It’s too early to get much of an impression – I’m jetlagged and in a hotel in the western suburbs of Shanghai and about half an hour’s drive through mad traffic from the famous Bund and the centre, so will leave that for later in the trip.

However, neither Twitter (nor Facebook nor Google search) work here, so my world is strangely silent. It’s quite incredible how central Twitter has become to my digital life. Maybe I’ll get back into blogging again for a while.

A couple of things I would have tweeted, if I had been able to:

Rkss has launched his first EP Rkss aka my son, Robin Buckley, interning at Berlin based startup Pipe. Have a listen and tell your friends.

I’m enjoying reading Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. It’s a dystopian future, where most people spend their time hooked up to an advanced version of Second Life, escaping reality. A cult develops in this virtual world, focused on searching for clues set by the founder to win his $200 Billion+ fortune. A fun read (especially for gamers and geeks), although not a very hopeful vision of the future, where people live in trailer park stacks (mobile homes stacked in piles of 15 to 20), fuel has run out and lives are bleak.

Firstly, let me clarify one brief point. When I wrote about my plans a month ago I suggested that I would be looking at some advisory work, investing and mentoring. This is something I’m still doing and plan to continue, so taking a full time gig is not a u-turn in any way, but very much complementary to the work I’ll be doing at Eagle Eye. You’ll still hopefully see me on the speaking circuit and I’m especially looking forward to the MLOVE Confestival taking place in a castle near Berlin at the end of June. I’ll be expanding on some of my recent talks about the exponential growth of mobile technology, The Singularity and the short and long term implications for businesses. And there’s a bunch of great speakers and plenty of partying to look forward to – check it out and book your place.

Anyway, back to mobile vouchers.

When I were a lad starting out in marketing, we used to bandy around the phrase “Advertising loads the gun and Sales Promotion pulls the trigger”. Like many truisms, it contained a healthy dollop of fact and wisdom, even if it was simplistically expressed. Basically, it suggested that Advertising’s job was to build a brand and create consumer demand for the product. And Sales Promotion created the sale by, for example, driving store traffic, promoting the product in-store or running loyalty programmes.

Today, Sales Promotion has been officially abolished in favour of “Promotional Marketing”, but broadly speaking, the principles are the same.

However, the hybrid “performance marketing” has also grown disproportionately important, where the ad also stimulates a purchase – largely driven by PC-based display and search marketing. This is a very effective technique for advertisers and can often be purchased on a payment-by-results basis – you only pay when the consumer engages with the brand by clicking on the ad (Pay Per Click), or in some cases, actually making a purchase of the product (known as CPA or Cost Per Action).

Digital Direct Response Advertising or Performance Advertising has proved truly revolutionary, but really only for companies who can complete an action or make a sale online. So if you’re say, Amazon, eBay or LastMinute.com, Performance Advertising is marketing nirvana. But if you still rely on a purchase of a physical product in a real-world store, the case is less clear. If online activity simply drives consumers to your website which doesn’t actually stimulate a transaction, does this have real value?

Rather than getting into a debate about the merits of this argument, let’s just look at the facts.

According to eMarketer, online ad spend now accounts for 15.4% of the total. There’s an argument to suggest that this is low anyway in comparison to how much time the average person spends online, as opposed to engaged with other media. Despite this, Nielsen states that

Big FMCG brands in particular might appear to have been rather shy of the online space, with Procter & Gamble investing just 1.3% of its overall media spend in paid-for internet ads, Nestle 2.7%, Unilever 1.9% and Tesco 1.4%.

Now, let’s just remind ourselves, these are 4 of the most sophisticated and innovative marketing brands globally and they’re consistently underspending in digital. And the main rationale for this is lack of measurable of results in terms of sales created. Or as Jerry Lloyd-Williams, head of content at MediaCom Beyond Advertising suggests:

For a lot of FMCG [CPG in the US] brands, one question still prevails, which is: do the dollars and pounds they spend on digital equate to sales? There’s still a lot of research that needs to be done, but the caution with which they are spending online is built on a reasonable research question.’

But let’s look at mobile, as opposed to PC-based advertising. Mobile can actually link advertising to a physical sale in a store. A brand can issue a mobile coupon and provided that the coupon can be digitally redeemed (as opposed to a sight-check by store staff), we can suddenly measure sales precisely and develop appropriate ROI formulations.

