Inside the Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

Wikimobipiedia: Mobile Media Planners’ New Favorite Site?

I received an email from Jamie Wells, US Mobile Director from OMD, about a new site he launched, Wikimobipedia. He also blogged about it at his site MobileStance.com.

He wrote:

I wanted to let you all in on a little side project that I've been working on, and was hoping you'd embrace it for the good of our industry.  The site is called wikimobipedia.org, and it's basically a public wiki where mobile marketing buyers can easily collect the info they need (case studies, contact info, audience comps, etc) to begin their planning process.

With our space moving so fast I felt the industry would benefit from a place that "keeps up with mobile (so you don't have to)", and so far things have been going pretty well.  I've yet to publically publicize the site (that's coming soon), and so far I've got most of the major mobile players involved - over 50 companies - in less than a month.

I love this idea for a number of reasons. One is that my least interesting collection is my media kit library, so having everything together on the web will potentially make one part of my job easier.

The other is that everyone Jamie sent that email too worked at different agencies that have some involvement with mobile. It’s safe to say no agency is going to win any business because of how current one’s media kit is, so this kind of collaboration will benefit everyone and threaten no one. Yes, some agency planners and strategists will probably discover a few more potential vendors and partners through this, but again, that alone isn’t going to come at another agency’s expense. And mobile’s an area where there’s so much going on but often in fits and spurts, so it’s great to have areas where people bring it together.

Everything Must Go! It’s the Mobile Marketing Fire Sale at iMedia

Technorati Tags: imedia,imediasummit,mobile marketing,mobile

 

You want it? We got it!

Jumptap set the tone with the opening sponsored keynote Saturday night at iMedia’s Mobile Boot Camp preceding the Breakthrough Summit. The presentation was complete with a mobile stimulus plan and a bailout, full of buzzwords to jumpstart mobile ad spending.

Other sponsors have followed suit. Want to do mobile? Never ran it before? Have we got a deal for you. And that’s not all!

As Jumptap’s CEO later said in his 10 Myths about Mobile, there’s now more supply than demand. It’s not just an issue of tight ad budgets; mobile ad spending still has plenty of rooms to grow. Yet consider these stats cited at the event (didn’t get the speaker name or the source): In January 2008, there were 37 million mobile web users, 10.8 million using it daily. In January 2009, that jumped to 63 million monthly and 22 million daily. Even if ad spending’s growing, that’s tough to keep up with, and the usage growth in the US will have that exponential run for awhile until everyone is on the mobile web and it starts going to more linear growth and then levels off as it reaches PC-web levels.

10 Myths of Mobile Advertising – Jumptap – iMedia Breakthrough Summit

I’m at the iMedia Breakthrough Summit in Bonita Springs, FL. For the first post from here, below are 10 Mobile Myths as presented by Paran Johar, CMO of mobile ad network Jumptap. Note I wasn’t typing fast enough, hence my own version of myth #10 below…

 

Technorati Tags: mobile,jumptap,mobile marketing

• 1) Not enough scale:
  • Mobile extends publisher unique reach 14-22%; iPhone has 8% market share, 66% of mobile internet usage
  • 63MM mobile internet users
• 2) Ads are too small
  • Usually only one ad unit per page, less clutter
  • Larger units are here and getting more prevalent, like full screen rich media
• 3) No creative standards
  • Okay, so there are (IAB, Mobile Marketing Association)
• 4) No tools
  • Nielsen, comScore mMetrics, 3^rd party ad serving becoming the norm
• 5) Can’t measure mobile
  • Increases future purchase consideration by 23%
  • Performance measures better than web (3x for brand favorability, 5x for recall)
• 6) No one clicks anyway
  • 2-8% CTR average (Verizon, Jumptap)
  • Click to call response rates 2-3x over CPC
• 7) CPMs High, Economy Underwater
  • Now more supply than demand. It all must go.
• 8) Mobile only reaches young adults
  • 41% of browsers accessed by people over 35
• 9) I’ll wait until others do it
  • Wrong. Lots of people are doing it. You’re not doing it, you’re too late. You’re about to miss the boat. It’s leaving without you. Companies you never even heard of are doing mobile. Your mom’s running mobile ads.
• 10) I missed one of them. He went really quickly. I’ll add my own: Santa Claus ran the first mobile web display campaign back in 2002.
  • Wrong. It was 2001. And it was actually run by a media elf without Santa’s consent. This elf was promptly fired, got hired by the Easter Bunny. Making a fortune in the egg trade, he invested it all with Bernie Madoff and has since returned to the North Pole, hat in hand, just waiting to get his job back.

