01/12/2009
24/11/2009
22/10/2009
Yours truy speaking at Picnic this year...
18/06/2009
17/06/2009
25/03/2009
14/03/2009
09/03/2009
03/03/2009
20/02/2009
14/01/2009
11/10/2008
02/10/2008
Why Talk When You Can Text?
Why Talk When You Can txt?
Text messaging overtakes mobile voice calls.
The average mobile subscriber in the US sent and received more SMS text messages than mobile telephone calls during Q2 2008, according to Nielsen. This was the second consecutive quarter in which the average number of text messages was significantly higher than the average number of phone calls.
Average Monthly Calls Made/Received and Text Messages Sent/Received per US Mobile Phone Subscriber, by Age, Q2 2008
Mr. Gauntt explained that communicating by text was close to having a conversation, and noted that marketers could embed links to pop text sessions into other media (click-to-map, click-to-call, click-to-video).
"The biggest mistake for marketers is to confuse texting by users over age 35 with asynchronous e-mail. If we look at text/Twitter and IM, there is a lot of value to textual communication that comes closer to—but is not the same as—synchronous voice communications. Marketers engaging with text still need to master the art of conversation," Mr. Gauntt continued.
Revenues from all ad-supported messaging in North America will approach $4 billion by 2011.
Mobile Messaging Revenues in North America, 2006-2011 (billions)
26/09/2008
Iphone RjDj The mind twisting hearing sensation.
(the video is a bit slow at first but is WELL worth watching through...)
24/09/2008
A 60th Birthday Message from Ogilvy London
22/09/2008
How’s your mobile strategy looking? When mobile kicks off will you be ready?
Talking about digital opportunities, Sir Martin Sorrell (Chief Executive of WPP) recently said mobile is the most overhyped thing that he had ever heard of in the short term but the most under hyped thing that he had ever heard of in the medium term.
I agree. Take the internet for example. For access to the internet, wireless devices will take over from PC’s and laptop’s in the medium term. It’s inevitable. At some point in the future the mobile internet will eclipse the PC web.
This idea can be illustrated easily of we look at it from a global perspective.
Take Cuba for instance. They recently launched their first mobile network, which means that they built a network of antennae masts and put handsets into shops. The Cubans were queuing around the corners to get their hands on a device - in spite of their apparent shortfall in disposable income. What happened next is interesting. They looked at the internet for the first time in their lives. In Cuba wireless devices have leapfrogged PC’s and Laptops as the primary window to the internet. In regions of the world with huge populations like Africa and Asia, mobile is burgeoning due to some very interesting factors such as the lack of robust fixed line infrastructure and the cost of laptops and PC’s. It follows that laptops and PC’s are actually barriers to entry for the internet because they are expensive.
So where is it all this going? A simple statement of fact: Mobile is going to take over from other online media in the medium term. If this is a fact then marketers should be experimenting with mobile right now.
While experimenting with mobile we should also be building our wireless device marketing strategies. We don’t want to miss the boat again this time like we did with Facebook. When volume kicks in for mobile we want to be ready. We need to have learned all our mistakes. Learned how to use our agencies in the most effective way and learnt how best to leverage this volume for our brand.
There’s a wave coming – get ready to ride it.
But where do we start on strategy and execution?
Well… SMS continues to be the most popular way for markettiers to utilise mobile as a channel but there is a debate over whether it is the most effective. For me the technical channels of mobile are not so much of an issue. So I think we should put the consumer first and most importantly be creative. Mobile has been technology-led for far too long. Mobile is the best tool to create relationships between brands and consumers. It is after all a communications device. We will see a big trend next year where (for brands) creating relationships will come a close second only to creating awareness. No other medium can build a relationship as effectively as mobile.
So in my mind, first off, mobile should be used to deliver fantastic brand engagements. The first of three things that I advise clients to do with the medium and its related technologies. The second thing to do would be to build consumer acquisition, I liken this to creating a mini radio station where all your customers are listeners and their mobiles are the radio (of course you are the broadcaster.) The third and final thing to do is to deliver some sort of activation via mobile. So herein we have a mobile strategy.