This isn’t a new concept, by any means. As an industry, we’ve been talking about “closing the loop” for the 11 years I’ve been in the industry and it’s remained the big promise of mobile marketing – but a promise that hasn’t yet been delivered. Most launches into this area rarely get beyond a trial as every method tried to date – from barcodes to NFC – require a significant upgrade in either the retailer’s EPoS or mobile handsets, or both. Such upgrades are expensive and take time to deploy.

When I was looking for my next role, I was looking for a market that had the ability to become a billion dollar business within 5 years. So it’s perhaps not surprising that mobile coupons would make my list. It’s potentially huge, with over 300 Billion paper coupons issued every year in the US alone. In addition, I know that mobile coupons will be embraced by retailers and FMCG/CPG verticals when a secure abd foolproof redemption methodology is in place.

However, in the last 11 years, I hadn’t seen a technology that would actually deliver the promise today in a scalable way. Until I came across Eagle Eye Solutions, which owns a great piece of patented technology that has the potential to disrupt several industries all at once – retailer marketing, mobile marketing and couponing.

While most players in this market have focused on scanning technology of some form, Eagle Eye have very cleverly thought out-of-the-box. Their idea has been to partner with the companies who supply retailers with their Credit Card Terminals in-store, or what we call in the UK, Chip and PIN Terminals. By integrating with these companies, which are already linked to the retail EPoS, something very neat indeed can be achieved. This is how it works.

1. Consumer Requests a Coupon

The ways in which a consumer might learn about the availability of a coupon are many and varied. But essentially, they’ll be responding to an ad – whether via traditional media, such a radio or press, or perhaps more likely, via mobile advertising itself. If by mobile, they can click on an ad or link and get a coupon sent to their phone, usually via ubiquitous sms.

2. The Coupon

The coupon is actually a simple unique PIN programmed for one-off usage.

3. The Retail Experience

They visit the store, make their purchase and use the Chip and PIN machine to enter the PIN as part or full payment. All the evidence so far points to very positive consumer acceptance of this mechanic, as they’re used to entering numbers in this way.

4. The Marketing

If the promotion is being run by the retailer, they get real-time reporting and analysis on their campaign. Ditto, if it’s a brand running the campaign via the retailer.

5. The Security

One of the dirty little secrets of the coupon industry is fraud.

There are two types of coupon misuse in operation. Malredemption is trade fraud – for example, where a retailer cuts out and collects coupons and claims back the face value and trade handling allowance, without ever involving a consumer. Clearly, this is a problem mainly involved with independent shops, but it is and always will be an issue using paper-based systems and manual fulfilment and reconciliation.

Misredemption is a far wider problem and involves the consumer claiming the value of the coupon without having ever purchased the product. It’s pretty hard to quantify the size of this wasted marketing budgets. Occasionally, a company with a vested interest in minimising the problem commissions a survey which finds that most people claim not to do it. But as you’re asking them to ‘fess up to cheating, maybe that’s not a big surpise.

Anyway, digital redemption is secure as the discount isn’t given by the retail EPoS unless the product is purchased. Brand budget holders can wave goodbye to this perennial headache for good.

6. The Fulfilment

No waiting for fulfilment houses to count coupons and send cheques (checks) around the country. So, the Green implications are pretty impressive too – especially avoiding the printing and distribution of the vouchers themselves.

Of course, the really huge opportunity here is using all the data to the best effect, but I think that’s a post for another day.

The mobile coupon/voucher space is already a crowded one. But that’s great for Eagle Eye as there are loads of companies who need the technology that we can deliver. The Facebooks, Groupons, LivingSocials and any company involved in running mobile advertising campaigns will all benefit from partnering with us to deliver mobile couponing today. So, I hope others will quickly see what the opportunity is here.

When I joined AdMob 5 years ago, many people questioned just what the hell I was doing getting involved in a company that ran banner campaigns on mobile websites. Clearly, I don’t need to explain that any more. In the same way, many people have asked the same thing about mobile couponing – or at least been very underwhelmed at the news.

Believe me, this sector is going to be massive and is worth getting very excited about indeed as the mobile revolution continues. Whether or not Eagle Eye turns out to be a big winner is yet to be seen. But I’ve researched this market very carefully and really believe that it’s got a good shot at winning big.

So, will mobile couponing be a billion dollar business in 5 years? We’ll see. But it’s going to be fun finding out.

I haven’t confirmed any long term plans yet, but there are a few things coming up that I’d like to share, if anyone is still reading out there in MobHappy Land.