DigiDay Mobile Panel: Monetizing Mobile Content and Social Communities

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Evan Neufeld, VP, comScore Brand Metrix
Alan Chapell, President, Chapell and Associates
Eric Litman, CEO, Medialets
Robert Samuels, Director Mobile Products, New York Times
Antonio Vince Staybl, CEO, itsmy.com
Moderator: Adam Hirsch, COO, Mashable

Evan (comScore): "We're at that precipice." - He used the phrase "pupu platter"

Eric (Medialets): Understanding who you're reaching in mobile has been very difficult. That's changing. No one vendor will have all the answers.

Q: Vince, how are you monetizing? And what are issues with carriers?

Vince (itsmy): Goal is to connect everyone with everyone through mobile web. Browser's the best thing since every mobile phone with a browser can use it. App installs break that universality. We can advertise to every customer from each customer. "We love the carriers because everything we do is on the carriers network" (including payment, etc).

Robert (NYT): We see lots of direct traffic, typing nytimes.com in mobile browser. Relationships with carriers, OEMs for device portal if carriers allow it.

Eric (Medialets): Apple's the first company to wrest control of everything away from carriers and make mobile platform a real platform. 600 million+ downloads of apps to date. Growth rate continues, not tapering. Pent up demand. 

Alan (his own company, all Alan, all the time): Carrier has visibility into all mobile usage data. Theoretically that data can be used by anyone else on-deck, off-deck. Will carriers be any good at data business though? Carriers haven't done great as media companies.

Evan (comScore): Carriers can be dump pipe, but they don't want to. They can become media companies. Haven't been great so far. 

Vince: Who owns the customer. We should own the customer and sell the customer services. [Me: I don't want to be owned. I pay for services, I own them. Not other way around.]

Twitter Highlights During Panel

tanvipc: Just won the new Kindle at the digiday: Mobile conference!!! (Nate - you can have my old one now) :)

annemai: Why is it that panels about data are all male? #digiday http://twitpic.com/21477

Literanista: #digiday it's freezing in here - my fingers are cold 

levydr: See - there is an advantage to mobile web. It's as close to carrier/device agnostic as we're gonna get. #digiday

digiday: Panelist Alan Chappell: We're hearing a theme here: the theme is off deck, away from direct carrier control." #digiday

Digiday Mobile: Mobile Marketer Roundtable: The Elephant in the Room: The Economy

Image via CrunchBase

More Twitter Highlights Below from DigiDay Mobile:

The Mobile Marketer Roundtable: The Elephant in the Room: The Economy: What impact will it have (or won't have) on mobile? And how can marketers use mobile to gain the edge in a down market? How does an agency and marketer justify spending on an emerging media platform such as mobile in such turbulent times? And will brands spend more on Mobile this year? How does a brand value the mobile consumer and the ROI associated with it? And how are brands integrating mobile into other channels? What are the current barriers for scale? Is it the technology? The carriers? The consumer? The advertiser? The marketers, carriers, technology execs, and buyers debate and reveal the issues and what the future holds for mobile.
Moderator: Dan Frommer, Senior Editor, Silicon Alley Insider

Speakers:
Jordan Berman, Executive Director, Media Innovation, AT&T Mobility
Mitch Paletz Head of  Premium Publisher Partnerships, Nokia Interactive
Maria Mandel, Senior Partner, Executive Director Digital Innovation, Ogilvy
Rob Wilk, VP, ChaCha
Jorey Ramer, Founder, JumpTap
June Bower, VP of Marketing, Cisco-WebEx

AMediaCircus: "we are in the first innings of mobile...20% of US users us web on their phone" #danfrommer #digiday

DorianBenkoil: #digiday WebEx now available for iPhone. Exec then says "3G" phone - so maybe others, too.

ggertz: #digiday ChaCha presentation - service seems cool - txt a question to 242242 and they answer it. Embed a small ad in the response. Nifty!

annemai: #digiday Maria Mandel Exec Director, Digital Innov Ogilvy talking about how clients r using mobile 4 advertising - focusing on sms,

ahynes1: #digiday Maybe I've been at conferences too much. "Eyeballs" really annoys me. What about "Eyeballs connected to brains" #curmudgeon

annemai: Oh yeah, June Bower is reminding us that while parents may not money, their teens still do #digiday

ggertz: #digiday combination of smartphones for work + kids who SMS make adults a target market for mobile content. IMHO this gets over looked

digiday: Mitch Paletz from Nokia: Automotive brands have tested mobile with good results- call to action campaigns. Mercedes, Ford, etc. #digiday

JasonDPG: #digiday live poll: 58% feel the mobile channel is experimental 42% proven

DorianBenkoil: 'i got hung up on 3 time s from the airport'. AT&"T guy: You should use AT&T. Answer: I am on AT&T, an iPhone." #digiday

ahynes1: #digiday Mobile phones are a swiss army knife, a TV to TV people, a computer to computer people, etc.