At Ogilvy we have some very clever remedies that fit intricately within our mobile strategy. I would love to tell you all about them here but unfortunately I don’t have the space… I would much prefer to do that in the privacy of our new Digital Innovation Lab, where you would be made most welcome…
As a final note I would just like to say something about where mobile could be going in the near future. A colleague of mine always goes on about a new set of the 3 p’s: Permission, privacy and preference. Permission being an explicit statement of permission to talk to you – i.e. a firm opt in. Privacy being a clear clarification of privacy, i.e. what data you give, what your data is used for and what data is actually used. The third, preference, is very interesting… it consists of statements defining your likes and dislikes, your behavioural preferences, your contextual data. If we embrace these three and build them into our mobile marketing strategy we experience almost unbelievable results. I created a mobile book club (for a certain high street retailer that will remain nameless) which enjoyed up to 23% redemption of mobile sales promotion vouchers. This ‘mobile club’ increased sales from promotions (net) by 15%. If consumers engage in a relationship with a brand and they know the level of privacy between them, they will tell us what they like and dislike. This makes them very happy to receive messages from us - a push in the right direction…
Contextual elements to mobile data are a critical element to success in the future. If we combine these with best practice and a strategy that I call ‘Engage, Acquire, Activate’ we get the start of a robust mobile strategy.
Now is the time to sort one out.
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Scott Seaborn, Head of Mobile Technologies, Ogilvy Group
Scott Seaborn is Head of Mobile Technologies at Ogilvy Group. He has 15 years experience in using technology for marketing and advertising. Upon leaving University (in the days before the internet) he went into radio. Radio was the new marketing technology. He then moved from radio to online and then through digital to mobile where he has worked for the past 8 years. It's fair to say that Scott has ridden the wave of new marketing technologies.
06/09/2008
16/08/2008
Using thier phones, crowds create heatmaps
Great post from Springwise...
3VOOR12, a multimedia platform for music that's run by Dutch broadcaster VPRO, is piloting a new heat-mapping system at this year's Lowlands music festival, which takes place next weekend.
Using familiar web terminology—Hot or Not—the festival's visitors will be able to let others know which of twelve venues is hosting the hottest show at any particular moment. The voting system will run on a mobile app that users can download to their internet-enabled phones. (Those with wifi-enabled phones will be able to use 3VOOR12's free festival-wide wifi.)
Considering the distance between venues at large events like Lowlands, a crowd-controlled, up-to-the-minute heat map seems like a clever idea, especially if users can view voting results from people who like the same bands they do. (Not currently a feature of 3VOOR12's application.) Related: CitySense, a mobile mapping tool that uses GPS to reveal San Francisco's nightlife hotspots.
Website: weblogs.vpro.nl/digitaal/2008/08/06/hot-or-not
Spotted by: Dutch Cowgirls
SMS TODAY, MORE POPULAR THAN THE INTERNET
Text Messaging Usage Grows 32 Percent In UK
Text messaging remains the most widely used data application in the UK, with 2007 revenues nearly three times the figures for data revenue. Regulator Ofcom revealed in its hefty annual survey of the communications market published today that SMS revenue for 2007 was £2.7 billion pounds, compared with £1 billion for data revenues and £11.4 billion for voice.
In short, SMS continues to boom, up a third in 2007, with people sending an average of 67 messages per month. Meanwhile, 44 percent of British adults text daily, as opposed to just 36 percent that use the internet each day, and just 25 percent never use SMS, while 28 percent never use the internet.
But what about the mobile internet? Ofcom says on one of the survey’s summary pages that “More than one in ten mobile phone users have accessed the internet on their mobile phone”. The report later cites data saying that just 5 percent of internet users age 15 and above used the internet on a “portable device” in Q108, unchanged from the previous year. It also says that there were 12.5 million 3G subscriptions at the end of 2007, or about 17 percent of all 74 million mobile subs (note that’s serving a population of 60 million). One big point that Ofcom emphasized was the takeoff of mobile broadband dongles — it claims 2 million UK adults said they’d “used a data card, USB modem or dongle to access the internet in March 2008″.
