“So you wanna implement mobile marketing by yourself”?

Trying to figure out how to cost out a mobile marketing program and how long it is going to take from start to finish and launch can be a challenge.

It is important to understand where the key cost centers are in setting up and running a mobile marketing program. It will also give you a sense of how much time you should budget to get a program launched.

Choosing your approach
When considering costs and schedules for your mobile marketing programs, you first need to take into account which strategic approach you plan on employing to get the job done.

Are you going to…
1) Take the agency approach and have someone build and run your campaigns for you in an ad hoc/one-off project based model, or
2) Are you going to go to the opposite of the spectrum and do everything — strategy, creative, execution, technology build out yourself — or
3) Will you take a hybrid approach and find a middle group between these two poles?

Once you have chosen your approach, you can figure out which costs elements with which to directly concern yourself.

Understanding the costs
If you are going to run ad hoc programs, then you can simply treat all your mobile marketing programs as variable cost — that is, you have no upfront investments and you simply pay for the services as you use them.

However, if you are going to invest in running mobile marketing programs yourself in a do-it-yourself or hybrid model, you will want to consider the upfront investments you will need to make to support your initiatives.

Below you will find a high-level overview of the cost drivers for both upfront mobile marketing program investments and program variable fees.

Upfront mobile marketing investment cost centers
There are four cost centers you will want to estimate when considering your upfront investments to setup your mobile marketing infrastructure if you are considering using a do-it-yourself or hybrid approach to launching mobile marketing programs for and within your business.

• Strategy and resource.You will want to estimate the costs for your team, their training and the development and maintenance of your strategy.

• Mobile marking platform and application licenses. You will want to plan for the fees you will pay to obtain and gain access to the application logic that will power your mobile marketing programs.

On average, depending on the functionality you license, mobile marketing application fees will range between some few hundreds of dollars to a few thousand dollars per month.

In addition to monthly fees, for access to a mobile marketing application platform you should plan on paying initial, one-time account setup and training fees as well.

• Connection aggregator fees will apply if you decide to go it alone and build out your own application logic and connect directly to a connection/messaging aggregator.

Connection aggregators are companies that provide application players with messaging connectivity to wireless carriers. A connection aggregator bind will cost you some thousands of dollars per month. You have to pay for any application logic extra by building it yourself or sourcing it from a third party.

Note that the connection aggregator fees are typically included in the mobile marketing application provider platform fees. This is an added benefit of working with an application provider over going it alone.

• Common short code leases. If you are going to run any text messaging mobile marketing programs you must lease one or more common short codes. Nearly every mobile marketing program — at least the good ones — use a short code as a core piece to the program.

You need to do this ahead of time — that is why it is listed in the upfront investment section — because it takes anywhere from eight weeks to 12 weeks to get a short code activated and certified for use and four weeks to six weeks to get a new campaign certified on an already activated code.

You do not need to get certification if the code has already been certified for a specific type of mobile marketing campaign. You only need to do so for new campaigns or if the campaign user flow changes.

To this end, short codes are a valuable asset to be nurtured.

Sort code leases nationwide cost $500 per month for a regular number and $1,000 monthly for a vanity code. They are billed quarterly.

You may be able to rent a short code from your application provider or connection aggregator. However, they will probably charge you a similar fee.

Variable mobile marketing program cost centers
Depending on who you are working with, you may be quoted a single number for your entire mobile marketing program — for example, $25,000 plus the traditional media and retail promotion and advertising fees — or you may get a breakdown of the variable costs.

The following provides a list of the cost elements in the typical mobile marketing program.