LorenDavie: First use of "tipping point" by a presenter. I should have brought a hip flask. #digiday

Lack of Latitude for Google Latitude Gets Laughable

Trojan Horse: GoGap via Flickr

There's a lot of buzz right now about Google Latitude, the new location-based service where you opt in to the service, select which friends you're connected to, and then have it automatically update your location. I admit that there's a creepy factor here, and that most people will not want to let most other people know exactly where they are at any given moment.

Yet in today's MediaPost, the concerns get SO overblown that it's making me think Latitude's not such a bad idea after all:

"As it stands right now, Latitude could be a gift to stalkers, prying employers, jealous partners and obsessive friends," Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, said in a new report.

...Privacy International says the system has a design flaw: Other people can get their hands on users' phones, and then change the settings. For instance, the group said, a phone left in a repair shop could be secretly enabled. Or someone could give another a Latitude-enabled phone as a gift.

So basically, the concern is that these phones will be turned into Trojan horses. And the concern's not with the software, it's with the hardware.

It's quite possible that Al Qaeda could come into your office, take your phone while you're in the bathroom, turn it into a bomb, and make it explode when you walk into a shopping mall. But if the real concern about Google Latitude is some doomsday scenario a la Arlington Road, then maybe we can focus on more serious threats.

I do think Mr. Davies of Privacy International has had some REALLY bad cellphone repairmen.

The Berkies: My 10 Impactful Technologies in 2008 - Technology That Changed My Life

I started to come up with a list of some of the most meaningful technologies for me in 2008. The one thing that they have in common is that they all changed the way I do something. Amazon is starting to change the way I shop and read. Hulu is changing how I watch TV. Zemanta is changing how I blog. It's not usually a complete revolutionary overhaul; I read the same amount with the Kindle, for instance, but what and how I read, and the way I purchase books, is shifting.

I'm curious to hear how technology has changed your life in the comments.

The Ten Technologies That Changed My Life in 2008Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr

Amazon's iPhone app: I'm not yet taking full advantage of it, but I love what Amazon's doing in the mobile space. Take a picture of a product and it will try to find the link to it on Amazon, where you may be able to buy it at a better price. This uses the manual lookup via Mechanical Turk, which could wind up being an incredibly valuable 'secret' weapon. Meanwhile, while this app hasn't totally changed things for me yet, Amazon's WAP site is also incredibly useful. I was in Best Buy recently and saw a great deal on a Canon camera for about $150, and I've needed a new point and shoot. I checked Amazon and it sold for about $105. Plus, Amazon had 375 customer reviews, which meant a lot more to me than the opinion of the generally non-existent sales clerks at Best Buy. I went home and ordered the camera from Amazon right away (I'd have done it from my mobile device but needed to dig up a gift certificate code to apply).

Facebook Connect: I love how easily I can now interact with various sites thanks to Connect functionality. We're just starting to see what we can do with it.

FriendFeed: The best thing I do with FriendFeed is scan it before any campaign planning, or when I want to know more about a topic in how it's represented across the web. Its public timeline is probably one of the most underused tools - search for what any FriendFeed user is posting across dozens of services online. It doesn't replace other tools like Twitter Search, but it does make it much easier to get a rich view into online activities.

GPS: I know, this is broad. I'm referring specifically to the $10/month VZ Navigator app I used on my summer road trip. Yet it could have been any other service. It makes one of my favorite activities, travel, so much better and freer, and I'm already starting to enjoy some of the more mundane or entertaining options through iPhone apps and the like.Image via CrunchBase

Hulu: Because of Hulu, I now watch 30 Rock religiously on TV, and I didn't have to watch the full episodes of Saturday Night Live since the election clips made it online after (I always forgot when those Thursday specials were on anyway).

iPod Touch: I've become so much more disappointed with my Samsung i760 since I got this. I'm still not ready to leave Verizon and use the iPhone as a phone, but I love the apps for both utility and gaming. Image via CrunchBase

Kindle: It hasn't yet changed how I read. But it might, and it's already starting. I don't lug as many books around when I travel. I'll buy some books on the Kindle when I think the odds are pretty good I'll just read them once.