But take all these stats with a grain of salt: back in June, the MDA said 16.5 million people in the UK used the mobile internet in May. Who to believe? Anyway, there’s plenty of stats to pour over in the full report if you’re interested.
30/07/2008
18/07/2008
Nokia Belatedly Opens Arms To Touchscreen Market
(from UK.GIZMODO.COM)
Nokia has stayed away from the touchscreen market with its mainstream mobile phones so far, preferring to leave this particular area to rivals like LG and HTC.
Like a lion studying a herd of grazing antelope it appears to be finally ready to pounce, and is planning not one but a range of touchscreen devices across the market.
No doubt spurred on by the success of the iPhone, it really is time to put up or shut up and though we doubt we'll see anything quite as fancy as the Aeon phone, we hope it'll get a little more adventurous than the recently announced Tube.
According to Kai Öistämö, head of devices for Nokia, it'll be releasing a complete portfolio of touchscreen products to both and high and low end of the market.
The first of these sounds like it will be the Tube phone, will be aimed at the mid-range market and will be announced in few months, though now that Nokia's officially getting involved we'll be keen to see what else it comes up with towards the end of the year.
08/07/2008
Ogilvy One Worldwide's Guinness Mobile Utiltiy
13/06/2008
Loading Up Wireless Devices with Microsoft Surface
12/06/2008
27/05/2008
QR Code Message from Me
Even after all this time, I am still not really loving these codes and readers. Mostly because I have a Nokia N93 which has a flip video screen designed for DVD capture and its really hard to read these codes with. Not may people have the N93 though so my experience is in no way representative. Saying that, while I hear from respectable sources that these codes have a very significant weight behind them, i still wonder about the nightmare user experiences that they create. Picture recognition solutions offer a better experience and we can do a lot more with them, but they cost the user because of MMS (while QR codes are free).
So for me the jury is still out. Right now I prefer MMS and picture recognition. But then I am not a typical target end user. I would rather pay a little (i.e. the cost of an MMS) and get a much better experience. I cant abide waiving my barcode reader around trying to connect.
Data Matrix Message From Me
We have be playing with Data Matrix codes - here is one with a small text message embedded in it - if you have a reader on your phone you can try this one out. A QR code with the same message will follow:
Right now there are three main data types that we can encode, these being: Web address (url), Text message (up to 60 characters) and Call Me Back.
(for those of you without a reader... Upon scanning, this code is recognised and a message appears on screen saying "Welcome to Real World Connection, Regards Scott.')
26/05/2008
22/05/2008
12/05/2008
United Nations Voices Project, Giving Everyone a Voice
Portrait pictures of underprivileged people were tagged with "Take a snap of my mouth, MMS it to (number) and in moments your phone will ring and you will hear my story..." the example of Tony a homeless man from Sydney can be seen below:
Here is the advert in location:
The algorithm was set to recognise each subjects mouth. Below is an example of some of the pictures that were received. You can see that the quality is very low, with flash back from the outdoor advertising furniture. In the pic below you can even see the street refection in the background! Of course the algorithm worked fine and we recognised all the correct images, their phones then rang and the correct voice recording was played - depending on who was snapped.
Here is another example, Uncle Max. He is part of a true family line of Australian Indigenous People, Uncle Max's story (for me) was the most interesting.
Again, here is a picture taken of the Uncle Max advert, you can see the reflection of the shooter from the glass - again the algorithm worked perfectly. As it did throughout the campaign.
