Chicks dig the …

 

… the cell phone ads?

With apologies to Nike, Mark McGwire, Tom Glavine and Greg Maddux.

But that’s the conclusion reached by UK-based electronics retailer Tesco, as reported by Silicon.com.

The story says that the company’s latest WAP-based banner ad campaign resulted in clickthroughs of 3-7 percent on a banner ad campaign promoting several products, including the DVD release of “Bee Movie.”

“Tesco said the user-base of the portal has a strong segment of female household budget owners with an average age of 36—a demographic it said is particularly valuable for fast-moving consumer goods such as toiletries and cleaning products,” the story stated.

It does not say whether there was any value associated with the ads, such as discounts or coupons.

For this to lead to a conclusion that women will go for cell ads more than men is a bit of a stretch. Frankly, I was surprised at these results. After all, men are seen to be a bit more gadget oriented, but my wife has really started getting into online couponing, so who knows?

The mobile ad revolution will be really take off when there is value associated with those ads, and perhaps this campaign had that. By value, I mean the customer gets a real or perceived value, such as a coupon or discount on their wireless bill for participating.

Maybe non-juiced skinny guys like me who can field and hit singles in softball still have a chance.

What’s for dinner - asked Dr. FF

In the Fight Club vein, just saw one of the most subversive (or depressingly mainstreaming of underground culture) things I’ve ever seen in a national ad - about a wireless company as well (even though I usually write about ads on cell phones, not about cell phones)…

Meat Loaf - who plays the pivotal character Robert Paulson in the movie previously referenced - does a cute at for AT&T’s Go prepaid phone, which I just saw watching the NCAA title game.

But the interesting thing is when the wife walks in with a leg of … who knows?

Anyone else think of Meat’s turn as Eddie in “Rocky Horror Picture Show?” And the great scene around the dinner table, when it is revealed that Meat Loaf is indeed on the menu?

Don’t know whether to be horrified or delighted by the reference.

OMG - *bux is a hottie!

Pondering a few things as I anxiously await the season premeire of “Battlestar Galactica” Friday night …

1)  Here is an interesting story about how mainstream advertising is staring to use text-ese to hit those teens to 20-somethings who have grown up with SMS. It strikes me as cute, but what about flipping it - how can you get the ads onto the text messages? Some companies have started with ideas such as using the unused portion of a text for a tag line, but it would have to be an opt-in solution.

2) Speaking of mobile ads, there was this from MediaPost Communications: A new report from our friends at Nielsen states that “twenty-three percent (58 million) of all U.S. mobile subscribers say they’ve been exposed to advertising on their phones in the past 30 days.  Half (51% or 28 million) of all data users who recall seeing mobile advertising in the previous 30 days say they responded to a mobile ad.” The post goes on to give different demographic breakdowns, and states that 10 percent of users feel ads on their phones are acceptable, an increasing number of mobile users appear to understand the value proposition of ad-supported mobile content, says the report.

I would be interested in what kind of ads were used. Anyone have a copy of the original report?

3) Here is a recounting of yet another failure/disappointment for a municipal Wi-Fi effort, this one in my old stomping grounds of Boston. Beantown’s city elders came up with a bit of a different plan and business model: using a non-profit shell and not relying on a commercial ISP like EarthLink: which last year all but got out of the Wi-Fi business.

It mirrors an effort by Philadelphia that also has been underwhelming. The biggest problem with such plans is that there isn’t enough demand to make it go, even for a non-profit charging 10 bucks a month. Wi-Fi is NOT designed to cover entire cities, and outside antennas/routers will have a hard time penetrating buildings - especially older walls like in Beacon Hill, etc.

Cincinnati played around with this as well, but pulled out last year because it had no money. And this post by Eric Stein on his blog sums up the situation pretty well - the demand for such services is low given the penetration by more traditional landline (DSL or cable) high-speed services. Cincinnati Bell, Time Warner and Insight all would be leery of getting into this business, because it would detract from a very high-margin business.

And nowhere in the Globe story does it mention the biggest boon for such services - emergency responders and city services. You can make it work if you offer a city such secure services, including water and parking meter reading, but the cities have to agree to pony up millions a year to keep the network subsidized - the so-called “anchor tenant” model. There has been some thinking that ads at log-on and sporadic pop-ups would also pay for it - hence wireless advertising - but again, not enough demand. I mean, the outside season in Boston is what, 3-4 months long?

