Welcome back to my daily dose of Predictions for this year. If you’ve read the original artilce as a whole, skip this one!
Today I’ve bundled 3 and 4 together as they’re both about messaging and the first is rather short 🙂
3. SMS
Continues to grow like crazy. We ain’t seen nothing yet.
4. MMS
Meanwhile, its ugly second cousin continues to flounder.
It’s too expensive on two levels. Firstly, any cost is too expensive if a user doesn’t understand what she gets out of using it for. So operators need to look at ways of incentivising trial. Clue: this doesn’t include throwing mega bucks at TV campaigns and competitions/contests.
Secondly, it’s too expensive anyway. Cut your prices, guys and give the market a chance to get started.
Having said that, there’s still a plethora of usability problems, not the least of which is the failure of anyone to take responsibility for making the things work out of the box. We KNOW that retailers don’t make this happen and that operators and retailers bitch and whine about each other’s failures.
But until someone sits down with Charlie Dunstone (of Carphone Warehouse – the UK’s largest mobile phone retailer) and his ilk and looks for creative ways to crack this issue, MMS will continue to sit unloved and unwanted.
This isn’t going to change guys, unless you change your approach.
Once these problems are cracked, I still think it’s far from plain sailing for MMS. A well composed and well thought through MMS will require a considerable investment in time and some artistic ability. Will most users bother?
MMS equates primarily to HTML email – how often have you EVER used an HTML email in the last 5 years? OK, you may use it to format an email nicely. And you’re received countless ones from businesses. And maybe you’ve passed on a few that you were sent – like jokes, people are happy to pass them on, but only a tiny, tiny percentage of people ever make them up.
One hope in the industry is mobile marketing coming to the rescue of MMS, in much the same way as they’re the primary users of HTML email. I’m not convinced as the cost per MMS is still way too high.
The best that mobile marketers can do is to produce such compelling content that seeding it to a few users will lead to a viral splurge as people pass it on. But that’s damn tricky to do – persuading people to pay through the nose to pass on your advertising!
So I’m afraid we’re going to see another year of MMS languishing promisingly but lazily on the “poorly executed ideas” pile.
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