There is much more to come from MMS and visual search me feels :-)
01/05/2008
Shop Scan Save - MTV Ad
Mobile Coupons - Brand Republic
I was interviewed recently for a story about retailers and mobile barcode coupons... The article begins with a piece about my previous company and some work we did with a high street grocer. It then moves through some reasons for a slow uptake in this space and suggests that retailers are finally keen to integrate mobile and couping with EPOS... great news. An exert from the article (and link to the full story) is below:Loyalty and Motivation - Mobile payments
Promotions & Incentives 09-Apr-08, 09:50
Eco-friendly, targeted, secure - mobile promotions should be everywhere. The problem is that retailers and consumers are still wary of them. David Murphy asks why they haven't caught on.
On the face of it, mobile coupons seem to be the answer to every retailer's and brand's prayers. They're eco-friendly (no paper), and they offer a neat way to avoid some of the mis-redemption issues that blight paper coupon campaigns. Yet the retail trade's response to mobile coupons has been lukewarm, to say the least.
....Another company in the mobile space, Magnet Harlequin, has successfully introduced a mobile couponing scheme for book chain Borders. According to Magnet Harlequin head of technology Scott Seaborn, the key to success is to keep things simple. "(WPP Group CEO) Martin Sorrell said that mobile is the most over-hyped medium in the short term and the under-hyped in the medium term that he has ever come across and this is the problem," says Seaborn. "The people pushing mobile coupons and barcodes get so excited about it that they over-complicate things and then the brand or the retailer gets confused."
In line with this thinking, the Borders scheme simply invites customers on the company's email database to receive discounts off books via text if they prefer. The offer appears on their phone in the form of a text message they display in store. To redeem the offer, checkout staff use a traditional printed barcode that the till is already equipped to cope with.
By keeping things simple, says Seaborn, the campaign has been a great success, with redemption rates as high as 23 per cent for some offers. "This tells me that mobile coupons are valid and that they work, but you have to keep them simple, and too few companies are doing that," he says. "Borders should take a lot of credit for having the vision to do this, without trying to over-complicate it."
Borders commercial director David Kohn agrees that keeping it simple works. He says: "This is in no way the centrepiece of our marketing strategy, but it appeals to a section of our customer base and, for that reason, we continue to do it."
30/04/2008
Borders Mobile Club - A Ground Breaking Success
• 69% choose to receive mobile dicsount coupons
• 22% of mobile coupons redeemed
• 15% contribution to net sales via Borders Mobile
Borders Books (& Books Etc) has announced spectacular results from its first mobile marketing campaign with exclusive mobile offers accounting for 15% of the net sales generated by email and digital marketing since its launch.
Borders distributes a monthly newsletter with exclusive offers to its extensive database of 480,000 loyal customers across the UK. In order to redeem these offers, consumers previously had to print the vouchers off and take them in-store. This month, for the first time, consumers were able to have the offers sent to their mobile phones and a colossal 69% of respondents said yes to mobile vouchers. In addition, 50% of these customers also opted-in to receiving future offers from Borders Mobile.
Mobile marketing is changing the promotional landscape and challenging conceptions of how to engage with consumers. Scott Seaborn, Head of Technology at Magnet Harlequin explains: “We know that mobile technology has so much to offer promotional marketing. One of our key tenets for retail and mobile is to drive footfall and we knew that a high profile, innovative retailer like Borders would be able to make the most of mobile marketing as a way of bringing consumers in store.”
Receiving vouchers direct to their mobile makes redemption so easy and effective for consumers that the numbers of them taking advantage of the offers has been outstanding. “We are delighted with the redemption figures and they have far exceeded our expectations,” says Laura Stafford, CRM and Online Manager at Borders. “One offer in particular achieved a 19% redemption, double that of the printed voucher alternative. To achieve 15% of net sales through Borders Mobile in just one campaign means that we are really connecting with our consumers.”
14/04/2008
The World's First Mobile Picture Recognition Campaign
Here's some work for Universal Pictures using picture recognition and mobile MMS. It was to promote 'Mr Beans Holiday' and lots of cool things were sent to consumers mobile phones; like movie trailers, exclusive ringtones, wallpapers etc... It's still live now (but the system only repsonds with an sms saying ''recognised as Bean''). Please try it now by sending a snap of the above image to 88222. Most of the images on this blog have been mapped on 88222.
