense smells when you get retweeted or into your Twitter account other interaction on Twitter and can then be configured to generate a scent whenever you receive an @mention; search for a particular term or are retweeted. Mint also offers Molly, a robot which dispenses sweets according to your Twitter activity. Olly developer Ben Redford says reaction to Olly has been positive – it won the Ideal Home Show’s 2012 ‘Ideal Home Inventor’ award. “Olly is a bit of fun, but we have plans for more internetconnected devices, some of which will be for serious use,” says Redford. http://ollyfactory.com

between devices, with most of the value going to the device manufacturer or service provider, but mobile operators dispute this scenario. “For M2M to succeed, you need to have an ecosystem in place, and mobile networks are a significant part of this. We are also working with many other players in this ecosystem,” says O2’s Coston. “It’s not just about providing connectivity,” adds Everything Everwhere’s Overton. “You have to ensure that the devices are interoperable with the network, and potentially, other networks. It’s also about providing fault management and other services – you need an end-to-end view.”

Corporate machines Many mobile operators around the world have developed mobile M2M platforms that are designed to help brands, manufacturers and service providers enter the market quickly and easily. Mobile operators have adopted a multi-channel approach, and formed partnerships with app developers, brands, manufacturers, system integrators, aggregators and others involved in the

M2M ecosystem. In the US, for example, AT&T is Ford’s network partner in the MyFord Mobile programme. “Our M2M technology allows businesses to sense issues with their machines, analyse the problem using back-end software, and respond to the situation in a quick and cost-effective manner,” says Eric Krauss, director of M2M product management, advanced mobility solutions, AT&T business and home solutions. “Our goal is to drive wireless capabilities into a wide variety of devices beyond traditional handsets, allowing our business customers to reduce operational costs and enable new revenue opportunities.” AT&T sees potential growth in the healthcare market and utilities sector through the use of smart metering – the company currently has 13m electricity meters on its wireless network. Krauss also sees mobile operators being much more than just connectivity providers. “Businesses are interested in developing and integrating overall M2M solutions, rather than just receiving raw data from machines. Many companies want applications that will

Mark Overton of Everything Everywhere with the company’s smart vending machine – a collaboration with Nokia Siemens Networks

June 2012 www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com

offering a suite of functions, such as the ability to centrally activate, suspend and deactivate devices. In the US, Vodafone has formed a partnership with Boston Scientific Corporation to develop a remote health monitoring system, and in Europe, Vodafone works with the in-car navigation company, TomTom on M2M solutions.

M2M apps

“our goal is to drive wireless capabilities into a wide variety of devices beyond traditional handsets” Eric Krauss, AT&T help them quickly and efficiently interpret the information transmitted via M2M connections.” Everything Everywhere has developed the M2M Management Platform, which includes a self-service profile for companies offering M2M solutions. The portal includes facilities for creating connection profiles; managing tariffs, accessing customer records and ordering SIMs. There are also plans to offer an API that will enable customers to integrate their M2M operations into existing CRM systems and other business applications. “Companies of all sizes are asking for solutions that are easy to deploy, with a self-service platform that puts the control back into their hands,” says Overton. Vodafone’s Global M2M Service Platform also has a customer self-service portal

Other partnership announcements are expected later this year. Telefónica has launched its Wayra technology initiative in nine countries, which offers entrepreneurs support and finance to develop new products and applications, which could include M2M apps, says Coston. It’s easy to see why mobile operators are keen to offer a onestop shop for potential M2M customers, but the fact that there are so many different platforms means there could be issues around standardisation and interoperability in this market. Bybjerg says that mobile operators like AT&T and Vodafone are working with the GSM Association to develop M2M standards, and he’s confident that progress in this area will be fast. Everything Everywhere’s Overton is also optimistic about the potential of mobile M2M. “It’s not just a bunch of engineering applications that are enabling smart logistics,” he says. “This area is going to go mainstream and will drive the development of the connected life; the network life that everyone is talking about. By having connectivity in all these consumer devices and in everyone’s homes, we’ll be able to manage our lives better and our businesses better, based on all this information and the ability to communicate with things. For us, as an operator, that has to be where we take this business.”

Zeo Sleep Manager M2M in action in consumer heathcare An example of a health and lifestyle consumer M2M device is the Zeo Sleep Manager, which has recently been launched in the UK. It’s a sleep management device, initially designed for Apple mobile devices, although an Android version is under development. The £89 product works by using a headband that tracks your sleep stages throughout the night and then transfers your sleep data to a bedside unit or wirelessly to a smartphone. In the morning, Zeo shows you how much time you spent in the various levels of sleep (such as Light sleep and REM sleep) and produces a sleep graph with your sleep patterns. Users can then upload their data to Zeo’s website (www.myzeo.co.uk) and view their nightly Zeo sleep score, a customised sleep quality score that allows users to compare their sleep data with others in their age group. This information can then be used to create a personal target, as well as produce a personal coaching programme to alter the lifestyle behaviour that affects sleep quality – such as caffeine and alcohol intake, stress, bedtime routine and bedroom environment.

