Blyk were invited to speak at the recent MobileSQUARED Permission-Based Marketing event, with just under 150 people from across Europe, US and the Middle East in attendance.
It was an event where virtually every presentation delivered a key message and provided deep insight into what is a burgeoning opportunity.
Blyk were there to talk about the power of delivering exceptional content and our belief in great media programming having the power to shift the dial from permission to full customer engagement.
At the event MobileSQUARED showed a documentary featuring many of the speakers from the day and their thoughts on the key developments for permission based marketing. Have a look!
Location Based Services, Proximity Marketing, Geo-Fencing – location marketing on mobile has many guises that may mean different things to different people – regardless it’s getting a lot of headlines at the moment, and rightly so. Identifying customers within a geographical area and pinging them an offer or coupon can be a very effective way of targeting potential customers.
Location based marketing is going to be big news, there’s no doubt, and I look forward to the launch of this service on Bright Stuff in the coming months. However, as with many shiny new products that hit the market there seems to be a rush to invest in location based marketing when location on it’s own may not meet the marketing requirement.
The same can be said when apps first hit the market, the world and his wife had to have an app whether it was actually useful for their business or not.
Let me give you an example, one close to my heart: if you want to sell a car do you think that targeting your potential customers as they walk past your showroom is the best vehicle, forgive the pun, for your advertising spend?
Is buying a new car really going to be influenced on an impulse triggered by your proximity to a showroom? Unlikely.
If you’re raising awareness of a new model of car hitting the market or trying to encourage people to take a test-drive then targeting potential customers by a cross-match of residential postcode and showroom locations will likely be more relevant than real-time geo-fencing showroom locations. But in either case, unless you’re using other profile information then you’re ultimately wasting budget.
The thought of knowing someone’s physical location is appealing to some advertisers but this targeting methodology falls short in understanding the real context of an individual’s needs.
If marketing messages are based solely on where someone is at a particular time, advertisers sacrifice the true relevancy that the mobile medium can deliver.
So, we need to evolve location-based advertising to go beyond the notion of where someone is standing or what showroom they maybe be walking past.
Understanding the context around someone’s location opens up a new door for mobile advertising – you can target an ad based not only on where someone is, but also who they are and what they are interested in.
This ability to target the right messages, to the right customer at the right time and place enables advertisers to leverage the carrier’s network in a way that adds real value to a customer’s everyday life.
Cheetan Sharma in his excellent piece The Operators vs. the Media Brands: said: “To be successful in the long term operators should focus on the unique elements that only they can provide, such as location, presence, user profile and device information”
It is this intelligent use of network elements and targeting that will increase the value exchange between the consumer and service provider and will therefore ultimately drive higher engagement levels for the advertising community.
In conclusion, location is a powerful tool in delivering awareness in your marketing plan but it becomes what Sir Martin Sorrell calls the Holy Grail if you can add context and profile to where your customer might be at any given time.
In my last post I wrote about the developments that we all see coming in mobile technology and I argue, with myself mostly, that these developments will jumpstart mobile ad spend and the long awaited revolution in mobile advertising.
Let’s have a look at one aspect of this revolution in a bit more detail – mobile payments. Now, retailers, as well as consumers, stand to benefit from the mobile payment revolution.
Through fast, contactless transactions, retailers can greatly increase footfall into their stores. The speed of mobile payments is substantially faster than messing about with your small change or chip and PIN systems, therefore mobile payments have the potential to reduce queues, improve the customer experience and allow more purchases to be made in a shorter space of time, lunch hours for example.
Furthermore, since tickets and coupons can be sent directly to NFC handsets via mobile messaging, retailers will need to spend less time and money printing and posting tickets to customers, which is also much more environmentally friendly – tick!