Here’s how I’ll be spending some of my time:

Angel Investing

I’m keen to do a little more of this – I’ve made one investment so far, but they haven’t announced it yet, so I don’t want to scoop them before they’re ready.

But if you or your pals are looking at an Angel round, feel free to get in contact as russell AT mobhappy DOT com. I’m really only interested in mobile and companies based in Europe. And, being a marketing dude, companies that I understand By that, I mean I’m unlikely to invest in some kind of clever middleware or something that does amazing stuff on a purely technical level.

As with most Angels, it’s inevitable that I’ll turn down more than I accept. But I promise always to give quality feedback and tell you why I’m not interested. My aim here is to help entrepreneurs think through their propositions and benefit from my startup experience – the failures as much as the successes.

Speaking

I’m still lucky enough to be invited to give speeches around the world. A few coming up that you might be interested in:

Post Transcendent Man on 9th April. It’s a Saturday, so you haven’t got a work excuse not to attend!

Those of you who know me will also know that The Singularity and what happens in Humanity 2.0 has long been a passion. The discussion promises to be a great one, with fascinating and opinionated fellow panelists.

April 12th sees me return to my Promotional Marketing (or Sales Promotion as we quaintly called it – what did we know?) roots for Mobile 4.0. I’m giving a talk on “Tomorrow’s World” and what it might mean for marketing.

On April 14th, I’ll be running a panel of very distinguished senior people at the Rutberg Summit at Claridge’s in London on the subject of “Mobile + Retail”. Rutberg is an invitation only audience and one of the most prestigious in the conference calendar, so very flattered to be asked.

Last, but not least, that week I’ll be doing Key Developments in Mobile Advertising, which has a great bunch of old friends talking mobsessively. Also on April 14th, it should be great.

It’s busy being unemployed, I’m telling you.

Other Stuff

Some other random, but important and interesting (to me) stuff.

I’m doing a fair amount of Non-Exec and Advisory roles. But I don’t think someone can take on too many of these without just becoming a dude who doesn’t add a lot of value, which defeats the purpose.

I’m planning on doing a lot more mentoring via both the excellent Springboard acceleration programme at Cambridge University and the School of Communication Arts 2.0. Both are definitely worth checking out.

Springboard is about accelerating the success of startups, following a successful recipe from the US, such as Y Combinator and others.

The School is for young people who either want a career in advertising/marketing or who want to be entrepreneurs and need help to refine their ideas and propositions. Both sets of students are doing really well, with the ad people winning awards against real agencies and the Intrepreneurs coming up with great ideas with a lot of potential.

The mentoring is something I’m planning to get more involved with when I return to the UK to live in the Summer, after 8 years in Germany.

Finally, the UK Department of Trade and Investment launched Catalyst UK in March, recognising that the UK needs to promote business and entrepreneurship. I’ve been invited to be one of the “influential business figures, established in international markets, who are supporters of the UK as a place to do business.”

So, trying to draw this together in one cogent theme, I’m planning to spend the next 10 years helping the UK to become a world class part of the tech scene and one which regularly produces mega-successes like the next Twitter, the next Facebook or the next Amazon. There’s plenty of reasons why The Valley has the advantage over us – early stage funding and a huge natural early adopter market, are my personal bugbears. But if we think big and harness the creativity and talent available, I believe it’s a realisable dream.

On the other hand, as Mike Tyson said “Everybody’s got plans…..until they get hit”. But that’s my thinking for now.

It promises to be a day full of great discussions and illuminating information — and best of all, we’ve still got free tickets to give away, so head over to the WIP site and register!

Just wanted to write that I’m in London next week for 3 interesting speaking events – all different, but all very interesting.

Monday sees me chairing a very distinguished panel at MoMo London, which consists of Neil Johnson from Teletext,
Dave Gwozdz from Mojiva (one of the event sponsors), Jason DaPonte from the BBC, David Gibbs from BSkyB and Hugh Griffiths, who is pursuing a portfolio career these days, but found fame and fortune at O2 and Microsoft. Our topic is “Where Mobile Meets Media” and in the best crowd-sourcing tradition, let me know if you have any questions you’d like me to pose to the panel. MoMo is already over-subscribed, so if you haven’t got a ticket, you’ll need to try bribery or start a secondary market on eBay.