June 2012

The Zeo Sleep Manager comprises a headband that tracks your sleep and an iOS app that shows you the data and suggests how you can improve

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business models

THE ANGRY MOB It seems that the sky’s the limit for Angry Birds – Rene Magri meets Rovio CMO Peter Vesterbacka and finds out how the simple bird-slinging game became a global sensation

“the budget for Angry Birds was limited – and it was done between producing games for hire. But we knew we had to do something that would make the brand stand out” Peter Vesterbacka, Rovio

he Angry Birds brand is one of the biggest success stories to emerge from the app explosion. No other game has taken the mobile world by storm in quite the same way – spawning a franchise of four games – not to mention a Hollywood movie tie-in. Rovio, the studio behind the mania, has struck gold. A recent valuation – based on revenues for 2011 and an investment by Atomico and Accel Partners – values the company at a whopping €2.25bn (£1.89bn). The company isn’t the overnight success it’s often portrayed to be, though – Rovio was founded back in 2003, and created 51 games for other companies before it struck upon the hit that is Angry Birds. Indeed, in just over two years, and essentially four games – Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons, Angry Birds Rio (a tie-in with animated children’s movie Rio from 20th Century Fox) and the new Angry Birds Space – the company has cemented itself as one of the essential games for millions of smartphonetoting fans. Along with the Rio movie, it’s also just opened Angry Birds Land – a dedicated

space at Finnish theme park Sarkanniemi Amusement Park. So, what did Rovio do so well to accomplish so much brand penetration in so little time, with so little money?

Brand excellence Peter Vesterbacka, Rovio’s CMO, gives the impression that the company has a clear strategy for developing the Angry Birds brand. No stone is left unturned when it comes to managing and growing the brand, and he’s very clear as to what makes the brand stand out. He says that the buzz so far is just “scratching the surface”. Vesterbacka joined Rovio in March 2010, just weeks after the first Angry Birds was launched

on iOS. Jaako Iisallo, a game designer at Rovio, was working on a number of designs for the company. Rovio, after making a total of 51 games for the likes of EA, had decided to take a bold step in developing a game of its own. The advent of the iPhone, and the platform which made the distribution portion of the business free from the control of big operators, gave a fighting chance to companies the size of Rovio to go it alone. Before Apple came into the picture, indie game developers had very few channels to get picked up, as games followed the Hollywood model – where typically for a game to have any chance of making any money, a sum in the millions had to be

Angry Birds is a simple game, but it has global, mass appeal

June 2012 www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com

thrown at its marketing. This priced out the small companies that had innovative ideas, but not enough cash.

Social gaming The advent of Apple’s App Store in 2008 didn’t just change the game for developers when it came to global reach, but also for the target audience. The iPhone made casual, simple games popular again. And, since it was relatively cheap to produce and design such games, they flourished on the iOS platform. As a result, games became the most competitive category of

apps on the App Store, so small companies such as Rovio in 2010, with no marketing budget had to be smart when it came to creating a successful brand. Rovio turned this into a science. Vesterbacka says: “We had no money to speak of with regards to marketing. In fact, the budget for Angry Birds was limited – and it was done in-between producing games for hire. But we knew we had to do something that would make the brand stand out. In and of itself, we capitalised on the fact that the name ‘Angry Birds’ begs a question – why are the birds angry? That is very good

for branding and attention grabbing. In addition, we worked on the colours that would make the game stand out among hundreds, and thus we chose a red bird icon. We had more than 60 icons made before we came up with the one that worked.” In these days of social media and social recommendation, it’s also key that your brand engages with fans where possible. Vesterbacka explains that at Rovio, despite the size of their fanbase today, they still take time to answer tweets and messages, and take in every idea that makes sense from fans. Social interaction with fans is extremely important for emotional engagement – an essential element of branding, he says. In the latest iteration of the franchise – Angry Birds Space – Rovio partnered with the likes of NASA and National Geographic to produce one of the most successful game launches in recent history. It netted Rovio around $10m in the first three days.

Taking on TV In terms of competition, Vesterbacka says that he doesn’t see any big brand to be a competitor in the direct sense of the word. Disney comes up in conversation often with Vesterbacka – mainly as a way to drive the main point across that “we are not a games company, but an entertainment franchise… We compete [with Disney], but it is also a role model”. The real direct competitor is television, says Vesterbacka. “Since in a given month an average person in the US spends over 158 hours watching television, and only two hours on Angry Birds, we are competing with them for big brand budgets. Then again, we will soon be on TV thanks to our animated series.”

Chinese ideas The Angry Birds story is a masterclass in growing revenue and brand awareness through exploiting good intellectual property. In terms of the growth

Angry Birds Land – an area within the Sarkanniemi Amusement Park in Tampere, Finland, shows just how far the brand has come

June 2012

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business models

of Rovio, China has formed a key part of the company’s strategy. “We want to be more Chinese than the Chinese,” says Vesterbacka. Rovio has opened an office (its second, after its HQ in Helsinki) in Beijing, and has been active in recruiting talent in China – for both offices. Vesterbacka even says Rovio has played a role in bringing China to the West. “We have

been a very good Chinese citizen,” says Vesterbacka. “We have helped bring China to the world, as much as we have brought Rovio – and Angry Birds – to China. Thanks to our Moon Festival game update on Angry Birds Seasons, we brought the Moon Festival – a Chinese feast – to the world, with tens of millions of people in the West getting familiarised with the festival.”

Rovio’s 5 lessons on brands and franchises: 1. Ambition Peter Vesterbacka: “We have always believed and viewed ourselves as an entertainment franchise and not just a games company. We started with games, but we had the intention of capitalising and expanding our reach to toys, comics, animated series and more.”