Twitterfox: This firefox plugin is what I use most often to write and read tweets. Yet it hasn't been showing me all the replies lately, so I may find alternatives for 2009. Runner up for Twitter: Twitturly, which makes it so easy for anyone, whether or not you use Twitter, to see the most popular links being tweeted. It's how I found this amazing fan trailer for a Thundercats live action movie, for instance.
Image via Wikipedia
Wii Fit: Especially now that it's cold in New York, I'm so happy to have this as a way to push myself to work out. And the passive-aggressive tone it takes gets the guilt flowing every time.

Zemanta: The best thing about Zemanta is the easy embedding of images, which makes for a richer blogging experience both for writing, and, I hope, reading. Its feature set keeps getting better; I'm sure embedding video is coming. Great work to the team here.

Search Trends To Watch In 2009

Image by Getty Images via DaylifeHere's my last column of the year for MediaPost. Thanks for your readership, and I look forward to your feedback on my posts to come in 2009.

Between the economy affecting stock prices and the potential mergers and acquisitions discussed among several of the major search engines, there is a lot of uncertainty as we head into 2009. Yet we can anticipate several shifts in search based on what we've seen over the past decade and other signs in the media ecosystem. Here are some major changes to anticipate:

 Holistic -- In Every Sense

The word "holistic" should play out in a number of ways:

First, any significant media campaign or offline event drives search volume, so marketers must capture that demand by integrating search with other media planning.

Next, paid search and SEO should be planned in tandem for the best results. Several studies show that by integrating search engine marketing with search engine optimization, results are greater than the sum of its parts.

Lastly, expect the major search engines and others to push forward with new ways to infuse paid search listings with display and video media. This will make search also about engagement and not just clicks and conversions. To some degree, these new search engine offerings will be motivated by more concentrated efforts to attract large brand marketers . Additionally, given how effective search engine marketing is, the engines and portals will want to have a steady stream of upsell options. In the coming year, consumers may experience the most dramatic shift in the format of search engine results pages since the basic template was established roughly a decade ago.

Search Fragmentation

While the search engine landscape continues to be dominated by one player, new complexities keep emerging as search migrates far beyond the traditional engines.

This fall, comScore and Ad Age reported that YouTube surpassed Yahoo as the second-largest search engine; within days, YouTube announced its new search advertising platform. What's more, MySpace (563 million U.S. queries in October 2008, according to comScore) is a bigger search engine than both AOL (424 million) and Ask.com (362 million). Queries on eBay, Craigslist, and Amazon combined (980 million) nearly rival MSN.com (1.04 billion).

What does all of this mean for marketers?

It's true that not all queries are created equally. A searcher on a social network or video sharing site often wants something different than what they’re looking for on a standard search engine. But given the volume of consumer search activity (among other interactions) on these nontraditional search sources, it's important for marketers to be positioned the best way possible where those searches are happening.

New Models for SEO

These other search sources don't just operate in a vacuum; they impact the major search engines, too. Search engine optimization is shifting, from a focus of entirely maximizing a site's rank in the engines, to maximizing a site's reach across all the top-ranked listings on a search engine's results page. While many consumers go directly to a marketers' site, which should be positioned as prominently as possible in search engine results pages, many more consumers reach marketers through intermediary properties. These include blogs, social networks, photo sharing sites, Twitter, Wikipedia, and countless other social sites that tend to rank increasingly well in search engines. That means marketers have to shift their mindset from optimizing their Web site to optimizing their Web presence.

Your Car Engine's Your Search Engine

The biggest change in 2009 and beyond is that the device consumers search from will start to matter even more than which engine they use. Image via Wikipedia

The most obvious manifestation of this is mobile consumption. New mobile devices and platforms such as the iPhone and Google Android are focused on improving the search and Web experience. This will fuel searches from mobile devices; iPhone users enter a disproportionate number of mobile search queries, though other devices are catching up.

Marketers need to adapt their strategies to reach their target audiences on these devices, such as by optimizing messaging and landing pages, and providing more consumer value by leveraging the unique features of these devices. For instance, mobile devices support integration with SMS (text messaging), click-to-call, mobile couponing, and location-based services, all of which take advantage of the mobile platform in ways that aren't as natural for PC-based Web advertising.

Over time, this trend of searches shifting beyond the PC will encompass far more than mobile phones. Consider the new set-top boxes and television models that make it easier to search from the TV, while delivering a hybrid TV-Web experience. Then there's vehicle telematics -- anyone who's searched for a restaurant, attraction, or drug store via a GPS device on the road will appreciate how valuable that can be. With all of these examples, and others to come, the device plays a significant role in how and why consumers search.