Again, Wi-Fi is great for houses and even offices, but not city blocks. Wait five years and see where 3G cellular technology takes us.

BTW, here is a link to Battlestar’s mobile page, for those of you interested (for those on a cell phone WAP browser, it’s mobile.scifi.com/bsg. The normal stuff - wallpapers, a few videos, scaled down graphics.

Not quite the shape of things to come, but fans could get a kick out of it.

Here’s hoping the show’s creators don’t disappoint in the final season - it kinda ran off the rails at the end of last season with all the legal drama and turning weasel-face Baltar into a Christ figure.

Catching up

Some odds and ends as I surf the Web and jam to Prince’s “Kiss” on Pandora ….

• Here is a cool site that really lays out the issues and the players in wireless advertising. There are more than the players listed here, but they really get to the heart of the issue - getting people to accept ads on their phones. Interesting take on which industries would be good for it: “Dining and Restaurant Reservations, Theatre Ticket Reservations, Hotels and Motels in connection with Telematics.” I would add retail, and especially grocery stores (see my previous post). But overall, MobileInfo.com gets it right.
• Here is a report of yet another prediction of more ad spend on “non-traditional” media, including mobile. This one suggests that even with the current threat of economic downturn, we’re looking at a 20.2 percent jump to $88.2 billion this year. This includes segments such as casual gaming, etc., but mobile certainly will take a share of that.
• Why has no one really followed up on/copied the coolest of all the iPhone applications? Sure, wanna-be devices are coming out in droves, but for me, the visual voice mail was the true new killer app on that phone (the rest was all superior UI as well as the ability to have your iPod and phone in one device). I know that Alcatel-Lucent did the back-end stuff for AT&T to make it happen, but why is it not been launched on other devices/networks since? (For those of you without an iPhone, the service allows you to see who called, and just touch the entry to hear the message, just like an e-mail inbox. No dialing in for voice mail - it is shipped to the phone within minutes of the message being left).
• That being said - here is a quick endorsement for another service that comes close - CallWave. If you can get your phone configured (or if your provider lets you), it comes really close to the “virtual voicemail” that is advertised. And they are playing around with voice to text conversion that allows you to get a sense of the message. Not quite as good as SpinVox, which uses real people to get the accuracy rate up, but not as expensive either. CallWave has a nifty widget for a PC, and even allows you to screen the call after a few rings either on your PC or on your cell.  You also get transcribed text messages, and e-mails (with a full voice message attached). You can also transfer back and forth between different lines. HawaiiTel (the major telecom in Hawaii) offered this, calling it Call Choice.
• And off topic - got another  comic series worth delving into. It’s called Y: The Last Man and it chronicles Yorick Brown, the lone remaining male of any species on the planet after a mysterious plague kills all the Y chromosomes but leaves all the females. And no, it’s not a dream world for poor Mr. Brown.

So where does all that money go, anyway? A BIG PARTY on Verizon’s tab!

Someone at the FCC is buying at least one round this weekend.

I mean, $19.59 billion with a B? For nothing more than air? For the uninitiated, I am referring to the results of the latest FCC auction of spectrum, or the licensed radio wavelengths that are used for everything from television broadcasts to yup, you guessed it, your cell phone networks.

The block up for grabs this time had been labeled “the beachfront property of wireless spectrum,” because of its purported ability to carry lots and lots of data (read: ads and media, hint hint). It is the space currently and soon to be formerly occupied by standard TV broadcasts, which are switching to go all digital.

Actually, I could’ve titled this post “The rich get richer - by losing their shirts.” All that money came from primarly two sources - Verizon and AT&T, primarly the former.

Noticably absent was Google - which honestly was a surprise to me. But they helped drive the price up, apparently, and got some provisions for open access networks (the ability for any phone or service provider to work on a particular network).

Also, the video guys didn’t really jump in full-force: Cox and a partner of Dish Network got some, but not nationally like the two big boys.

But two questions remain:

1) Did VZ and AT&T overpay? Some say yes, some say it’s too soon to tell. Here is an excellent post by Susan Crawford about the particulars of both the auction and the context around it.

