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Tuesday, October 27, 2009
According to a new survey commissioned by 1020 Placecast and conducted by Harris Interactive, American consumers are receptive to opt-in mobile marketing messages from brick-and-mortar businesses. 42% of 18 to 34 year old cell phone owners and 33% of 35 to 44 year olds are at least somewhat interested in receiving alerts about sales on their cell phones from their favorite establishments.Men are more interested than women:
Only 1% cell phone owners currently receive alerts about sales at their favorite establishments on their phones, yet 26% would be at least somewhat interested in receiving such alerts, assuming they were permission-based. Food, entertainment and consumer products top the list of categories Of those interested in receiving alerts, 53% would be at least somewhat interested in being notified about restaurant specials around them.In addition, about 2-in-5 of these adults would like to receive alerts about sales for:
About another 3-in-10 of these adults would want to be alerted about:
About one quarter would want to be notified about:
The survey found that about 9-in-10 U.S. adults have made an impulse purchase when they were out shopping in a store based on a sale or a special near where they were.
Among cell phone owners in households with children under 18, 37% are at least somewhat interested in receiving opt-in alerts on their mobile phones. This number rises to 44% in households with children under age 6. According to Kathryn Koegel of Primary Impact Research, “Many American consumers have their mobile devices with them all day long, including when they are shopping… reaching a receptive audience… presents a big opportunity to influence impulse purchases… ” For more information about 1020 Placecast and this study, please visit here. Or, to access the PDF file, please go to Placecast here. |
JUNE 9, 2009
Look!
Applications for mobile devices date back to the 1990s, when Palm—by far the largest PDA player at the time—built an open platform that developers soon filled with thousands of applications. Users downloaded applications to PCs and synchronized them with their PDAs.
Enter the Apple App Store in July 2008.
“Apple did not invent either the model of aftermarket applications or the notion of building a store to house them,” says Noah Elkin, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, Mobile Applications: Moving Beyond Apple, “but it did succeed in radically improving an existing idea.”
Excitement over the iPhone and App Store transformed these functional utilities into full-blown consumer experiences. Apple and others in its wake have jolted the mobile advertising market and are paving the way for paid branded applications.
As a result of rising smartphone popularity, eMarketer projects that mobile Internet access will see significant gains over the next five years, with the number of mobile Internet users reaching 134 million in 2013.
Global economic forces are taking their toll on the mobile device market, but smartphones have been spared the ravages of the economic downturn.
Even in the face of a worldwide recession, the International Data Corporation (IDC) expects smartphone shipments to grow by 3.4% this year, and expand at triple the rate of feature phones in 2010.
This sales growth will dramatically reshape the device market. By 2013, Informa predicts smartphones will make up 38% of all handset sales worldwide, more than double their share in 2009.
“As integrated devices grow more sophisticated in functionality and more accessible in price, consumers are responding by upgrading their handsets,” says Mr. Elkin. “And once they have experienced the mobile Internet through improved browsers or installed applications, they appear unwilling to let it go.”
The size of the mobile applications market is something of a moving target, given how quickly app stores are proliferating and their catalogs growing. Piper Jaffray, one of few organizations to project the extent of the growth, estimates that combined spending on consumer and business mobile applications will top $13 billion worldwide by 2012, a nearly fivefold increase over 2009.
“It is increasingly evident that for many marketers, mobile applications constitute a necessary avenue for reaching and engaging with their customers, either by building and marketing a proprietary application or sponsoring a third-party app,” says Mr. Elkin. “In both cases, the essential challenge remains: to understand consumer behavior and craft experiences that not only resonate with a target audience but also integrate with other channels.”
MAY 26, 2009
Young, hip and ad-friendly.
It appears that the Apple iPhone, one of the hottest gadgets from one of the most cutting-edge companies in the world, may kick mobile advertising up a notch.
According to Brightkite, Inc. and Gfk NOP, iPhone users are more likely to recall mobile ads than non-iPhone users.
iPhone users had higher rates of recall from all measured types of mobile ads than nonusers, including mobile display, standard text message (SMS), audio, picture or video messages (MMS) and mobile TV and video ads.
That’s great news for marketers, particularly at a time when other mobile manufacturers are building more touch-screen smartphones, such as the BlackBerry Storm, Palm Pre and Google Android.
But are iPhone users a viable demographic target? After all, Nielsen estimated that only 5.9% of US households owned or rented an iPhone in Q3 2008.
That number is sure to grow.
The NPD Group data ranked the iPhone as the second-highest-selling smartphone in 2009, and a Skype survey conducted by Zogby International ranked it the second-most-popular smartphone in the country, after the BlackBerry.
Enthusiasm for the device is also high among current users. Based on a customer satisfaction index, J.D. Power and Associates ranked Apple as the No. 1 smartphone brand in the second half of 2008.
According to a survey by Rubicon Consulting, most iPhone users are young (under 30), technologically sophisticated and apt to buy gadgets.
All in all, targeting smartphone users looks like a pretty smart tactic.
Why We’ve Only Begun to Scratch the Surface
For nearly a decade, mobile advertising has proven to be the great white whale of digital marketing — forever on the horizon but perpetually out of reach.
