Following on from SMS Text and SPAM (part 4)
Before we discuss the complex paradigms of mobile marketing content, let's step back a moment to discuss mobile phone culture.
For advertising to be effective, it has to be presented within the context of it's audience.
TV advertising is a model we are all used to.
While specialist cable/satellite/local channels may carry more targeted advertising, the majority of TV advertising (in the UK at least) is LCD (Lowest Common Denominator) often aimed at the lady of the house.
Naturally, during peak children's viewing times, the toy ads and teenie fashion campaigns appear.
Also during what could be described as "male dominated viewing" programming times, like the late evening news and sports shows, adverts for cars and beer will appear.
But during a typical early evening, what percentage of TV adverts can you recall, which targeted a more specific LCD audience than household? Personally I don't think this is because advertising executives think that women are time rich and TV obsessed. It's just the LCD of children at play or in bed, men down the pub, doing hobbies and erm. working late at the office.
Many men wouldn't admit to liking or following a SOAP or family comedy (unless they contain a hot actress). If you look at the scheduling of these, what does that tell you?
Such viewing patterns and advert scheduling criteria, may also be dramatically influenced by the socio-economic status of the audience. For example, richer households may have secondary TV sets in the kitchen or in specific bedroom. Even richer households may have TV sets in a second home (beach bungalow or house boat). How would that affect an advertisers targeting?
All these conditions relate to what that audience segment is receptive too.
So what do you think are the environmental and social contexts in which the mobile phone audience exists?
I feel another survey coming on ;-)
More to follow in part 6.
Showing posts with label SMS Text and SPAMing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SMS Text and SPAMing. Show all posts
Sunday, 4 February 2007
SMS Text and SPAM (part 4)
Following on from SMS Text and SPAM (part 3)
I hope you'll consider, and ideally take, my little content survey.
I hope you'll agree it raises some questions - questions which seem to change the more you consider it. Depending on what circumstances or information was in your mind at that flash point, seems to change ones answer.
Regardless of how clever the technology. How often or not something is sent. How well presented it is. Or even how well targeted or focused it is.
The industry is in huge danger of killing itself off. Of making us immune to mobile marketing. Just like the fax and email before it (you knew there had to be a link within my ramblings didn't you?).
With mobile phones being so personal, it's unlikely that people, or the governing bodies would tolerate such a scenario, or allow self regulation.
So the next million dollar question is, how does the industry make mobile content worthy ?!
More to come in Part 5.
I hope you'll consider, and ideally take, my little content survey.
I hope you'll agree it raises some questions - questions which seem to change the more you consider it. Depending on what circumstances or information was in your mind at that flash point, seems to change ones answer.
"May be I would. Maybe I wouldn't. But then again..."One of the things I most passionately believe is that "content is king" - nothing new there, but this is especially true in the mobile marketing world. In fact in mobile marketing, it is all that matters!
Regardless of how clever the technology. How often or not something is sent. How well presented it is. Or even how well targeted or focused it is.
The industry is in huge danger of killing itself off. Of making us immune to mobile marketing. Just like the fax and email before it (you knew there had to be a link within my ramblings didn't you?).
With mobile phones being so personal, it's unlikely that people, or the governing bodies would tolerate such a scenario, or allow self regulation.
So the next million dollar question is, how does the industry make mobile content worthy ?!
More to come in Part 5.
SMS Text and SPAM (part 3)
Following on from SMS Text and SPAM (part 2)
So the main way SMS Text is being introduced is in TextBack campaigns. the classic text "monkey" to 601234 to receive a monkey screen picture (whoopee).
This is also often used in voting and competition entries, or sometimes "more information" requests - such as by sending your post code to get events (or erm. the weather) in your area.
There's much excitement at the moment about passive advertising - text links and mini pixel adverts, introduced in to WAP content - such as mobile searches on the Yahoo or Google portals, or a weather feed and so on.
Normal WAP website advertising is of course still moderately viable on your mobile. The million dollar question being though, other than a mobile search and perhaps your eBay auctions, what is it one regular surfs for on ones mobile phone?
Maybe you're a BBC news or soap junkie and can pallet it on a 2 inch screen, but may be you're not ;-)
WapTV is another possibility. But besides the mini screen size, only really 3G enabled phones have the speed to provide a worthy mobile viewing experience. Three are big players in the 3G market and their X Series package (huge bandwidth and many cool features like Instant Messaging and Skype, included) will be attractive to more and more people as mobile content becomes more worthy.
4G is of course around the corner, and barring another mammoth government levy (as for 3G licenses) for allocation, all the major players might adopt it and still be able to afford to provide content over it. That would be nice, wouldn't it ;-)
More to come in part 4
SMS Text and SPAM (part 2)
SMS SPAM and the mobile (part 2) - Following on from part 1;
Email is an essential part of work/life for many, and it's difficult to imagine us living without it.