The effect of mobile payment technology on consumers will also be revolutionary. The technology will allow transactions to become faster, easier and more straightforward to monitor. Continue reading » The Mobile Wallet
Aggro Santos is a 22-year old Brazilian-born English rapper, who recently shot into the fame with his debut single “Candy”, featuring vocals from ex-Pussycat Dolls member Kimberly Wyatt. The Coca-Cola company, on the other hand, is the world’s largest soft drinks’ company with over 500 brands, notably Coca-Cola. What could they possibly have in common?
As a recording artist Aggros is in the business of selling music, concerts and other experiences related to his persona.
Joe Tripodi, the Chief Marketing and Commercial Office of the Coca-Cola company recently blogged in the Harvard Business Review about the company’s shift in media measurement from impressions to expressions. To Coca-Cola, an expression means “any level of engagement with our brand content by a consumer or constituent”. As ordinary consumers can now generate more content than marketeers ever could, Joe suggests to support the “wave of expression” with brand content that touches consumers’ passion points, like music.
In my view, both Aggro Santos and the Coca-Cola company are therefore brand owners who engage consumers and sell their products through content. “Content” is no longer the exclusive domain of the so-called content industry. Today, rich multimedia content plays a great role in awareness creation, service or product discovery and driving sales for a range of brands, including Coke. Continue reading » The similarity between rapper Aggro Santos and the Coca-Cola company
Back in the days you’d either be online by your computer or out there. Now you’re online even when you’re out there. That changes things, massively.
In the old days it would take some time before a nightclub could become reasonably successful, because it would take weeks before clubbers would have told enough friends about it. Or then if the bar got lucky, there was enough press coverage to make it locally reknown.
Today you just publish on Facebook with or without Foursquare that you are in Bar Llamas and that it’s great, and within an hour all your friends ‘out there’ surfing online with their phones know about it and might even join you.
Location sharing is at the edge of becoming a big thing. Strategy Analytics estimates in their recent report that location based services will be a business opportunity worth $10 billion by 2016. Foursquare says they have 10 million users with 3 million check ins daily (information from April 2011).
For location sharing to be a significant success will depend on three factors:
ease - how convenient ‘location sharing’ and ‘check in’ actually is
personal control - how easy it is to control privacy
benefit – the outcome of sharing and receiving other’s location info.
An interesting challenge presented itself to me at the excellent Media Playground 2011 event recently where Blyk were a sponsor and member of the mobile advertising expert panel in the afternoon.
Some of the discussion on this panel session centred around which channels mobile ad dollars would start to move from. There’s no doubt that more spend is required in mobile and soon. Mobile will no doubt become what Tomi Ahonen calls the 7th mass media but not all brands and agencies are freeing up large sums of cash to support this growing market. It’s growing fast, but I for one am looking forward to getting past the ‘tipping point’.
There are more mobile devices in the world than people right now, to be precise 6.920 billion connections versus 6.915 billion people (or something like that!). So, make no mistake, mobile is going to be a significant player in the media mix. Advertiser dollars will always, without exception, follow eyeballs and we are talking about a hell of a lot of eyeballs here!
Perhaps the answer here lies in advertiser ROI. At Blyk we already know that investment in messaging is investment in clear, personal and accountable engagement. However, I am becoming more and more convinced that developments in mobile coupons, NFC and mobile payments will be the catalyst that fires a significant shift on mobile ad spend.
Once these developments kick start bigger investment the benefits and case studies will then prompt mobile messaging in all it’s formats to form a central part of buyers and planners thinking rather than, in some cases, being an after thought.
When I started out on my career path in the world of marketing & media we were still listening, watching and reading local media. Local businesses were the kings of consumer engagement and local advertisers underpinned many balance sheets. We lived in a big old world but local issues dominated consumer attention. The ongoing and enduring appeal of the BBC’s Eastenders should tell you this is right. How else could such a miserable TV program remain the nations favourite for so long.
Fast track to 2011 and today we live in a global community. Everything is global – movies, music, media, and meltdowns all come from that place we call ‘global’. To support this we look to other markets for lessons on KPI performances, case studies and and best practice to import to our own business. Equally we all communicate in global speak.