Mobile Advertising for Newbies White Paper from Peggy Salz

Peggy Salz, a blogger friend who writes MSearch Groove, hands down the best blog about mobile search, just released a new white paper that's a great guide to mobile marketing.

It's called Mobile Advertising for Newbies, and while marketers new to the channel may gain the most out of it, I've been paying attention to mobile for a long time and focusing on it in a concentrated manner all year (running several campaigns for big brands along the way) and I learned a few things. You probably will too - just a hunch.

In the process, Peggy has also launched the Mobislim blog with additional resources.

Read about the white paper here, and or go directly to the download page at Bango.com.

And Peggy, I'll say this publicly so you can hold me to it - let's reconnect on that interview for the Search Insider.

One Small Asterisk, One Leap For Digital Media

Here's the image, and the asterisk, that inspired today's column, originally in MediaPost. You can see my profile on Zannel here.

One Small Asterisk, One Leap For Digital Media

Here’s one of those moments when you realize how quickly media is changing: when registering with a content-sharing community, an email address is optional, but a mobile phone number is required.

That’s what I found when signing up for  Zannel. Not long ago, such sites wouldn’t even ask for your mobile number, but now it’s all they need.  All that changed here was the position of an asterisk, but it signified something much bigger. Mobile phones, which a couple years ago seemed ill-suited for anything but talking (and many couldn’t do that particularly well), are becoming the default content production and distribution devices for millions of consumers.

Mobile phones still have a number of disadvantages. Connection speeds are slow with the mobile Web. Unlimited data plans are often prohibitively expensive. The resolution of multimedia captured on a $500 phone will be much lower quality than what’s taken with a $200 camera (Exhibit A: my grainy blog post from Digital Hollywood this month, captured from my Samsung i760). Phones currently have few ways to edit photos; if you’re not using an iPhone, even rotating a picture 90 degrees can be burdensome. More sophisticated edits, like all the photo fixes Google’s Picasa provides in a single click of its “I’m feeling lucky” button in its downloadable PC software, are rarely available.

None of those hurdles are insurmountable. Do you remember the first time you took or viewed a digital photo? I do. My dad got a Sony Mavica in the late 1990s that stored photos on 3.5″ disks. Instead of taking pictures of the house or the family, I took a series of photos of schwag my dad got from a gastroenterology conference, which I turned into one of my first PowerPoint presentations, “The Adventures of EneMan” (he still shares it with his fellows). The photos were barely a fraction of the quality of print photos, and it will take you less time to read this column than the wait between shots on the Mavica, but those inferior products had infinite possibilities. It took a few more years before I gave up on film altogether — I think my last sets of negatives are from 9/11 and a trip two months later to San Francisco — but the death of film was imminent.

Mobile media is undergoing a similar transition. Why are early adopters sacrificing quality and using Zannel, along with related services like Kyte  and  Qik  and mobile extensions of Flickr, WordPress, TypePad, and Facebook’s photo sharing? Here are four reasons:

Immediacy: Some of these services can stream live video from the phone. A photo can go up on a blog within seconds of snapping it. Friends following you on Zannel can see your photos instantly on their own phones. See something — or even think of it — and you can share it instantly. That’s not always a plus, as more poor-quality content gets produced. By the same reasoning, however, the printing press allowed more awful books to come out, yet I’d wager few readers would want to turn the clock back to the pre-press days of 1438.

Efficiency: With mobile media-sharing, there’s no shifting memory cards around, looking for cables, or switching devices (though one can record multimedia on other devices like digital cameras and Flip video cameras and share them later).  One pocket-sized, Web-enabled device can record and share text, speech, music, images, and video.

Portability: “Always on” used to refer to broadband access, but now it’s even more applicable for devices that are always on you and always online. When’s the last time your phone was out of arm’s reach?

Access: It’s a matter of time before just about all phones have some degree of mobile Web access. That’s not even required, though. Zannel, for instance, works perfectly well with a camera phone and MMS (multimedia messaging service).

All four of these factors have at least surpassed the “good enough” threshold, and the technology is often staying ahead of what consumers want to do with it. If you want to create any kind of content on your phone and share it with any site or group of contacts, there’s a way to do it, and the features get richer by the day.
One can rightfully grow skeptical of the hype of convergence. For years, people have owned camera phones but only shared pictures taken on digital cameras. Now, the camera phones benefit from higher MMS and mobile Web penetration and new applications that tie it all together.

And to think, all of that’s summed up in one slight shift of an asterisk.