• Program strategy development: All the activities needed to conceive your campaign and lay out the plan

• Creative concept development: All the design activities associated with your campaign

• Content licensing and/or creation: Licensing fees or design fees for any content you may use for the campaign such as images, ringtones, videos and news feeds

• Mobile marketing application/platform: If you are not already licensing a platform or have not built it yourself, these are the fees you will pay for hosting and reporting on your campaign during the entire period of your campaign

• Tactical execution of a program: This includes creative, program certifications as needed, technical implementation on mobile marking application platform providers, legal costs — if you’re running a sweepstakes program — and any custom non-recurring software development that may be needed to tailor the application(s) to your specific campaign requirements

• Transactional items: Messaging traffic comprising SMS, MMS and email, Internet and mobile Internet page views, advertising page views/click-throughs, content downloads, IVR minutes, content royalties and images recognized

• Carrier-specific charges: You will also want to double check if there are any carrier-specific charges — for example, uplifts on text messages or tariffs on promotional content downloads

• Traditional media and retail channels: The fees for promoting the program in any traditional media channels

Here’s a hint. You can often reuse portions of the strategy, creative and any custom software and content development in one program for future programs.

If you keep this in mind, you can end up saving yourself quite a bit of money and time down the road as you roll out new and derivative programs based on what you have already done in the past.

Getting to know the timelines
As for getting a mobile marketing program launched, while technically you can do it in a matter of minutes if you have the right application provider, you should realistically plan for it to take 12 weeks to 15 weeks to get a new, typical, campaign launched.

The timeline will vary primarily due to the management of short code activation and carrier certification requirements. If you are borrowing a code from an application provider that already has a program certified, then the timelines can be much faster.

Mobile marketing is a fantastic practice that can be used to generate intimate, informative, entertaining two-way interactions with a person.

Mobile marketing programs have been known to have better brand recall — 3 percent, 6 percent, 9 percent, 20 percent and higher response rates depending on the nature of the program and the target audience. It is a valuable practice, one that you can master, and very cost effectively”which is important especially given today’s financial times.

Learn how to minimize the costs and maximize the value of your mobile marketing programs and you will be on your way to significantly contributing to your business’ bottom line through the use of mobile marketing.

How many people watch TV AND surf the web on their mobile phones at the same time? (You may be startled!)

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – U.S. television viewers are increasingly turning on the Web, tuning into television and not missing a beat on either, as simultaneous TV and Internet use continues to rise, research firm Nielsen said on Wednesday.

Nielsen said in a report that 57 percent of TV viewers in the U.S. who have Internet access use both mediums at the same time at least once a month. That translates to more than 128 million U.S. consumers.

As the heightened importance of the Web changes the way Americans watch TV, industry executives and marketers are considering ways to adjust their broadcast shows and play into viewers’ simultaneous use of the Internet.

“What we’re finding is that there’s a connection between the two media, and that innovative marketers can take advantage of that,” said Gary Holmes, a spokesman for Nielsen.

“One medium can be used to reinforce the other,” he said.

Broadcasters can expect some viewers will turn to the Web to learn more about their shows, but they have to be wary of losing the attention of their viewers.

The Nielsen study found the average TV viewer who uses the Internet simultaneously does that for 2 hours and 40 minutes a month, and that 28 percent of the time they are on the Web at home, they are also watching television.

The percentage of time U.S. consumers watch TV and use the Internet simultaneously is about the same as a similar Nielsen study from last year, but the total number of individuals doing that rose because more of them have the Web, Holmes said.

The report also found TV consumption in the United States continues to increase, with the average viewer watching 141 hours per month, a 1.5 percent rise from a year ago.

Holmes said even as viewership of videos on the Internet and on mobile phones increases, Americans still prefer to watch video on their television, as shown by how many more hours they spend in front of the tube.

“The possibility of watching (video) anyplace has really increased dramatically, but really the rule of thumb is that you watch it on the best screen,” he said.

Stats that will change advertising forever: Digital Spending Will Nearly Double in 5 Years, But Ad Budgets Won’t…

And now for a not-so-negative online advertising forecast: Forrester Research is pegging the U.S. interactive ad market to reach $55 billion over the next five years—meaning marketers will go from spending just 12 percent of their total ad budgets online this year, to 21 percent by 2014.

Search and display will command the biggest percentage of spend overall—with $31.5 billion and $16.9 billion in spending, respectively—but most of the growth will come from social media and mobile advertising.

Advertisers will spend just $716 million on social media marketing (including ads on social networks, not to mention devoting resources to their own blogs) this year, but that will grow by 34 percent to top $3.1 billion in 2014. (This gels with a recent Forbes survey that found that senior level marketing execs planned to spend more on viral and social media campaigns over the next six months). Meanwhile, mobile ad spending will grow by 27 percent—from $391 million this year, to $1.2 billion in five years.