The Angry Birds Land theme park has 12 rides, various games, and an adventure assualt course

2. A simple story The simpler the story, the better it is for growth. This gives you freedom of movement to add new layers and complexity at a later stage. This helps to create a four-quadrant brand – a brand that applies to everyone, from boys to girls, men and women. 3. Stand out Rovio went through more than 60 icons before they chose the red bird. Colour and emotion – in this case, anger – are key to the brand. Finding an edge when money is limited is essential to have a fighting chance of building a good, lasting offering for users in the mobile space. 4. Care and reach out Rovio cares about the fans. It responds to tweets, suggestions and comments made by fans. Communication is ongoing. Reaching out to the community is essential for long-term engagement and growth for small indie developers. Rovio’s first game launch was mostly aided by bloggers and other inexpensive coverage. 5. Partner up Rovio partnered up with Chillingo to get to Apple and get featured on iTunes. When it came to expanding into physical form, or launching new games – it partnered up with the likes of 20th Century Fox, National Geographic, and NASA.

June 2012 www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com

eager thumbs

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June 2011

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thought leadership

Mobile At The Centre

Ektron CMO Tom Wentworth tells Andy Penfold that mobile should be the cornerstone of any marketing presence – and outlines how ‘mobile first’ thinking will enhance every area of a consumer’s interaction with a brand

“the impetus is on marketers and brands to be smarter about what they provide to people on mobile” Tom Wentworth, Ektron

sk anyone who works in the mobile space, and they’ll tell you – mobile is fast becoming essential to the marketing strategy for any brand. But for web content management and marketing company Ektron, mobile is more than essential. Tom Wentworth, the New Hampshire-based company’s CMO, says it’s time to make mobile the cornerstone of any marketing strategy. “The growth of mobile devices is probably the most significant advance to computing since the mouse, and potentially even more significant than the mouse,” says Wentworth. “We’ve revolutionised how people consume content but also how they interact with it. We’re no longer pointing and clicking, we’re flicking and swiping. This has huge repercussions for marketers, and what we’re advocating to our customers is really adopting what we call a ‘mobile first’ mindset where you really need to think about how your consumers interact with your brand across Tablets and smartphones as your primary interaction type.”

First-tier channel Wentworth says Ektron approaches marketing with mobile as a first-tier marketing

channel. However, he says that while the company’s customers benefit from this approach, the wider industry has so far largely failed to ‘get it’. “Most organisations today think about being mobile friendly, which basically means that their website has to simply render on mobile devices – it has to be just good enough to not embarrass the brand, but they aren’t thinking about the opportunities that mobile presents.” Wentworth sees a four-step scale in terms of a brand’s mobile maturity, which he calls the ‘four Fs’. The first of his ‘Fs’ sounds like it’s lifted from the lexicon of the Twitter generation: ‘mobile failure’. “Unfortunately this is still a reality,” he says. “This is the site you go to that has a big Flash movie in the middle and the site just doesn’t operate. There’s still a fair number of marketers at the failure level.”

Post-PC direction And while many marketers find convincing their boss to embrace mobile is the main barrier, Wentworth says that from the consumer’s point of view, it’s a no-brainer. “We’re in this post-PC era, with the so-called ‘millennial generation’ entering

the workplace with an iPhone in their hand. They’re now the ones with disposable income. If you’re not prepared for that shift, as a company or brand, it’s a pretty significant impediment to business. And if your competitor is… I wouldn’t want to be in that position.” Moving through the ‘Fs’: the next two stages are where most brands find themselves operating. Next is a mobile ‘focus’. This is when a company takes the key 10 per cent of the pages on its site, and ensures they render on a mobile device. “It’s dipping the toes in the water,” says Wentworth. “It’s doing the minimum to make your site work on a mobile device.” Then comes mobile ‘friendly’. “Mobile friendly is really about organisations that want their content to render fully on a mobile device, but they’re really not taking full advantage of it,” says Wentworth. “You can almost do more now with mobile devices than you can with desktop devices because they’re more capable platforms. Very few organisations are doing well.”

Mobile experience Which brings us to the ultimate stage of Ektron’s mobile maturity scale: mobile ‘first’.

June 2012 www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com

For Ektron, marketing strategies should revolve around the consumer’s mobile experience – and that should be the goal for any brand. Wentworth says that consumers now demand mobile as the primary means of interaction with a brand. Analysts agree – Gartner says that mobile browsing will eclipse desktop browsing by 2013, while Forrester Research has predicted that by 2016 there will be 1bn smartphones in use on the planet. So given these forecasts, what does ‘mobile first’ mean? “The thought behind mobile first is when you start thinking about mobile devices, it requires you to put the user at the centre of the discussion,” says Wentworth. “I’m not sure if you in the UK have seen the show Hoarders? [we have]. It’s a TV show about these people whose houses become overwhelmed with stuff. It’s crazy. Websites have become like an episode of Hoarders. You have all these departments of an organisation trying to put their content or their promotion on the home page. so what you end up with is this mishmash of content. It’s more driven by the marketing team’s requirements that it is by the user experience requirements.”

nator screen size, you’re going to deliver something that works better for everyone – not just your mobile users.” Rather than taking your desktop site and hobbling it until it works as a functional but unambitious mobile site, Ektron argues that you start with a mobile site, and progressively enhance for the desktop. “If you always start with the user’s tasks first, you’re going to have a happier user that’s going to do more on your site,” says Wentworth.