On Wednesday, I have a slot at ME Magazine’s “Monetising Mobile”, which consists of a lightening series of 10 minute presentations, so no room to waffle. I’ll be speaking about ‘Commercial break – The reality of ad-funded apps’ – basically talking about the engine room of App development, which is how you make money.

As an aside, ME Magazine does a brilliant job (no, I’m not being sycophantic!) of balancing humour with mobile news and comment. It sets standards that other trade magazines need to aspire too, providing they wish to entertain, as well as inform. And making content fun to read has to be a winning strategy over traditional dry reportage.

On Thursday, we move on to The Open Mobile Summit, which has a seriously good line-up of speakers, including many old pals. I’m doing a panel on “Mobile advertising in 2011″, chaired by comScore’s excellent Mark Donovan. Back in the day when they were M:Metrics, I wrote a post calling them “The Elvis of Analysts” after a briefing with Mark and I think that’s still true all these years later.

So – a busy week and I hope to see some MobHappy readers at one of these events. If you are attending, please come and say Hi and tell me what you’re up to. Both Carlo and I love to meet readers and followers, so don’t hold back.

Second, I’ve also joined the Wireless Industry Partnership as their new community manager! I’ve known Caroline Lewko from WIP for a long time and have a tremendous amount of respect for her, and I’m honored that she asked me to join her team. I’ll be working to build and support WIP’s community of developers and helping to carry out WIP’s mission of making developers as successful as they can be. I’m excited about the opportunity here, and I’m glad to be doing it as a part of WIP!

To that end, there are some events I want to tell you about — and if you’re in the neighborhood, stop in and say hi:
- On Wednesday June 9, I’ll be at the WIPJam in Berlin, that’s a part of the IT-Profits show. We’re currently working on the agenda, and we’re looking for some input on what developers want to hear about. If you submit your ideas to us by May 9, you could get a free pass to the event (a EUR99 value)!
- A few days later, on June 12, I’ll be in London for the Vodafone Betavine Mobile Technology for Social Entrepreneurs event. It’s part of the Betavine Social Exchange efforts, focused on using mobile technology to solve challenges in developing nations.
- I won’t be there, but the rest of the WIP team will be in Singapore for CommunicAsia, where they’ll be holding another WIPJam on June 16.

I’d also like to thank all of our lovely MH readers for your attention and support, your insights, emails, comments, conversations and connections have been a huge help to me!

If you’d like a whopping 40% off and a day at the Emirates Stadium, mixing with a great line up of speakers and attendees, use the booking code “mobh4pp3″.

If you’re going, please come and say Hi. Meeting MobHappy readers is something I love and if there’s anything you’d like to share here, feel free to talk to me about it.

It’s been a while. As many of you know, I started work on an MBA in the fall, and this semester has been pretty brutal on the work front. Combined with a job/internship search in this economy (coupled with Vegas’ 10%+ unemployment rate), and time has been pretty short. In any case, I’m back with a few posts today.

Before that, a couple of observations:

First, despite not having posted to the site in about two months, PR spammers don’t seem to have noticed one bit, making it abundantly clear (or perhaps just reinforcing) that they probably don’t bother reading the site. If you’ve engaged a PR firm, you might want to check up on what they’re doing and make sure they’re devoting their time to activities that are worthwhile. If they’re not, or if you’re looking for PR representation in mobile, drop me a line and I’d be happy to recommend some excellent PR folks to you.

Second, I’ve been thinking about customer service a lot lately, for various reasons. Our good friend Helen summed things up nicely when she said (at the Forum Oxford conference today, I gather) “good marketing begins and ends with good product and service.” The point’s rather obvious when you think about it, but that doesn’t stop it from being missed by plenty of people. Another thing to consider is just how broad your customer service function is, and how far it extends into marketing.

Case in point: As I said, I’ve been job hunting, and it’s been pretty interesting to see how different companies treat applicants. In a few cases, my impression of a company as a consumer have been impacted by my interaction with them as an applicant. Perhaps the best example was a rejection I got from a company here in town. What’s interesting is that I came away from the rejection actually feeling better about the company and thinking more positively of it, because of the way it was handled.

There’s a company here in Vegas that I’d really like to work for, and I recently saw an opening for the type of role I want. The only hitch was that it was for a senior position, asking for more experience than I’ve got. So I emailed the recruiter, asking about the team and if there were more junior positions on it. She wrote me back (which was a good start on its own), and said I should apply anyway, and she’d look at my resume and give me some feedback. A week or so later, I get a voicemail, saying that as I’d thought, they were looking for somebody with more experience. That was disappointing (though not surprising), but she then proceeded to leave a really nice message with some useful advice for me, making it clear she’d actually looked over my materials and given them some consideration.