Here’s one of the things we do at Forrester Research: we interview as many marketers as we can about their plans, identify trends and project future likely conditions, and then we put together some numbers to make a projection. If you’ve ever seen a Forrester projection, it comes from a process like this.

This means that inside every projection is an idea or ten about the future. Those ideas can be powerful, and they come from research with marketers and consumers.

My colleague at Forrester, Shar Van Boskirk, just published our five-year interactive marketing forecast. The idea inside it is the real kicker.
In this recession, marketers have learned that interactive marketing is more effective, and advertising less effective, per dollar spent. While budgets for online have decreased, they decreased less than other budgets. Six out of ten marketers we surveyed agreed with the statement “we will increase budget for interactive by shifting money away from traditional marketing.” Only 7% said “we have no plans to increase our marketing budget.”
Unlike the last recession, digital marketing is no longer experimental. Now it looks more like advertising is inefficient, relative to digital. More than half of the marketers we surveyed said that effectiveness of direct mail, TV, magazines, outdoor, newspapers, and radio would stay the same or decrease within three years. In contrast, well over 70% expected the effectiveness of channels like created social media, online video, and mobile marketing to increase.

The result is that digital, which will be about 12% of overall advertising spend in 2009, is likely to grow to about 21% in five years. Along the way overall advertising budgets won’t grow much.

THIS IS HUGE!

It means we are all digital marketers now, since digital is at the center of many campaigns anyway.

It means media is in trouble, or at least in the middle of a transformation. For example, online video ads, which will be about $870 million this year, will grow to over $3 billion in 2014. What will this do to networks plans to put more of their shows online in places like Hulu. How will it accelerate some newspapers plans to become more and more centered around online?

And it means that social “media,” which will account for $716 million this year between social network campaigns and agency fees, will generate $3 billion in five years. And this doesn’t even count displays ads on social networks (which are in the display ads category.) Of all the parts of digital marketing, social network marketing one is poised for the most explosive growth.

Pundits have been declaring the end of mass media and advertising for years now. From my 14 years of experience analyzing this stuff, I’ve learned that things die very slowly, but there are real trends you can see. If you’re in advertising, you’d better learn to speak digital, because that’s the way the world is going.

Mobile Advertising and Marketing-”Change Is in the Air” (A Staggering Forecast!)

Mobile has long represented little more than a rounding error in most advertising and marketing budgets, despite the burgeoning number of mobile users and their increasingly sophisticated devices and usage patterns.

As with online advertising, dollars flowing to mobile will continue to lag behind consumer usage of the channel. And compared with online ad spending, mobile looks minuscule: eMarketer estimates that mobile ad spending, including messaging-based formats, will reach $416 million in 2009, compared with the nearly $24 billion that will be spent overall for online advertising.
While many marketers have been reluctant to embrace a channel that lacks proven use cases, an increasing number have begun to realize the “additive effect” of mobile on their other advertising and marketing efforts. As smartphones proliferate and marketers move beyond experimentation, budgets will steadily increase. eMarketer predicts that spending on mobile advertising will gain momentum over the next five years, reaching $1.56 billion by 2013.

Mobile Marketing & Advertising 2009 Report Highlights

(BUSINESS WIRE)–Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/13bc3e/mobile_marketing) has announced the addition of the “Mobile Marketing & Advertising 2009: Challenges and Opportunities” report to their offering.

When compared to other forms of advertising (print, Internet, TV, radio, direct mail), mobile is likely growing at a much faster rate because it is considered more cost effective, personalized, and results-driven. Mobile Marketing & Advertising 2009: Challenges and Opportunities examines the current mobile marketing and advertising market, evaluating methods companies are using to effectively leverage it as a platform to enhance brand awareness and increase sales effectiveness. The report examines the leading suppliers to the mobile marketing industry and analyzes how their products are impacting the way consumers opt-in to cell phone-delivered marketing messages and increasingly use their phones to search for, and even purchase, products and service.

