A far as defining mobile advertising in relation to mobile marketing, i would say that mobile advertising is a subset of mobile marketing the same way (TV or print or and other form of) advertising is a subset of marketing. Goals for TV or print or mobile advertising campaigns in my opninion and experience should be subject to overall marketing campaign goals, same way as for any other marketing vehicle, concentrating on the channel specifics, i.e. audience profile and medium capabilities.

I’d put the type of mobile marketing you’re writing about more as CRM though ie an ongoing dialogue and I am surprised, as I said above, that more clients aren’t using this type of activity.

Cheers

Russell

You’d be amazed at the number of clients who are still at ground zero with mobile and also the numbrer that we have to ween off the idea that mobile is just like email and direct mail where you buy a list and push messages etc.

That being said we have had some very solid and encouraging results this year for push campaigns, but these started with the consumer initiating them by responding to a mobile call to action on some other media. Most encouragingly for us we have had tiny (less than 1%) opt outs from the promotional messages sent on behalf of the brands.

We had to work had at it though.

I expect us to be working with mobile advertising with clients from Q2 next year, but I don’t see it as their entry point into the mobile channel.

A couple of points.

Even if you are right and Push is better than Pull at the moment, you said it yourself “if you can identify them”. The idea of finding a meaningful amount of people who had truely opted in on a mass market scale is pretty unlikely – certainly in the markets I know about. Might be different in Australia. But you could never reach around 30% of people like that (using your stats).

In addition, you’d also have to pay a list broking fee per number you used, which would push up costs significantly.

You also have to consider budgets in finite terms.

As an example, even if you could sms all the people in the UK (which you couldn’t) at 10 cents each (broking fee and transmission fee), you be paying $4 million, which is way beyond most budgets.

Then sms is also limited to 160 characters of text making the creative execution limited, as you have to assume that any link in there wouldn’t be used by an awful lot of the recipients.

So I think pull wins over push this year as well as next.

Russell

So push based, assuming the call to action is not a link to a mobile web site, will reach all the “target” audience (if you can identify them).

Pull based is limited because it can only reach 30% of the “target” audience, because the rest of the “target” audience do not use the mobile web.

Using your figures, a push based campaign may cost $2+ per response but logically it will get you 3 times the number of responses that pull based campaign at $0.50 per response. So as a campaign manager what would you choose?

The big advantage of a pull campaign is you don’t need to (or can’t ) identify your audience, and you might get responses from outside your expected audience. Plus at the moment you can assume the pull audience is more tech savvy with a higher disposable income.