customers get really smart about what they deliver to their users. For example, someone on a Tablet is going to be more interested in a rich media experience – more video – whereas smartphone users are more about text and actionability. That’s something that our tools achieve.” With this approach, Wentworth says brands can drive forward mobile as the primary marketing channel. He believes consumers have made their intentions clear when it comes to mobile adoption – now brands

Responsive web design

Ektron’s responsive web design principles have delivered strong results for US college Morehead State University

Mobile is essentially ushering in a new set of principles in terms of web design – Wentworth terms it “responsive web design” – and that’s where Ektron fits in. “No technology in the world is going to prevent a website designer from turning their site into a episode of Hoarders,” says Wentworth. “What we can do is ensure your entire site is mobile friendly. When you build your site on top of Ektron web content management, you’re immediately going to be at a minimum ‘mobile friendly’. We will detect different devices and screen sizes automatically.”

Ektron’s content management tools allow an organisation’s site to automatically detect the device types and the screen sizes that are coming to the site, and then adaptively render the site in a mobile friendly way across all those diverse screen sizes and types of devices. “The good thing about responsive web design is that you can start looking at the kinds of devices someone is using, and the kinds of ways they’re using your site, and you can make it very relevant to that device,” says Wentworth. “We help our

need to deliver, or let their competitors deliver. “Every consumer across every demographic and across all ages is ready to think about mobile as the primary way they do computing. So I think the impetus is on marketers and brands to be smarter about what they provide to people on mobile.” With Ektron’s ‘mobile first’ mentality, Wentworth is certain he has the formula to really engage consumers through focusing on their behaviour and desires. “It’s about putting the user at the centre of your site design, not your marketing team,” he says.

Ektron’s four Fs of Mobile Maturity

Core purpose Wentworth says that the screen real estate of the mobile device, and the ‘infosnacking’ behaviours that consumers demonstrate on mobile, forces marketers to hone in on the core purpose of their brand’s mobile presence. “When you think about mobile first, and you put a premium on mobile screen real estate, you have to think about the three or four things that the user wants to do,” he says. “My belief is that if you think mobile first, and you design first for the lowest common denomi-

June 2012

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best practice

Join our Mobile Marketing party – Mobile Marketing Live takes place in London on 1-2 October 2012, and conference tickets are available at Early Bird prices before 31 July Media Partners

oin us in London on 1 and 2 October 2012, for Mobile Marketing Live, our new two-day exhibition, conference, training and networking event for the global mobile marketing business. Event sponsors include Textlocal, Prinovis, TradeMob, OpenMarket, and InMobi (Gold); and Mojiva, Fiksu, Celtra, Messmr, and Cogenta (Silver). We can promise you two action-packed days of knowledge transfer, interactivity, case study success stories, and the chance to meet face-to-face with some of the smartest solutions providers who are helping global businesses to successfully take their brands into the mobile channel. The exhibition encompasses 500 square metres of floor space, with stand sizes to suit all budgets. Our Mobile Training Academy will also be on hand, offering free mobile marketing training to conference delegates in a dedicated area of the show. The conference programme is split into two streams, one looking at mobile marketing by Vertical, the other by Discipline. The Verticals stream breaks down into eight key sectors: Retail; Travel; Finance; Pub-

lishing; Automotive; Charity; Healthcare; and Sport, Leisure & Entertainment. We are inviting well-known figures in each sector to speak, explaining what they have done in the mobile channel, what worked, what didn’t work, the lessons learned, and what they plan to do next. The Disciplines stream breaks mobile marketing down into eight core disciplines: Apps; Sites; Mobile Advertising; Social; Gamification; Financial Services; CRM; and Locationbased Services, explaining what each is, and showcasing examples of best practice and successful campaigns. We’re busy putting together a stellar lineup of speakers – so far we’ve confirmed: David Chan, CEO of Barclaycard Europe; Steve Wing, business director, mobile at The Guardian; Ian Carrington, EMEA head of mobile at Google; Paul Francis, head of commercial systems at Domino’s Pizza; Sarah Baillie, mobile commerce manager at Debenhams; Jonathan Stephen, head of mobile product at JetBlue Airways; Bob Schukia, global head of mobile

technology at Thomson Reuters; Alex Kirmse, head of mobile at Zappos; Christine Kellogg, mobile marketer (Acquisitions) at Betfair; and Alistair Goodman, CEO of Placecast. You can attend the exhibition for free. A one-day Conference Pass costs just £295, or just £195 if you book before 31 July. And if you bring a colleague or colleagues along, they come half price, even if you buy tickets at the Early Bird rate. So if you book before 31 July, four people from the same company can get a one-day Conference Pass for a total cost of under £500 – that’s less than a single ticket to most events. A two-day Conference Pass costs just £495, or just £395 if you book before 31 July. And the same 50 per cent discount applies to tickets bought for colleagues. Mobile Marketing Live is the show this fantastic industry has been waiting for, and we can’t wait to bring it to you. For more information, head for www. mobilemarketingmagazine.com/ live. Or, call Lisa Slavin on +44 (0) 20 7183 2920, or email lisa. slavin@mobilemarketingmag azine.com