This report provides forecasts and analysis on the global perspective of mobile advertising and marketing, which includes product placement in games, sponsored video, premium content and branded applications. It also provides a forecast for each different mobile type and opportunity. It not only profiles suppliers but also shows how they compare on technological prowess and customer awareness/satisfaction. Finally, the report shows strategies for the largest revenue opportunities.

Key Report Findings:

-Given the exponential adoption of mobile as a communications and promotion platform, we fully expect that global spending on mobile advertising and marketing initiatives will reach nearly $29 billion in 2009, a 59% increase from 2008

-The greatest opportunity for marketing campaign development is likely the mobile video and downloadable applications sector, which we expect will surpass the $1 billion mark in the U.S. in 2009

-We find that premium content for mobile devices, including streaming video and downloadable applications, is growing at the fastest rate of all mobile marketing types. Not to be ignored, however, is the rising trend of consumers to use their mobile devices for accessing social networks, such as Facebook and MySpace.

-We estimate the world market for mobile marketing and advertising revenues will reach nearly $50 billion by 2014, up from about $29 billion today, growing at a five-year CAGR rate of nearly 12%. Europe and North America will grow at the fastest rates, about 16% through the period, to reach $16.3 billion and $12.4 billion, respectively.

-We expect 2010 to be a decisive year for mobile marketing spending as marketers worldwide move from disillusionment over their expected return from this platform to the realization that they can indeed enhance consumer brand equity via the targeted precision and customized experience that mobile affords over other media placements

Audience:
• Marketing and Advertising Agencies, and Corporate Marketing Departments. Chief Marketing and Advertising Executives are determining how best to allocate their budgets for 2010 and mobile is certainly on their radar.
• Mobile advertising networks. The suppliers enable different types of mobile ads to be broadcast over mobile networks, in videos, and in other mobile premium content.
• Mobile search and content aggregators. Many are chasing Google but the smaller vendors offer localized search capabilities.
• Cellular phone providers. They carry the millions of text messages, some of them sponsored, and are looking at ways to leverage mobile marketing campaign data for their own use.
• Mobile platform developers. These suppliers create videos, games, downloadable applications for mobile that they in turn use to recruit sponsorship opportunities.
• Traditional media outlets. Broadcast television stations and Internet properties are leveraging mobile to stream newscasts and other premium content.
• Smartphone and PDA manufacturers. They provide the hardware that enable next-generation mobile content possible.

Why email marketers must mobile-optimize their messages (Part 2 of 2)

Why email marketers must mobile-optimize their messages

This is a 2 part series. The following is Part 2 of 2. (Part 1 can be found below this article.)

“Now is the time to test integration and explore user-behavior patterns,” Ms. Miller said. “It’s unlikely that all inbox activity will shift to the third screen, but there are some activities that might benefit both subscribers and marketers such as restaurant reviews, shopping lists, recipes, local sales and news for commuters.

“Marketers can encourage, optimize and nurture these opportunities now,” she said.

So what is the current state of mobile email marketing? For one, it is not just a business-to-business challenge any longer.

Consumers have smartphones in increased numbers, especially in Asia and Europe, and adoption is now growing also in North America.

So business-to-consumer email marketers have to assume that some of their subscribers are reading email sent to their personal accounts—a Web-based service like Yahoo Mail, Hotmail or Gmail—on a mobile device.

“Unfortunately, there is no ‘sniffer’ that tells the marketer that a subscriber is reading an email on a mobile device,” Ms. Miller said. “So marketers have to assume that their HTML version is being displayed, and this has a number of consequences.”

Best Practices
Open rates will most likely go up as mobile usage goes up.

“Since opens are tracked by image downloads, and there is no image suppression, some marketers may see a small pop in opens,” Ms. Miller said.

“Since images download, and the mobile browser renders to the ratios built for a PC-based client, the use of large masthead banners or logos at the top may contort the content or push the actual headline and call to action way below the fold,” she said.

As all good marketers know, user experience matters. Scrolling on a smartphone is not the same as scrolling on a PC-based email client.

Making sure emails render well across a wide range of mobile devices is still a challenge.

