Mobile Phone Industry Is Massive

"4 billion mobile phone subscriptions on the planet, covering 60% of the population. 3.4 billion actual phones in use and connected. 3 billion unique phone owners. 3 billion active users of SMS text messaging. 1.9 billion cameraphones in use. 1.7 billion consumers of various premium data services on mobile. 1.35 billion active users of MMS 1.05 active users of browsing ("mobile internet") on the phones. The total content industry on mobile is worth 71 billion dollars. Messaging on mobile worth 130 billion. Total data on phones worth 200 billion. Total mobile services, voice and data, worth 800 billion and the total annual revenues of the mobile industry including handset and network equipment sales, worth one Trillion dollars." says Tomi Ahonen

PayPal using Text2Buy in the UK

PayPal has expanded its Text 2 Buy service in the UK to include magazine subscriptions and consumer electronics. The rationale is that: “Readers will always have a mobile close by when they’re leafing through a magazine, and the phone can immediately connect the printed page to the wider digital universe in a very personal way,” said Andy Schachtel, president of Mowave. “This service is an important step in introducing consumers to the potential of mobile commerce.”

Opera Mini 2.0 Aims To Simplify Mobile Commerce

Opera has released Opera Mini 2.0, which allows downloads of files and removes a step from the process of buying mobile content. When a content provider requires a customer to send a particular word via text message Opera Mini 2.0 will send the message when a user clicks on the link to buy it — so the user doesn’t have to exit the WAP page and go to the messaging menu. “In order to enable the service, content providers must include specific scripts on their Web sites. The sites will then detect when a visitor is using Opera Mini 2.0 and enable the shortened buying procedure.”

Gamevil Moves To USA

Gamevil has opened a US subsidiary in Los Angeles. These are the guys who developed Skipping Stone, which is published by iPlay and has won several awards. From the press release:
“The company’s portfolio emphasizes easily accessible casual and networked games, all of which are based on bleeding-edge technologies. One such technology is GAMEVIL LIVE, a scalable, user-friendly network gaming service that will bridge new gamers to existing carrier communities…Along with great games and novel technologies, GAMEVIL USA will also bring GAMEVIL’s winning business strategy to the United States. GAMEVIL is a marketing leader in Korea, where it has pioneered direct-to-consumer and community-based promotions.”
Gamevil plans to use the same marketing techniques in the US, which should be a good thing — many people think that distribution is one of the biggest problems with the US (and most of the world’s) mobile gaming market.

Mobile industry booming in Japan

According to an article in mobileindustry.biz (this article) mobile in Japan is booming !!

“According to the report, partially translated by GameSpot, figures released by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Communication state that the mobile industry has grown to 722.4 billion Yen (4.9 billion Euro) over the past 12 months - a rise of 39 per cent.

The increase was boosted by mobile content sales, which rose by 21 per cent to reach 315 billion Yen (2.1 billion Euro). Sales of ringtones accounted for 161 billion Yen (1.09 billion Euro).”

SMS Alerts To Prevent Bouncing Checks

St Georges Bank in Australia is working on an SMS alert system that will give customers a chance to top up their accounts if the bank detects that they're about to become overdrawn. The point of the service is to help consumers and small businesses protect their credit records and reputations. "The key incentive," says Chief information officer John Lobenstein "is to avoid a payment that you intended to make not being paid, another party getting very annoyed with you, and potentially getting you a bad credit record."

They are hoping that this type of mobile alert service will appeal to customers who "run cash-flow tight." Which seems to make sense as these are the types of people that also seem to be on the go the most but would also want to be alerting about their money situations.

However, Lobenstein does point out that the SMS service is not aimed at avoiding dishonour fees as people who opt to receive the the alerts will be forced to pay a dishonor fee if their check or debit payment goes dishonored.

They estimate that the service will cost 35$ a message! What that is about I have no idea but it seems like a lot.

Dishonor fees and bad checks come with a 45-50 dollar penalty.

The service will be tested by users of its South Australia subsidiary, Bank SA, next month.