Below is a press release about the campaign.
Universal Pictures is promoting its new movie, Mr Bean’s Holiday, using picture recognition technology.
Kids of all ages can take cameraphone piccs of any Mr Bean poster and send them by MMS to 88222. The system will then recognise the Mr Bean image and identify the type of phone they have and offer them free ringtones, wallpapers or videos exclusively recorded by Mr Bean. There’s no app to be downloaded or barcode to be scanned. It even works by taking a picture of the image used in this story. It’s the world first use of picture recognition with an MMS shortcode.
Scott Seaborn said: “In the UK 40 per cent of brands have used text messaging which has been extremely successful. WAP enabled mobile phones are the second most popular digital device owned by Britons after the PC, so we know the potential for this kind of activity is huge.” Marketers can now enable print ads, POS, posters, packaging and websites with Snap Happy to allow consumers to interact with brands in real time. I am experimenting with coupling this technology to GPS too.
02/04/2008
3GSM: NVIDIA next-generation mobile phone interface
29/02/2008
The MMS Tipping Point
According to Telcoms.com , roughly 370 million digital cameras were sold in 2005 – of which 77% were imbedded into mobile phones. This makes handset manufacturers like Nokia leaders in digital camera sales.
We also know that global MMS (multi-media messaging, or picture messaging) hit 13.7 billion pictures sent in Q2 2007, according to Informa's World Cellular Metrics. Almost 20% of these messages were sent by China alone.
SMS traffic was nearly 50 times higher in 2007,at 672 billion for the quarter (Q2) – equivalent to an average of 77 per subscription per month worldwide.
Basically, it is becomming aparent that there is a tipping point on its way -for MMS and picture messaging. Dont forget, this is a channel created by the mighty mobile networks to increase ARPU and it offers us much more scope for marketing services.
In the UK 40% of brands [1] have already used text messaging which has been extremely successful. WAP enabled mobile phones are the second most popular digital device owned by Britons after the PC [2], so we know the potential for this kind of activity is huge.
Picture recognition technology is a real breakthrough for mobile marketing and a valuable addition to the marketing mix. The technology behind Snap Happy matches the consumer’s camera phone picture to the promotional image logged on the database - even partial images will be recognisable. It requires not complicated software on the mobile, and no need for clients to add barcodes to their colateral - its very simple becuase its server based architecture, the algorythm does it all.
Marketers can now enable print ads, POS, posters, packaging and even websites to allow consumers to interact with their brands in real time. Campaigns using Magnet Harlequin’s technology can also be fine tuned once launched thanks to up to the minute feedback.
In a nutshell, advertising with SMS is a bit like advertising on Teletext, advertising using MMS is like advertising through a full visual media channel.
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Notes:
[1] Airwide Solutions (2006)
[2] MDA, Nielsen/Net Ratings & bbc.co.uk (2006)
10/02/2008
Picture Recognition is Bourne!
This post is all about a campaign that i developed and created for Universal Pictures. It was very cool because it was the first ever promotion in to use picture recognition in the UK press - the averts went in The Times, The Sun, Metro, The Star and Time Out.
Mobile picture recognition was used in the press ads for The Bourne Ultimatum movie.
Film studio Universal is used ‘real world connection’ mobile technology to make its press ads digitally interactive in the UK. This half page ad appeared in national UK press (The Times, The Sun, Metro, The Star, The Independant.) Readers took photo's of it and send them via MMS to 88222. This image is live now - try it for yourself, there is a better one in an ealier post somewhere below this one. They (the readers) then got free mobile content.
The press quoted me saying: “This is the first time that marketers have enabled print ads to allow consumers to interact with their brands in this way. "
Picture Recognition In the Press!
Interview with Mobile Marketing Magazine
08/02/2008
MMS Picture Recognition
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