But SPAM prevention needs to increase pretty rapidly. IMHO we're all becoming fairly immune to email - often binning emails we don't recognise without reading them, or setting up junk filters that we never manually review.
For important communications, we tend to rely on the mobile phone. It's on our person 90% of the time, only select people have the number (we think*) and as it costs significant money to make it ring or bleep, SPAM is vastly reduced.
But the marketing industry has started to realise this and bodies like the Mobile Marketing Association are championing the mobile phone as a valid route to personalised marketing.
Laura Marriot is one of their main public spokes-people and as a young literate, their webinars always seem credible ;-)
Human off-shore call centres and automated IVR systems can of course make our mobile phones ring and erm. "speak" to us.
But the current mobile marketing status quo is to use SMS Text messages to our mobiles instead. The messages have to be short (160 characters unless concentated) and are moderately unobtrusive as our phones only go bleep and they take half a second to arrive. Trouble is, half the time they are so short, they don't even say what they are about, let alone who they are really from.
ICSTIS (the independent telcoms body) are supposed to govern the use for premium rate response rip-offs and the like; but they don't handle individual cases.
The first port of call is still your phone operator, who in theory would then send the cumulative SPAM/rip-off complaints to ICSTIS.
But you have probably unfortunately already experienced how unresponsive mobile operators are. Once I paid 25p to get in a human operator queue, was on hold for 8 minutes and then the queuing system hung up on me. Nice!
More to come in part 3
Email is an essential part of work/life for many, and it's difficult to imagine us living without it.
But SPAM prevention needs to increase pretty rapidly. IMHO we're all becoming fairly immune to email - often binning emails we don't recognise without reading them, or setting up junk filters that we never manually review.
For important communications, we tend to rely on the mobile phone. It's on our person 90% of the time, only select people have the number (we think*) and as it costs significant money to make it ring or bleep, SPAM is vastly reduced.
But the marketing industry has started to realise this and bodies like the Mobile Marketing Association are championing the mobile phone as a valid route to personalised marketing.
Laura Marriot is one of their main public spokes-people and as a young literate, their webinars always seem credible ;-)
Human off-shore call centres and automated IVR systems can of course make our mobile phones ring and erm. "speak" to us.
But the current mobile marketing status quo is to use SMS Text messages to our mobiles instead. The messages have to be short (160 characters unless concentated) and are moderately unobtrusive as our phones only go bleep and they take half a second to arrive. Trouble is, half the time they are so short, they don't even say what they are about, let alone who they are really from.
ICSTIS (the independent telcoms body) are supposed to govern the use for premium rate response rip-offs and the like; but they don't handle individual cases.
The first port of call is still your phone operator, who in theory would then send the cumulative SPAM/rip-off complaints to ICSTIS.
But you have probably unfortunately already experienced how unresponsive mobile operators are. Once I paid 25p to get in a human operator queue, was on hold for 8 minutes and then the queuing system hung up on me. Nice!
More to come in part 3
SMS Text and SPAM (part 1)
SMS SPAM and the mobile
I don't know if you're old enough to remember the Fax machine? It started life as a great business communication tool, effectively letting you fax black and white flyers on-demand.
Then the spammers joined in and we all started getting faxes at home at 3am in the morning, with premium rate opt-out numbers. Fax paper wasn't free either!
Technology was probably the main thing that has relinquished fax to the on-demand legal signature on forms, but spam certainly didn't help.
Email obviously features heavily on our lives. So does SPAM. Figures are something like 60~80% of all email sent is SPAM. Business workers spend between 20~60 minutes per day dealing with SPAM.
Anti-SPAM solutions are trying, but at the end of the day, no-one can afford to loose legitimate fresh customers not in your whilelist.
There are even some genuine customers who use Hotmail, Yahoo, Google and the other freebie, no commitment, no identify confirmation, email sign-up providers.
The real solution with email SPAM probably revolves somewhere around that a spammer almost never uses their own real email address. Maybe more about that later.
Any way back to the point....
To Be Continued. [Part 2]
I don't know if you're old enough to remember the Fax machine? It started life as a great business communication tool, effectively letting you fax black and white flyers on-demand.
Then the spammers joined in and we all started getting faxes at home at 3am in the morning, with premium rate opt-out numbers. Fax paper wasn't free either!
Technology was probably the main thing that has relinquished fax to the on-demand legal signature on forms, but spam certainly didn't help.
Email obviously features heavily on our lives. So does SPAM. Figures are something like 60~80% of all email sent is SPAM. Business workers spend between 20~60 minutes per day dealing with SPAM.
Anti-SPAM solutions are trying, but at the end of the day, no-one can afford to loose legitimate fresh customers not in your whilelist.
There are even some genuine customers who use Hotmail, Yahoo, Google and the other freebie, no commitment, no identify confirmation, email sign-up providers.
The real solution with email SPAM probably revolves somewhere around that a spammer almost never uses their own real email address. Maybe more about that later.
Any way back to the point....
To Be Continued. [Part 2]
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