June 2012 www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com

Gold Sponsors

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June 2012

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thought leadership

June 17-20 Vienna

Exclusive 15% Discount for Mobile Marketing Magazine Readers It’s the must attend event of the year for me. To the point I’ll consider self funding it if I can’t get budget sign off. Andy Overall, Johnston Press Join publisher ad operations and ad technology leaders from across Europe for this unmissable 3-day forum. Speakers and topic to include: Richard Swan Head of Advertising Operations, Hearst Magazines UK on Non-traditional Video Advertising Adib Razzaq Digital Integration & Automation Manager, News International on Private Marketplaces Petri Vatanen Business Development Manager, Sanoma News on Viewable Impressions Danny Doyle Commercial Ad Operations Team Leader, The Guardian on Workflow Systems

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June 2012 www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com

thought leadership

Aggregate Score Rob Malcolm, general manager of messaging at mBlox, explores the evolution of Application to Person (A2P) messaging aggregation and the challenges it faces

obile messaging has become a key tool for communication between brands and consumers on the move over the last decade. It includes a variety of different communication channels, including SMS, MMS, instant messaging, email, and more recently, push notifications. In total, the volume of this application-toperson (A2P) traffic is estimated by mBlox to be roughly made up of 1trillion messages globally on an annual basis, of which SMS constitutes around 35 per cent. This makes A2P SMS messaging the most successful mobile application ever to run on a mobile handset in terms of monetisation to the application provider (the mobile network operator in this case), consumer adoption, and value to the enterprise. Even as smartphone penetration increases in mature markets, and Peer to Peer (P2P) messaging starts to decline due to cannibalisation by over the top (OTT) applications, A2P mobile messaging volumes continue to grow by double-digit percentages year on year. mBlox started as the pioneer of A2P SMS aggregation in 2000, when it recognised the need to simplify the sending and receiving of SMS to hundreds of mobile operators in a reliable, SLA (service level agreement) guaranteed, secure, and cost effective way.

Personal delivery In these 12 years, mBlox has delivered more than 20bn A2P SMS messages to over 200 countries within an average time of less than 10 seconds per message. Those 20bn messages have included services from every vertical, driving real material value to

enterprises and brands globally. The market has grown to be a 350bn A2P SMS per year business, engaging more than 3bn consumers on a regular basis. Back in 2000, one might have predicted that the fragmentation of the global market and the complexity of global messaging would have decreased. The reality has turned out to be very different, in part due to the need for carriers to monetise A2P messaging, but primarily as a result of the need to prevent unsolicited messaging and fraud. This has led to a trend known in the industry as ‘blocking and filtering’ whereby the carriers compel messages to be injected directly into them via a dedicated direct connection, rather than passing through the transit connections between mobile operators using GSM standard interoperability links and contracts. This allows the MNOs to fully monetise and control the messages entering their networks. Although building new connections can be expensive and time-consuming, mBlox is supportive of this trend, simply because we’ve learnt that the level of unsolicited messages and fraud is inversely proportional to the market price. In regions where the market price for SMS is significantly lower than the UK (for example, India) the volumes of unsolicited messages are so vast that consumers fail to read any of them. The situation in India became so severe that local regulators stepped in with draconian measures to reduce the volume of unsolicited messages, making it extremely difficult to use SMS for commercial purposes in the powerful and flexible way we have become accustomed to in the UK.

June 2012

Despite the positive effects of blocking and filtering, SMS fraud continues to be the biggest issue facing the operators and SMS aggregators alike. Fraud has the ability to crash SMS market prices, defraud operators and aggregators of millions of pounds annually, and ultimately lead to very poor service quality for enterprises.

Number porting The second largest challenge for aggregators in the UK is the absence of a central and accessible mobile number portability (MNP) database, allowing aggregators and enterprises to determine to which network operator a mobile number belongs – a problem North America and most of Europe has solved. mBlox, along with a number of operators, aggregators and MNP companies, is working to address these two challenges. mBlox continues to invest heavily in its messaging business as we see a growing trend for increased adoption and interaction between consumers and the enterprise, in real time and in a highly secure way. We see push notifications as an exciting addition to the world of mobile messaging and, although similar to SMS, it will co-exist alongside SMS without replacing or materially cannibalising it. Push notifications have a long way to go in solving fragmentation, penetration, standardisation, and quality before they reach their maximum potential. Most importantly, we believe that until they are monetised in some way, they may be destined for the same future as email – important in your overall marketing mix but not something to use if you need to ensure your message is read.

www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com

best practice

APPLICATION Showcase Mobile apps make ideal travel companions. With summer upon us, Alex Spencer checks out the latest apps that enhance your travels TripAdvisor (iPad, free)

ripAdvisor has squashed the majority of its usergenerated tourist review site into a sleek, presentable app. It offers reviews of hotels, restaurants, and things to do, as well as a flight-checker, local map, and access to the TripAdvisor forums. These functions are all laid out on a minimalist home screen as buttons centring around a large search bar.

The flight-checker function searches numerous airlines for cheap flights, which can be filtered by airline, on-board amenities, or even type of aircraft. Selecting a flight leads onto the airline’s website. The forums section, meanwhile, lays out TripAdvisor’s message boards in a clean and easy to use fashion. However, the meat of the app is in the reviews section. All

attractions are shown as pins in an interactive gesture-navigated map, powered by Bing. This can be viewed as a plain map, a satellite image, or from an angled bird’s eye view. The pin for each location can be tapped once to see its name, address, and average review score; or twice to see its ranking, user images, and full reviews, where you’ll find the usual mix

of praise and nitpicking. Each location can be marked as a favourite, to be accessed later. Overall, the app provides a streamlined version of the TripAdvisor site, and demonstrates some of the keys to good mobile design – it takes every opportunity to incorporate location services and touch controls, and squeezes in a lot of content while still being intuitive to navigate.