“While the Apple iPhone and BlackBerry clients render HTML quite well, there are many mobile devices that are very poor at handling HTML email,” Ms. Miller said. “Marketers can use a pre-header link to a mobile version in order to provide a better mobile experience—for example ‘Reading on a mobile device? Click here.’

“Optimizing for one or the other—PCs versus mobile devices—may result in a design that is sub-optimal for the other, or both,” she said.

User behavior is still unclear, and most retailers find that mobile commerce is still nascent, according to Return Path.

While an Exact Target study released in July suggests that many subscribers—88 percent—say they actually do go back to their PC to respond to email messages later, marketers may not be able to count on this behavior for the heavy mobile users on their file.

“We also don’t know how consumers’ larger Web habits will change if they move some activities from the PC to a mobile device,” Ms. Miller said. “Will email become more or less important?”

“Will the inbox become a repository for saved offers?” she said. “Will complaints (clicks on the Report Spam button) go down since there is no Report Spam button on mobile clients (yet)?”

Marketers beware: The laws on emailing to a mobile device, which is different than viewing the inbox of an actual email account on a smartphone, are more stringent than the FTC’s Can Spam rules.

“You must have permission to send commercial messages,” Ms. Miller said. “A safe way to avoid this is to just auto-remove any mobile email addresses such as 9173654455@verizon.net from your file (I am not a lawyer, please check with counsel).”

Return Path provided the following list of best practices for email marketers:

1. Try to quantify the impact to your business. Survey your subscribers. Provide a “Mobile Format” option at sign up, along with Text or HTML. Track clicks on the link to your mobile version in your header.

2. Know how you render in the top mobile devices. Use a rendering service to track various environments like Return Path’s Campaign Preview or Email Reach for small business, or get access it from your email broadcast vendor.

3. Since there is no standard for mobile rendering, be sure the first few lines clearly display the sender/brand, offer and a link for call to action. Consider adding a phone number here, as well.

4. Be recognized. Use a consistent From: name and emphasize the brand.

Why email marketers must mobile-optimize their messages (Part 1 of 2)

Why email marketers must mobile-optimize their messages…

This will be a 2 part series. The following is Part 1 of 2.

Whether marketers can track it or not, they can safely assume that a significant portion of their emails are being read on mobile phones.

One in 10 consumers are triaging their primary personal email accounts on handheld devices, according to Forrester Research, and that percentage is poised for continued growth. For that reason, optimizing emails for cross-platform performance is the No. 1 challenge for email marketers—emails have to render well on a wide spectrum of mobile devices.

“It is very important that email marketers begin to format their messages to correctly render on mobile devices and ensure that the subscriber can perform the desired call-to-action,” said David Daniels, Spring Lake, NJ-based vice president/principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc.

“That is, marketers must also consider the landing page that email links direct subscribers to, and may want to consider building WAP versions of those pages,” he said. “There are many email service providers that offer this functionality.

“Additionally marketers should also work with vendors such as Pivotal Veracity, which provides tools to ensure that their messages render correctly on a variety of devices.”

David Daniels is vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research

‘Mobile email campaign’ is a misnomer
“The first and foremost concept emailers need to embrace is that there is really no such thing as a ‘mobile email campaign,’” said Deirdre Baird, president/CEO of Pivotal Veracity, Phoenix, AZ. “Unlike SMS/MMS, which is directed to a phone number for a particular mobile device, emails are sent to an email address and it is the customer—not the mailer—who decides whether to read that email on their mobile phone.

“On any given day at any given time, I can read an email sent to my Gmail address on my laptop in Google’s Web email client, or I can download it into my Outlook 2007 on my desktop, or I can read it on my Palm Pre, or, as I’ve done many times before, I can access it in a hotel room via a Set Top Box on my TV,” she said. “Who decides what’s read where?

“Me—the recipient, not the mailer, and my preference can and will change based on what I’m doing and what technologies I have at my disposal at that moment in time.” David Daniels, Spring Lake, NJ-based vice president

Stephanie Miller is vice president of market development at Return Path

The bottom line? Mobile email is happening now, whether or not marketers are aware of it, and whether or not they like it.