I’ve never felt so good about being rejected for a job, simply because of the way she handled it. This company is one that’s built around customer service, and it shows, even in this scenario. I’ve come away from the situation thinking even more highly about the company, as a consumer as well as a wannabe employee. And I’ve mentioned the experience to several people to boot. Anyway, the point is that when you’re thinking about service, don’t stop at the people you’re trying to sell to; consider every interaction with your company a customer service — and a marketing — opportunity.

- I’ve been using a neat little application called Xobni recently, which is a free app that helps you manage email so much easier. It works as an extension to Outlook and really saves time. Essentially, when you highlight an email in your Inbox (Xobni spelt backwards, geddit?) you can see lots of relevant stuff about the sender, like contact details, email thread history, (clickable links to) files exchanged, people you share in your network and more.

It saves lots of time and that’s valuable for free. It’s currently in Beta, but I have 12 invites if anyone wants one.

I’m not sure whether Xobni’s existence isn’t a terrible indictment of Microsoft or very clever of the folks from Redmond. On the one hand, shouldn’t they have thought of this type of tool? I mean one of the frustrations of Outlook is trying to find people’s phone numbers if it’s not in their sig – you have to click on Contacts, then search for the name again – yeuh. A horrible user experience.

The other view is that maybe one company shouldn’t even try to do everything, but launch the basic product and let others use it as a platform to perfect and customise it. Certainly, this is very Googlesque or Facebookian, but I wonder if it’s a small piece of evidence that Ray Ozzie is beginning to make some impact.

Anyone have a view on what happened here?

- Tomi Ahonen asked me to write a foreword to his book of Pearls, that I wrote about recently. Very flattering.

Incidentally, Tomi’s new eBook project (does he ever sleep?) is his Almanac, also on sale for Euro 9.99 . In his own words:

So if you felt the need to know what is the mobile phone penetration rate of Colombia, or what percentage of mobile phones accept memory cards, or what regions does the Orange telecoms operator carrier group cover, or how many mobile subscribers are there in Malaysia or how many camera-phones are in use worldwide, or has Turkey launched 3G or how many consumers are active users of MMS picture messaging or what is the average price of SMS text messaging or do they have MVNOs in Belgium or how many unique mobile phone users, rather than total subscriptions, there are in Russia, etc, this is your Almanac.

Whenever I need a stat, Tomi seems to have it, so I’d highly recommend this for any aspiring mobile fact junkie. And, no I don’t get commission or anything grubby.

- AdMob got into Fast Company’s Fast 50 – the only advertising company that wasn’t a creative agency to do so. W00t.

- Finally, another useful service is BackType. This allows you to create alerts (like Google) except it only tracks comments in blogs and news sites. This allows you to follow what people are saying about you and your company – which not even the mighty Goog tracks, or at least reports on. It’s certainly not a replacement for Google alerts, but it’s a very useful complement and one I’ve already used to good effect.

That’s all for this week from me. See you all in Barcelona!

I’m in San Mateo from 20th – 23rd January, Orlando for mPlanet (which looks like it’ll be great) from 24th to 28th January and of course, dear old Barcelona for Mobile World Congress from 15th to 19th February. I’ll probably be squeezing in a trip to London too in the meantime.

A great place to meet up in Barcelona will be the Mobile Monday Peer Awards, taking place on the Monday (d’oh) and organised by my pal Rudy De Waele. I have the honour to be on the jury for the third year running and I’m looking forward to what is always a great afternoon hearing from the cream of the world’s startups.

This year we’re having a pre-judging session too, which will make things run a little quicker and leave more time for networking. Watch out for more details soon.

On the subject of travel, I’ve also been playing round with TripIt, also available as a plugin on LinkedIn too. TripIt allows you to input your travel itinerary and make it available to people in your network. It also alerts you when people are going to be in the same place and you can arrange hook up.

I’ve used other similar services in the past, but I found that keeping them up to date was a hassle. What’s clever about TripIt is that when you get a confirmation email from your airline or hotel, you just forward it by email to plans@tripit.com and it automatically completes the details. This is a very cool feature.

If you’d like to join my network at LinkedIn or TripIt, invite me or email me at russell AT mobhappy DOT com.