Interactive Advertising with SMS/MMS

One of the features that ought to be a no-brainer for advertisers is to include an sms short code on all their advertisements. This means that people can see the ad and instantly fire off an sms with their ever-present mobile and get a response just as instantly. Examples might be to claim a coupon, find the nearest stockist, arrange a test-drive for a car and any number of other groovy marketing enhancements.

But at least 6 years after sms became mainstream, this feature is still far from common and what should surely be as automatic as putting a web address on an ad, still gets omitted.

One reason could be cost. While most people would think nothing of firing off an sms to get more info, the advertiser normally faces some cost from the service provider, along with a set up fee. And when the set up fee is amortised over the total response, the cost per response can be pretty hefty.

So it’s interesting that mobi.li have launched a totally free service for advertisers in the UK - the user pays the normal cost of the sms. So that means no set up or ongoing charges and really, removes any commercial rationale for not embracing sms interactivity. Their business model , if you’re curious, is to sign up customers and sell them other services in due course. A pretty common plan these days.

However, I suspect that one reason why agencies especially are reluctant to go down this route is that it introduces a frightening level of accountability. Currently, assessing advertising effectiveness is pretty woolly in most cases, involving measures like the number of people who could see an ad. If you start to prove how few people actually notice an advertisement and then engage with it via an interaction, it might begin to call into question the whole point of running a campaign in the first place.

Having personally experienced a meeting (a long time ago now) with a marketing director of a major brand where we both knew that his campaign had very few redemptions, there’s just no way of getting round the facts. Sure, you can fall back on mumbling about coverage, opportunities to see and other marketing-speak, but if no one felt inclined to respond to the offer and that’s 100% measurable, how can you persuade the guy to carry on using the channel?

However, in these days of increasing media accountability, with budgets migrating online and now to mobile, where payment by results is increasingly the norm, old media needs to fight back. If your poster, TV commercial or print ad isn’t engaging the consumer and isn’t generating a response, maybe it’s better to know that and identify what’s wrong with it, rather than pretending everything in the garden is rosy.

Pay per click (via a mobile) and pay per call is coming to old media as inevitably as England losing on penalties in Euro 2008. And that’s going to be another head-butt in the chest of an ad industry already dizzy with the pace of change and largely unable to understand that the world has drastically changed on them.

Starbucks SMS Scavenger Hunt (With Image Recognition)

Hey everybody. Starbucks is doing some SMS marketing. Which has everyone saying that SMS is now catching on here in the States. Which could be true but I don't think Starbucks is the cataclysmic sign of all marketing truths! Especially since I went into nine Starbucks today in New York city (which is not hard to do, there is one of every other block right next to an Irish pub and a pizza parlor) ... none of which advertised for this SMS Starbucks Summer pursuit and none of the employees knew what the hell I was talking about (but agreed it sounded pretty cool). Maybe the table cards have not yet been delivered. We shall see. For now all of this depends how many people visit the Starbucks website (which I do everyday).

Anyways, though, to be fair Starbuck's campaign does seem pretty damn innovative and nifty. The Strarbucks Summer Pursuit is a fun text messaging trivia game and the first mobile phone game that can recognize a picture of the answer as well as text - their techies are calling it intelligent image recognition. Mr Pondering Primate would call it world connection and Mr Neven of Neven Vision would call it a "visual google" and shout "hey we thought of that first!"

Each week Sratbucks will text you three summer themed clues and you can text or send a picture of your answer back to us. Rack up the answers and you'll be eligible for a chance to play the Ultimate Scavenger Hunt in NYC and compete for an amazing trip to Costa Rica!

Its not so much the image recognition then the idea of a scavenger hunt that impresses me the most. Of course, the image recognition makes the scavenger hunt that much more easier to do but still.... a scavenger is the perfect kind of thing for a mobile marketing scheme to tap on a ubiquitous level.

So let the hunt begin! Text "Summer" to 66268 to start playing! I know I will. And perhaps we can share our image recognition stories on the beaches of Costa Rica.

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