A second related concept is that customers are reading emails on mobile devices now, even if the mailer doesn’t know it or plan for it.

Ms. Baird estimates that 98 percent of mailers have no idea whether their emails are being read on mobile devices and, as a result, are missing the unique opportunity to communicate with their customers with emails that are both content- and design-appropriate for on-the-go customers.

This month, Pivotal Veracity reviewed email-client usage statistics for more than 75 million ‘regular’ emails from a half dozen of its clients, including American Express, Nestle, Progressive and Oracle.

“What surprised us and our clients: iPhone usage alone ranged from 2 to 12 percent of a campaign and ranked universally in the top 15 email clients used by their customers,” Ms. Baird said. “While impressive enough, these figures understate the likely mobile audience because the method of tracking favored the iPhone, which displays emails with images on.

“When you consider the iPhone ranked third, with just over 10 percent market share in the smartphone market in the first quarter of this year, you can extrapolate from there to estimate that mobile recipients could very easily have represented double this amount on any given campaign.”

The implication for marketers is an easy one: Whether it can be tracked or not, it is safe to assume some portion of marketing emails are being read on mobile phones.

Hence, optimizing emails for cross-platform performance is the No. 1 challenge for email marketers. Emails have to render well on a wide spectrum of mobile devices.

“It is only in the last year or so that mailers and their ESPs have really begun embracing the realization that an email that looks good and functions correctly in Yahoo may be an unmitigated disaster in Outlook or Hotmail,” Ms. Baird said.

“Now add to that the incredible proliferation of mobile phones for all socio-economic groups and their growth as a preferred method of multichannel communication and you soon realize that marketers must embrace not only the unique rendering and functionality aspects of the mobile platform but must also get a heck of a lot smarter in terms of understanding the unique platform preferences and habits of their customers in order to remain relevant,” she said.

As with all media, mobile email marketers benefit from knowing the behavior patterns of their target demographics.

“The smart marketer will need to know that I’m at my desk Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., I’m using Outlook 2007 with all its many rendering idiosyncrasies and am disposed to read longer news-related emails during this period,” Ms. Baird said.

“On the weekends, my husband and I have three little kids in toe and an iPhone (him) and BlackBerry (me) in hand and if you want to get my attention during this time, your email better be short, to the point and relevant to my place and time,” she said.

“Giving me ways to entertain three kids under five will certainly grab my attention and as for those long trade pub newsletters…well, how fast can you say ‘delete’?”

Two important take aways for mailers: Develop emails for cross-platform performance.

That is the world consumers operate in and emails need to be minimally designed to function and render properly across platforms.

Email marketers also need to track and understand the unique preferences and habits of customers as it relates to time, place and platform preferences.

By so doing, marketers dramatically improve their ability to target and engage customers with relevant information in an increasingly cluttered world.

“Mobile email is not only here to stay but will continue to grow,” Ms. Baird said. “All the challenges inherent in traditional email such as spam filtering/deliverability, mailbox clutter, rendering, tracking and targeting apply.

“The only difference is that you can now multiply their complexity by a factor of 10,” she said. “In other words, the challenges are the same but the strategies and solutions you’ll need to apply just got a heck of a lot tougher.”

The state of mobile email marketing
In the case of mobile email, marketers need to catch up to consumer behavior, especially given the hockey-stick adoption curve of smartphones.

“Email marketers are lethargic when it comes to synergizing mobile with email,” said Stephanie Miller, vice president of market development at Return Path Inc., New York. “Many have added a link to the pre-header, and some have created mobile Web sites, but very little actual mobile email marketing is taking place.”

In the U.S. and abroad, the smartphone audience is growing fast and starting to become interesting for email marketers.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of 2…

Why mobile should be a key element to your holiday marketing this season…

Mobile will make this a happy holiday season

As the holiday season quickly approaches, marketers need to start their campaign planning. This year may be different than any other in terms of the role that mobile will play.

Marketers have quickly come to embrace mobile and all that it offers in terms of a one-to-one communication vehicle. There is no doubt that we will start seeing a shift in how major brands and retailers market for the holidays.