Lonely Planet (iPhone, free)

ssentially a newsstandstyle one stop shop for all things travel, Lonely Planet comprises an in-app store, and a browsable collection of purchased guides. It’s all very simple to use, though the store could benefit from a filter or search function to pick between the various offerings, which include phrasebooks for foreign languages (each costing £3.99); travel guides, for individual cities (£3.99) and whole countries (£6.99); and a handful of audio walking tours (£1.99). The phrasebooks offer a few hundred English phrases, translated into the language, with a phonetic guide, and the option to play the translated phrase aloud. With all content stored on the device, it could be a good

June 2012 www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com

Word Lens (iPad, free)

ost travellers have experienced the stress of a menu in a foreign language – and ordered something by mistake. If that rings a bell, Word Lens is for you. The app uses text recognition to translate any printed text you point your device’s camera at, and overlays the translated words on the live video feed, matching the original font and perspective. It’s a great idea, with some impressive technology powering it – but, at least on the iPad, the execution is still some way from perfect. The lack of autofocus on the Tablet’s camera means that the text recognition is rather twitchy. It struggles to pin down words for long, meaning words jump in and out of translation, or repeatedly re-translate as the app changes its mind. Understandably, it seems to fare better in direct sunlight – great for al fresco lunches as the sun is shining, but not so

useful at dinnertime. As with any image recognition app, trying to hold an iPad perfectly still while it gets a bead on the text proves difficult. To combat this, there’s a pause button, which freezes the video feed and translated words, which can be interacted with to examine alternative translations. However, it only presents the translation as it was when the pause button is pressed – a ‘best of’ display including all of the words it has so far recognised would be more useful. There’s also a search function that provides translations of words typed into it, which is a useful and powerful tool on its own, especially given that the dictionary is stored locally. This means that the app doesn’t require an internet connection – particularly useful given network roaming charges. Word Lens currently offers French and Spanish, but the

way to learn the basics on your flight. The phrases are limited by space, though, and can only be searched by English. The content of each travel guide isn’t too different to a linked series of PDFs, with text and the occasional image on a plain white background, but they’re easy to navigate. The page for each restaurant, attraction, or hotel can be found by browsing by area, type of activity, or using a map – which, with its location-based functionality, is the only mobile-specific feature of the guides. Most distinctive are the walking tours, which combine audio from the BBC archives, split into individual tracks for each landmark on the tour, and a locationbased map with the tour route

marked on it. There is a limited selection, mostly focused on London – but they provide an informative, if slightly cheesy, way of experiencing new places.

app itself, while free, is only a shell without the purchasable language packs (£5.99). That’s not too costly but, unfortunately, each only translates in one direction, meaning English to Spanish and Spanish to English must be bought separately. If you’re careful and patient, it’s possible to get the gist of most sentences you point your camera at, but that’s not ideal in

June 2012

an app which sells itself on convenience. It’s undeniable that Word Lens has potential – and on other devices its problems might be lessened – but on iPad, the image recognition software doesn’t quite work. It really needs the hardware to catch up with the software. For now, it’s an impressive futuristic-toy, but probably shouldn’t be relied on as your holiday’s only translator.

www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com

best practice

winning with apps Rob Thurner, mobile specialist and adviser to the Mobile Training Academy, explains how to avoid the pitfalls and deliver successful apps

ut the champagne on ice – it’s only a couple of months till the mobile app celebrates its fourth anniversary. Apps have enjoyed a meteoric rise to prominence in a short lifetime, having first appeared on the screens of early adopting iPhone users back in July 2008. By March 2012, Apple reported 25bn app downloads, with around 1bn per month, a number matched by its major app store competitor, the Android Play Store (previously known as Android Market). Applications have also made a healthy contribution to Apple’s revenues, generating an estimated $6bn (£3.8bn). This figure includes the 30 per cent Apple takes in its share of app download spend, charges from in-app payments, and revenue from iAd, its in-app advertising business. Today’s smartphone users – who now outnumber non-smartphone users in the UK, the US, and other leading mobile markets – have a choice of around 1m apps in the app stores hosted by Apple, Android, Microsoft and BlackBerry. For the marketer, the logic for investing in apps is compelling. There are three key reasons to get involved. • Personalisation Mobile is the ultimate personalised marketing channel. We don’t share our handsets, and most of us never part company

with our phones. When I download an app, it becomes ‘mine’, creating an easy, convenient, instant one-to-one shortcut to the chosen brand through a bookmarked icon on my handset or Tablet. This can be accessed 24/7, in all locations, with or without internet access or cellular signal. • Payment channel Through iTunes, Apple established a convenient, secure and trusted channel for music lovers to download and pay for music. iTunes users set up their accounts online, added credit card details just once, and agreed T&Cs authorising Apple to charge them via their mobile bills for multiple purchases, typically at low transactions costs (79p to £3). iTunes then added books, videos and apps, to be paid for using the same payment channel. This payment model has since been replicated by Android and Microsoft. • No credible alternative For many years, the mobile internet fell well short of its potential in delivering a satisfactory internet-based engagement channel for information-hungry mobile users. This created a vacuum for apps to gain traction and multiply, unopposed. The phenomenal app success story has been turbo-charged by slick marketing by the app stores, and by the emergence of advertiser-friendly specialist app companies that talked the right

language when appealing to client- and agency-based creatives, developers, and C-level staff.

