One of my predictions for this year was that despite a lot of chatter, mobile marketing still wouldn’t really take off in 2005 and this seems to have been born out as we approach the end of the year.
Mobile marketing is nowhere near mainstream yet, despite some big brands flirting with the medium and a load of specialist agencies attempting to corner the market. We’ve even had Andrew Robertson, CEO of the world’s second largest ad agency, BBDO, with his headline-grabbing claims that mobile will soon be the most important channel….as he settled back into selling yet more 30 second ad slots.
It’s hard to argue that mobile isn’t potentially important – two billion people carrying what are essentially Personal Media Players, capable of receiving calls and messages in real time, playing music, watching film, streaming Tv and radio and hosting games. Not only that, but we’re promised that these devices will soon be self-aware enough to know where they are in the world, and in relation to other users – and let interested parties know this information (with the user’s permission).
So it’s not the medium itself that represents the challenge for marketers. It’s bleeding obvious that it’s attractive. At least if you don’t work in a traditional agency.
The problem that everyone’s struggling with is what the marketing itself might look like.
The marketing industry itself is still wedded to the interruptive marketing model – whether we’re talking about interrupting your TV programme, your film, your web surfing, your email time, your shopping trip (with in-store displays, on-pack promotions et al), your life (direct mail) – I could go on, almost endlessly. All these techniques work on the premise of grabbing your attention as you’re doing one thing – and then trying to get you to do something else. The way they interrupt you may vary from entertaining you to pummeling you into submission and all variants between, but interruption is the name of the game.
The breakthrough with online marketing came, not with (interruptive – again) banner ads, but a spin off of the dear old Yellow Pages business model. Yellow Pages offers a free listing for all businesses, so it can claim to be comprehensive, but it allows businesses who pay them money, to increase their prominence in the publication. And millions of small businesses throughout the world have made that decision to upgrade their presence and largely benefited from it. This was years before the Long Tail was ever mooted, excellent concept though it is.
Google borrowed and adapted that idea and allowed businesses to get in front of people when they were searching for information that was relevant to a need that the business might be able to help them with. This meant that Google were offering a channel that no longer interrupted people as they went about their daily lives, but helped them get more from what they were doing at the time – namely a better search experience.
I believe that this points the way to how marketers will need to treat the mobile channel. Simply bombarding people with interruptive messages, via sms, mms, video or even voice recordings at the start or middle of a phone call, is going to be a very short-term strategy indeed.
Even when initial permission is given for these types of interruption, when it doesn’t take into account what the recipient is doing or where they are, it quickly becomes unwelcome spam. For instance, I might give my favourite band permission to let me know about forthcoming gigs and album releases. But if I happen to be on holiday in a different time zone and the incoming message wakes me up, or even in the middle of an important business meeting, I’m suddenly going to see it as interrupting and annoying.
This is even more so than other forms of permission-based, push marketing. If I get emailed from the band, generally speaking, I get interrupted when I choose (ie when I’m doing my email -unless I’m on a Crackberry), not when they do, so the interruption isn’t nearly so extreme.
While the promise of location-based marketing can overcome this to an extent, I still might not like to receive a message when it arrives – I might just not be in the mood, or might have just purchased the ubiquitous Starbucks’ Latte when asked if I fancy one.
So is Pull-based marketing the answer? In other words, should marketers wait for customers to ask them for a marketing message? Well, this certainly sounds cool, but I also know from ZagMe that the majority of people simply forget, even though they would dearly love to communicate at that time, if they had remembered and remembered how to. So to rely solely on this technique seems to be doing a disservice to both user and marketer, as far as I can see.
These annoyances will (eventually) lead to permission being withdrawn and then that means for ever. Mobile Marketers can’t even ask for a second chance, as they’ve been banished from the mobile channel altogether, as far as that customer is concerned.
So the key to success in this new channel will be for marketers to ask themselves how they can add value to what the user is doing at that time. In the same way that AdWords help the searcher, how can the marketer help the mobile user or enhance their mobile experience or indeed, their lives at that moment?
Further clues lie in the increasing ease that users will be able to pull down information with their phones when they want to, via virtual graffito links (whatever the underlying technology) and the fact that most people still use their phones primarily to make voice calls and do sms – in other words, it’s still first and foremost a communication device for person-to-person interactions.
The marketers who take the time to understand these important issues will inherit the mobile channel and thus, the most important medium to emerge since TV, over 50 years ago. Those who seek to merely apply outmoded interruptive advertising are doomed from the start.
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