“Mobile marketing is no longer playing second fiddle to traditional media channels,” said Shira Simmonds, president of Ping Mobile, Englewood Cliffs, NJ. “In fact, the ROI results and metrics have illustrated that mobile is more powerful, more engaging and more valuable than these other channels.

“In addition, most major brands and retailers have decreased their advertising budgets, and managers will be looking for a more cost-effective and trackable solution in order to justify each dollar spent,” she said.

“In this regard, mobile is the most powerful marketing tool for these brands – it will allow them to place information directly into the hands of consumers, and quickly drive an increase in foot traffic at the point of sale.”

Advertisers have already begun their holiday marketing planning. As with other times of the year and all other campaigns, the key is to know one’s audience.

Consumers are increasingly mobile, or on the go, and therefore the best way to reach out to them is on the device that they never leave home without – the mobile phone.

With the amount of campaigns we’ve been seeing this year and all the databases of opted-in consumers that have been built for future marketing, there’s no doubt that marketers will turn to mobile for this year’s holiday marketing.

“Advertisers are planning for this year’s holiday season now and by consistently leveraging mobile throughout the summer months and into the fall, they are reaching their consumer early,” said Marcus Startzel, senior vice president of sales at Millennial Media, Baltimore.

“Consistent advertising, in a highly effective and efficient channel, will enable these brands to creatively retarget these consumers via mobile to impact purchase intent closer to the holidays,” he said.

Like Ms. Simmonds, Mr. Startzel attributes the economic downturn as one of the main factors that will drive the use of mobile in this year’s holiday marketing.

With the economic problems, marketers are looking for ways to save a buck or two, and because mobile is still a fairly new marketing medium the prices are still pretty low.

The volume of holiday marketing campaigns makes mobile very attractive to marketers looking to break through the clutter. Marketers that leverage the channel will have a great vehicle to get through to and reach their target audience.

“This year, even in a challenging economic environment, we expect retailers to be bullish on mobile advertising,” Mr. Startzel said. “Recent studies from Universal McCann have shown that 80 percent of mobile Internet users browse the mobile Web while shopping.

“Marketers will leverage this user behavior to impact these consumers while they are in stores,” he said. “By increasing campaign targeting on those days when consumers are more likely to be shopping, advertisers will get an even stronger return.

“When you combine this strategy with engaging ad units including expanding trailers, product displays and other viral components to register and forward to a friend, advertisers can reach and engage more than 61 million mobile consumers while they are in a place to make a physical purchase.”

Last year’s holiday marketing campaigns really only made use of SMS and although marketers are more advanced in their usage of mobile marketing, text-message communications will play a big role this year as well.

Last year, department store chain J. C. Penney Company Inc. launched an integrated marketing campaign and mobile just happened to be one of the components.

The campaign highlighted JCPenney’s affordable gift assortment and invited customers to celebrate in the joy of giving during the holiday season.

Consistent with its “Every Day Matters” approach, JCPenney’s marketing campaign communicated to customers that JCPenney understands their financial pressures and is designed to showcase the great value in shopping with the retailer.

Starting the week of Thanksgiving JCPenney let visitors sign up to get SMS alerts to their handsets.

The mobile alerts consisted of shopping tips, gift ideas and some included a link to a WAP site built especially for the campaign (see story).

“SMS should really have a profile this holiday season, especially among the forward thinking chains,” said Dave Everett, president of Kaooga, Newton, MA. “Text is going to be bigger and better than ever before and holiday advertisers will be more creative than last year with their offers.

“As the economy struggles to stay afloat and consumer shopping habits adjust with the times, retailers become desperate to move products, and they will have to take advantage of a marketing tool that simply works,” he said.

Not only does text work, it is cost-effective and measurable.

“First of all, you can be sure the retailers are going to be blasting coupons and incentives to their mobile database, and customized messages to the extent they have some demographic breakouts,” Mr. Everett said.

But a new idea Mr. Everett is hearing about is tied into retailers overriding objective to get the customers into their stores first, before they’ve spent most of their holiday gift budgets.