Last year I was lucky enough to spend some time in the globally mighty United States of America as a guest, come missionary, of a UKTI organised trade trip. (Check them out at http://www.ukti.gov.uk) The purpose was to connect some of the best small and innovative digital interactive UK companies with our best, albeit much larger, counterparts on the West Coast. The fact that over 100 companies applied for the 16 coveted places and Blyk was selected makes me enormously proud of what we have achieved and confident that our proposition will be a winner on the global (!) media stage. Continue reading » Thinking Global, Acting Local
Much has been written recently about permission based mobile marketing and the results that Blyk and other players share in terms of engagement. Some of what is written is supportive of what we are trying to do in the mobile messaging space, some more sceptical.
Now, I have nothing against scepticism, I have been known to have my own moments of scepticism in my time that’s for sure — I once questioned the sanity of Arsène Wenger when he spent £11 million on Thierry Henry and also didn’t get into The Wire until about episode 5 and nearly binned it — proved wrong on both counts and happy to hold my hands up.
What is important is to understand what the results are telling us. Here at Blyk we have been clear on what we have been able to achieve in terms of consumer adoption and engagement as an MVNO and what we continue to achieve in partnership with operators.
There’s a pretty simple formula to achieving consumer engagement with mobile advertising –
Asia’s biggest fashion event. A showcase of the best in India—the best designers, the best runway talent, and of course, the best display of glamour. The Wills India Fashion Week, organised by the Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI) – the official body of the Indian fashion industry, has become one of the most anticipated fashion events in the country. It is also witnessing growing international interest.
Of course, where there is fashion, there is youth and where there is youth, there is Blyk. Recognising this natural connection, Blyk entered into a strategic content-sharing deal with the FDCI and became the exclusive content partner for the mobile and Internet spaces.
Blyk pushed Fashion Week content to youth across the country and built interest and awareness around the event. Blyk also shared a repository of model pictures, videos, designer sound bytes, and so on. On the days of the event, live web streaming was done, sponsored by Blyk. Along with the FDCI site, the live streaming was also done on the Facebook pages of Blyk India as well as that of its operating partner Aircel India.
The response was enthusiastic and emphatic. In just three days, the number of fans of the Blyk India Facebook page grew by 500 percent. To just two updates, there were 791 Likes and 79 comments. And the live streaming page, in five days of streaming saw more than 18,000 hits. Clearly, it was a winning formula!
More than just the numbers, this simple exercise gave Blyk India a chance to come face-to-face with its members and get to know them better. It also served as a base to build on for Blyk India’s social media properties. Individual and customised engagement is, after all, what Blyk is all about.
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Shubhodip Pal leads Blyk’s India business. He has 14 years of consumer marketing experience in launching, building and managing brands from consumer durables to the banking and computer hardware sector. Read more on Shubhodip at Blyk.com.
To get an understanding of the scale of the worldwide mobile revolution, consider that 4.1 billion people subscribe to a mobile phone service, according to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), which is part of the United Nations. More than half of the world’s people are connected, right now. If you have a mobile, you have the capability to send and receive text messages — no need to mess about with downloads or installations. With the ever-increasing choice of unlimited messaging plans, texting has become the mobile communication option of choice for young people.
New Media Age recently reported on the focus that Operators are placing on mobile coupons and the success that they are having for brands. Blyk Media are powering this initiative for Everything Everywhere in the UK.
Clare Messenger, Everything Everywhere’s Head of Mobile Marketing, said:
“Working with the coupon system in Blyk’s media platform, and with some newly signed redemption partners, we’ll be able to provide a great coupon offering”.
Blyk works with local partners to drive its global expansion. If interested in helping us please contact partner@blyk.com110 days agoJanuary 27, 2012
MMA have just published a white paper on Permission Based Mobile Marketing. www.mmaglobal.com226 days agoOctober 3, 2011
@mobilesquared Excellent topic. Thank you MMA, Mobile Squared for inviting the range of interesting speakers including Alex Franks, Blyk UK 226 days agoOctober 3, 2011
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