Success factors Whatever the business sector and consumer proposition, apps are all about delivering a clear consumer benefit and engaging content, thus maximising download volumes, and ensuring frequent use. This explains why the biggest app categories are games and social networking, which account for 62 per cent of all app usage. Unless you tick one or more of the following boxes, your app is unlikely to hit the mark with download volumes or frequency. Consumer benefit

Examples

Utility

Access to social networks, bank details, identify music

Entertainment

Games, music or film downloads

Information

News, sport, travel, weather updates, currency exchange

If you get it right, the rewards are sensational. Take Angry Birds, Rovio’s legendary app, which achieves 1m downloads every

June 2012 www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com

day, occupying the world’s smartphone users with the cumulative play time of 25 years’ gaming every day, and generating monthly in-app ad revenues of $1m. Consider the phenomenal success of Shazam, the audio-tagging application, which has achieved 200m downloads. There are two strands to Shazam’s success. First, its accurate, user-friendly audio recognition software allowing music lovers to identify and buy the music they’re discovering at festivals and in clubs, tagging their favourites and sharing via social media. Second, extending the service to recognise TV and radio ad jingles, taking app users directly to corresponding sites and apps. The result? It took Shazam 10 years to log its first billion tags, and 10 months to log its last billion tags.

The 2012 Super Bowl proved to be a watershed for Shazam, which ran an experiment in audio tagging 50 per cent of the ads broadcast. Viewers Shazam’d ads as much As they commented about the brands on all social media channels combined. But Shazam’s real success lies far beyond the tag numbers: on average all Shazam TV campaigns have seen 65 per cent or more ‘post tagging’ engagement. And critically, Shazam interactions convert to sale: an Old Navy campaign resulted in a 27 per cent conversion to sale. CEO Andrew Fisher says consumer use of Shazam to respond to TV ads far exceeded expectations, no doubt easing negotiations to sign an exclusive deal with ITV in the UK. Native apps bring a range of consumer benefits and revenue streams for B2C and

B2B business. As a rule, the apps that enable users to access other native functions on the handset to create a highly personalised experience are most likely to encourage repeat usage. Consider the cameraphone, photo-library, contact book, calendar, social media profiles, GPS, accelerometer, calculator and browser. API plug ins, including Google Maps, weather updates and Facebook Connect are all popular, allowing the app to aggregate and compile highly personalised data, fed in realtime. The app then provides a concierge service.

Proving the ROI The true measure of success with apps lies far beyond the download numbers. 85 per cent of apps are only used once. This

Potential pitfalls If they’re honest, most marketers, and the agencies that advise them, will admit that their cherished app has not lived up to expectations. Here are the main challenges and tips.

Challenge

Issue

Solution

Audience reach

50 per cent of mobile users have not (yet) migrated to smartphones, so your audience is capped with apps.

Research the handset ownership and mobile behaviour of your target audience against Flurry and comScore data. Build a mobile-optimised site for non-smartphone users.

Discovery

With 1m apps available, creating stand-out in the app stores is critical. Apple and Android prioritise apps based on popularity (downloads) and quality (ratings & reviews).

Marketing your app is essential. Use traditional channels (above and below the line media, word of mouth, PR) digital channels (online ads, email, social media) and mobile channels (mobile sites, mobile ads, mobile search, app store marketing) to drive awareness.

Cost

There are no established ways to design and build once and render the app across different operating platforms, which means developers need to re-code the app multiple times for each of the platforms’ different Software Development Kits (SDKs) – iOS for Apple, Android, BlackBerry, Java – thereby escalating costs.

As a rule of thumb, you should examine mobile traffic on your mobile site to confirm the handsets being used, and prioritise the corresponding SDK in your app build plan. HTML5 is emerging as a browser-based alternative for “web apps”

Revenue

Trusted brands from gaming, media, entertainment, retail and travel sectors are generating significant revenues from apps. The majority of apps fail to do so. Remember the app store hosts keep a healthy portion of the download cost (for example Apple takes 30 per cent).

Evaluate the options – for example download costs, in-app payments, in-app advertising, sponsored apps – and bear in mind that 95 per cent of all app users won’t pay for any app activity. Free apps will achieve higher downloads, but most are used infrequently and deleted quickly, whilst paid for apps have greater perceived value, hence longevity.

Project management

This one is fundamental, as weak project management results in a rushed and stressful app build process, resulting in sloppy testing (50 per cent of apps are launched with bugs), leading to negative reviews, hence poor visibility in the stores.

Build sufficient time to determine handset ownership of your target audience, define app features, hire expert iOS and Android coders, test on multiple handsets, and allow enough time for approvals (up to 10 weeks for Apple).

June 2012

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best practice

is where you need to dig into the detailed reporting now available. Market leader www.flurry.com now tracks 37bn app sessions each month (1.8bn daily) based on over 20m live app users worldwide. This analysis allows you to view active users, session length, frequency, rolling retention, and user paths into multiple layers of engagement. You can then cross reference the data against age, gender, and consumer clusters and benchmark your app’s performance against category norms. The intelligence derived helps brands optimise their budgets in delivered content which users find genuinely engaging.