That is why the big chains have Thanksgiving newspaper inserts touting their “DOORBUSTER” promotions saying “doors will open at 5am or 6am” on Black Friday. Sometimes they open as early as midnight on Thursday.

They may offer $800 PCs for just $250 to the first 50 customers, for example.

“What we’re hearing is that some marketers are considering a second chance promotion where they could now use SMS to inform their database of shoppers that they have a midday price break, say between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., and note some of the bargains on offer,” Mr. Everett said.

“The idea is essentially a mid-day, real-time shout-out to their customer database to get them to abandon their current shopping destination and head over to the SMS store’s side of the mall,” he said. “So if they can’t get them in the morning, they can still try for half a loaf in the afternoon.”

An up to date look at who is actually reading/using mobile marketing…(They should charge for this data!)

Minorities Lead Mobile Content Adoption / Blacks and Hispanics come out ahead

Based on data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, consumption of mobile content shows significant variation among ethnic groups.
According to Pew’s “Wireless Internet Use” report, 32% of all US consumers ages 18 and older have accessed the mobile Internet. Penetration was up 8 percentage points over 2007.

eMarketer estimates 26.3% of mobile phone subscribers will log on to the mobile Web at least once per month in 2009, for a total of 73.7 million mobile Internet users.
The digital divide may still exist when it comes to traditional Internet access—Pew found white consumers were more likely to go online via a PC on a typical day than blacks, at 59% versus 45%—but the opposite pattern exists for mobile Internet usage.
Nearly one-half of black and Hispanic consumers reported having ever used the Internet via a handheld device in 2009, compared with only 28% of whites. Usage by all three groups grew since 2007, but usage by minorities climbed more quickly. By 2009, 29% of both blacks and Hispanics went online with a handheld device “on a typical day,” versus only 17% of whites.

“Black and Hispanic households are more likely to use a mobile phone as their primary phone, and have a lower penetration rate of PCs and broadband than white households,” said Lisa E. Phillips, eMarketer senior analyst. “It makes sense that these groups access the Internet via a mobile device more often than whites.”
High mobile usage among minorities is not limited to online content. Black and Hispanic mobile users were more likely than whites to participate in every mobile activity studied by Pew, including sending and receiving text messages, taking pictures, playing games and accessing e-mail.

One-half of white mobile users reported consuming at least one type of mobile content on a typical day, compared with 58% of black mobile users and fully 70% of Hispanics.

New Study Shows Brand Awareness Greatly Impacted By “Voice” in Mobile Marketing.

Campaign measurement firm Dynamic Logic has released the results of a new study to explore the impact In-Call Media, the insertion of audio ads directly into the call stream of a targeted consumer.

The study shows that both brand awareness and purchase intent can greatly increased through in-call advertising, with brand awareness rising almost 12% for some groups.

The study was run using the advertising platform from Disney-backed VoodooVox. Their In-Call Advertising Network serves over 100 million in-call ads a month across dozens of call sources, working with brands like Bank of America, Burger King, ABC TV, FOX and Western Union.

The study campaign was targeted to mobile phone users and ran throughout the month of December 2008, delivering 900,000 audio ad impressions during this time.

According to the press release, for this study “callers who were on hold for a popular toll-free movie ticket line heard a variety of 10-second messages about redbox (a DVD retailer) in an effort to build awareness and encourage trial of their movie kiosks. Interested callers could engage further to hear more or get a text message coupon.”

Selected callers were then surveyed to determine the overall impact on respondents who heard the redbox advertising.

Some of the key findings from the study include:

* Exposure to the redbox messages increased Aided Brand Awareness by over 9 percentage points among overall respondents — a significant increase for the brand and higher than typically seen with Dynamic Logic’s mobile display norms. Among “Frequent DVD Renters,” Aided Brand Awareness increased 11.9%.
* Among respondents whom occasionally rent DVDs, the campaign increased those saying they were very likely to rent from a redbox kiosk by almost 11 percentage points, to 10.7%.
* Awareness of the redbox brand significantly increased after just one exposure to the advertising, whereas for a normal online campaign it takes 10 times that exposure for a similar increase to occur.