But thanks to Apple’s iPhone and App Store, that’s all about to change. The numbers to date are staggering: 1 billion applications served, 35,000 applications available and more than 30 million devices in market. Apple’s meteoric success with the App Store (launched a mere nine months ago) is fueling a mobile-application market boom.
Consumers, once wary of using their phones for anything more than talking or texting, now seem to have an almost insatiable appetite for mobile applications. IPhone owners on average download more than 20 applications to their devices (upward of 40, according to some reports) and Google Android users are even more ravenous.
The market is sure to grow even larger as more companies leap in. Nokia, which has nearly 40% of the global smartphone market, announced that it would be entering the mobile-application fray with its Ovi Store (featuring 20,000 applications available for download) this week, joining competing offerings from BlackBerry, Google’s Android Market, Microsoft and Palm.
All of this is igniting the imaginations of brand marketers and ushering in a land grab for an increasingly valuable piece of real estate: the always-on device in our pockets.
Enter “app-vertising,” a new name for an emerging mix of branded mobile applications and in-application advertising that is finally poised to deliver on the promise of mobile marketing. Here are some marketers getting into the act.
Branded Apps
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Uniqlo: Branded applications have seen the most growth since Apple launched the App Store, and Uniqlo’s Uniqlock app is easily one of the most imaginative. Produced by Projector, Uniqlock fuses the utility of a clock with videos of models, attired in Uniqlo clothing, performing a series of mostly quirky dances. Weighing in at a hefty 181 MB, the app certainly packs a punch.
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Adidas: The Adidas Urban Art Guide was created specifically as a walking guide to Berlin’s impressive street art, which includes paintings, stencils, paste-ups and stickers from underground artists. The app taps Microsoft Virtual Earth to create routes, provides galleries and even allows users to upload their own artistic discoveries.
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Chanel: Fashion brands have certainly embraced the video elements of the iPhone and iPod Touch, and Chanel’s mobile application is no exception. Featuring video from Chanel fashion shows, 70-plus looks and accessories, Chanel News video segments, and even a store locator, this app clearly knows its fashionista audience.
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Audi A4: More than half of the top mobile applications are games — and engagement for apps averages nine-plus minutes per session — so it makes perfect sense that the Audi created the A4 Driving Challenge game app. Taking advantage of the iPhone’s accelerometer (which allows the device to detect movement), the A4 game allows users to select courses, choose car specifications and more.
In-Application Advertising
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Levis: The next wave of mobile advertising will certainly be in-application advertising, and the creative possibilities there are limitless as well. Levi’s Dockers’ “shakeable” ad, built on the Medialets platform, is a great example of how savvy creatives can take advantage of the iPhone’s accelerometer to add motion to advertising — in this case, making a khaki-clad model break dance — when the user shakes the device.
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Burger King: For Valentine’s Day, Burger King crafted a clever in-app ad, “The Scent of Seduction,” that allowed users to burst heart-shaped bubbles by touching the screen. Greystripe, which ran the in-app ad, reported that 14% of users interacted with it and spent 16 seconds on average playing the game.
While “app-vertising” provides tantalizing opportunities, we are still in the early days here. Recently, Pinch Media analyzed 30 million iPhone app downloads and discovered that only 5% of users will open either a free or paid app 30 days after the initial download. It’s enough to make even the savviest developers or brand marketers question basic assumptions about mobile utility and entertainment.
Still, we are just scratching the surface of what mobile marketing will start to deliver. It’s not hard to imagine how we leap from the Uniqlock app or the shakeable Dockers ad to a whole new world where the GPS is integrated with content and offers; video actually reacts to user movements (think about the storytelling possibilities); and our own voices, channeled through the phone’s microphone, start to control interactions.
Best of all, in the future we’ll still have access to all the rich functionality of some of these mobile apps when the phone goes offline, too. This is due, in large part, to advances in pre-caching technology — a certain relief to anyone who’s struggled to find a 3G signal either on the road or in their own living room.
So will “app-vertising” finally take off? Analysts certainly think so. Sanford Bernstein’s Jeff Lindsay predicts that the worldwide mobile-advertising market will explode, mushrooming from $700 million in 2008 to $7.2 billion by 2012. And with Silicon Alley Insider estimating that in-app advertising fetches a hefty $20 to $30 CPM, there’s no turning back now.
As consumers embraced mobile technologies like never before, last year the channel began to catch up with its hype. 2009 may actually be the point when advertisers start shifting to include mobile.
The Mobile Advertising and Usage report analyzes the (finally) accelerating mobile opportunities opening up for both consumers and marketers.
The true turning point for the industry was the introduction of the smartphone, heightened by Apple’s iPhone launch in mid-2007. The development of third-generation (3G) mobile phones led to better connection speeds, Wi-Fi connectivity and the rise of mobile Internet browsing.
Another critical factor was pricing plans that took the mystery out of data usage and encouraged unlimited mobile content consumption.
In light of the heightened activity and interest, eMarketer forecasts that advertisers will spend $3.3 billion on mobile advertising in 2013, up from $648 million in 2008.
US Mobile Advertising Spending, 2008-2013 (millions and % change)
Mobile Advertising and Usage