What next for apps? Two predictions • Prediction 1 – Low cost, self-serve apps A new breed of high-end self-serve app tools is emerging that allows brands and organisations with limited technical capabilities to build their own apps for multiple-platform hosting and download (iOS, Android, Microsoft etc). One example is Appsplash (www.appsplash. co.uk), which allows easy content import and geo-location-based offers and coupons to attract new customers and stimulate repeat visits through targeted in-app push notifications. • Prediction 2 – Apple and Android will face challenge One of the key trends this year will be the arrival of newcomers who are

Apps offer brands a personal connection to consumers via their mobile phone

likely to challenge the dominance of Apple and Android in the application space, according to Forrester’s 2012 Mobile Trends for CPS Professionals report. The main players – Amazon and Facebook – will leverage their strengths in using social recommendations and personalisation to create new tools, which could facilitate app discovery and pose a challenge to the established app stores. Amazon’s challenge is based on cloud-based capabilities and the ability to personalise content; while Facebook brings a massive

“The importance of apps and their place in the marketing mix can be explained by the ease and convenience for consumers to have a ‘buttonised’ shortcut to their favourite brands” Rob Thurner, MTA

mobile audience and experience in working with web developers to distribute content virally on its ubiquitious platform.

Conclusions Apps have emerged rapidly as a major force in the mobile landscape, and account for a disproportionate share of brands’ mobile marketing budgets, considering the ROI they deliver. This is because the majority offer little if any consumer benefit, and will be used just once, which renders many of them a vanity item. The importance of apps and their place in the marketing mix can be explained by the ease and convenience for consumers to have a ‘buttonised’ shortcut to their favourite brands, and apps have assumed the opportunity to provide immediate ‘brand in hand’ access. Critically, apps have established a secure, convenient and popular payment channel which will continue to appeal to brands and organisations aiming to monetise compelling content. Apps have taken the initiative, and brands’ budgets, as the mobile internet had a slow start and for many years offered a substandard user experience. However, with the advances in HTML5 browser technology and enhanced mobile search, I predict the mobile world will turn rapidly in coming months, and the importance of apps will diminish. After all, there is only one internet, to which every mobile user has access. www.mobiletrainingacademy.com

June 2012

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business models

Wide Angle View Andy Penfold discusses mobile ad engagement with Henric Ehrenblad, co-founder and chairman of Swedish premium mobile ad network Widespace

hen it comes to consumer engagement on mobile, Sweden-based premium ad network Widespace has plenty of experience in delivering successful campaigns. And Henric Ehrenblad, the company’s cofounder and chairman, says its success is down to putting the advertisers in control of their campaigns, and the publisher in control of who can advertise. “We have a slightly different focus compared to other ad networks,” he says. “We’re almost hesitant to use the word ‘network’ because that usually implies low-quality and uncontrolled ad campaigns and uncontrolled inventories, with advertisers not knowing where their ad goes. We work very openly with our advertisers and publishers in order that they get the right reach and the right demographic.”

Focus on quality Widespace’s focus is on quality, according to Ehrenblad. “We only work with quality apps and brand-name apps,” he says. “Likewise, we only focus on quality advertisers. Old style mobile content with banners that, if you click, will charge your bill every week – we don’t get involved in that. So we focus very much on the quality segment. Both in terms of the publisher and the advertiser.” The focus on quality inventory and quality advertisers means that advertisers can be confi-

dent their campaign results are meaningful. “Brands like brands – big advertiser brands prefer to be seen on premium brands,” says Ehrenblad. “Some developers develop their own little bots that generate a lot of traffic and clicks, we make sure we don’t deal with any of those.”

Getting engaged Ehrenblad says that a lot of Widespace’s advertising clients seek engagement as a key measure of success, and the company offers a range of metrics that assess the level of engagement. In many cases, what comes after the click is what is important. One Widespace campaign for VW, for example, saw an average engagement time of 48 seconds. The campaign, which was part of the launch of the Passat in 2011, delighted the client. While the overall aim of its wideranging multichannel campaign was to sell more cars, VW was pleased that mobile consumers spent time learning about the new product. “A lot of our advertisers want a long engagement time on their landing page,” says Ehrenblad. “We measure that and the reach and depth of campaigns. Whether it’s a movie premiere or a car launch or concert tickets, we have developed a lot of templates that work really well when it comes to engaging mobile consumers.” The company has also become well known in the radio industry,

thanks to running hugely successful campaigns on branded ‘listen now’ apps. “Here in Scandinavia, we deliver as much revenue to a radio station, per day, as the station does on its FM stream. We effectively double a radio station’s revenues through their apps.” The company’s base in an advanced mobile market such as Sweden means it has a lot of experience in premium mobile. Scandinavian mobile markets tend to be comparatively mature, with historically early adoption of the mobile internet, and high smartphone penetration. “We’ve had a bit of a head start, we believe, when it comes to analysing some consumer behaviours,” says Ehrenblad. “We’ve been fortunate to be in a very mobile place, and what we’ve learned here is what we can now expand outside. We’ve spent five years now doing nothing but mobile campaigns. We have run thousands of different campaigns, and we’ve delivered ads in 100 countries and we’ve learnt a lot.” As a result, Ehrenblad says Widespace is a safe pair of hands when it comes to mobile strategy. “We offer much more of a ‘consultative selling’ kind of approach to our customers. Most customers haven’t done a lot of mobile advertising – we have a very solid understanding of what we can suggest; what will work and what won’t work, both in terms of clicks and in terms of engagement.”