2) Will it make consumers life better, and will it make it easier for marketers to use cell phones to advertise? Yes and no. It will take a few years, but this spectrum will make our current DSL landline connections seem like dial-up. The mobile Internet will work on this. And no, marketers will still face the same reservations and objections from consumers about getting ads on their phones as they always did. Even a noted online marketing expert acknowledged as such in my previous post (there’s just something about a person’s relationship with their phone). It will make it easier to get the content there, but will it make it easier for a consumer to want it? That’s up to the marketer, not the technology or the spectrum.

As for the fate of all that loot, here is a missive from the Washington Post:

“The winnings from the auction will go to the U.S. Treasury and are earmarked for support for public safety and digital television transition initiatives.”

That kind of loot should get us all a personal bodyguard, me thinks. But there oughta be a share set aside for a kegger, anyway.

You like me, you really like me!

Hopefully, you get the Sally Field reference.

And here’s why: I attended a presentation by Pete Blackshaw of Nielsen Online yesterday (Friday, 3/21) and it was spot on. He was previewing his next book Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000: Running a Business in Today’s Consumer-Driven World (which can be preordered through Amazon).

As background, Pete is the guy who helped launch Planet Feedback, which was the first such Internet “buzz” marketing research firm - and it even predated blogs. That eventually was swallowed up by Nielsen Online, which has become the leader in the field.

Anyway, he is the one behind such terms as “consumer generated media.”

Couple of key points from his talk:

• “The Web is all about listening”: That’s his advice to companies and marketers, who think they can shout their message and have it heard. I agree entirely with Pete here - the Web has enabled discourse and conversation about EVERYTHING, but most companies are truly uncomfortable with what people might say about them, or too thin-skinned to take the heat.
• “In the age of consumer control, credibility is everything”: Getting back to the first point, of course. You can’t hope to completely control everything except your own behavior. He cited Patagonia and Wal-Mart as two examples of companies starting to get it. Another example is what came out this week thanks to the blogosphere. Turns out a guy with an Xbox 360 specially decorated and signed by the guys at Bungie who are behind the Halo series had it fry (as has mine). Despite Microsoft’s assurances, the company scrubbed all the decorations off. Apparently, Microsoft heard about it through the blogosphere and had the guy up to Seattle to meet with Bungie and gave him a bunch of other cool Halo swag. Again, you can only control your own credibility, and when you mess up, be ready to fix it.
• And his six drivers of brand credibility: Trust, Authenticity (used the Patagonia example here), Transparency, Affirmation, Listening (Starbucks actually is now actively elicting ideas from customers - got an e-mail the other day), and Responsiveness.

OK, now how does this play into what I write about? Well, given that many people are starting to use their cell phones to interact with each other over the Internet (mobile blogging, videoblogs, Twitter, Jott.com) it only makes sense. Cell users are only going to get more sophisticated about how they use their devices to give feedback and the like.

I even asked Pete what he thought about mobile advertising, especially since he cited a study saying that of all the advertisement sources, text messaging was listed last at less than 10 percent. He did say that it has to be “grounded in high levels of consumer permission. There is something about the phone when unwelcome messages come in.”

Agreed. But how to get people to give that permission? I think it is a combination of cool, relevant content and value-add premise, especially if you can hit the consumer when they are about to make that buying decision. 

So why the Sally Field Oscar speech quote? Pete cited my blog during his speech, saying I had really done well after being up for such a short period of time, and then afterward said my blog kicked butt.

Although maybe he was just being nice.

The networks may need to get faster to catch that Vette …

With a $2 billion ad budget, General Motors is finally pushing some of that to interactive, according to this piece in Advertising Age.

And guess what? Some of that could be going to mobile advertising, the company says in the story. Great timing, considering that mobile Web surfing more than doubled n 2007. Still, only 1 percent of cell phone users say they use their devices to access the Web, according to the ComScore report.

But NBCU (the interactive branch of NBC TV networks) also is getting into the act, launching a car shopping network. And I know that NBCU is trying hard to get into mobile as well, having posted a position or two for the same effort.

But this also comes at a time when a lot of phones will start being able to handle Flash (the program that handles a lot of animation on the Web) as well as PDF (those pesky files that can load off Adobe Acrobat) - including Nokia, as well as Motorola and LG phones.

The trick is going to be making relevant and funny/poignant content tied to the auto industry’s product, or coming up with a cool way to get people to look at the message. A banner ad on a WAP deck ain’t going to cut it with car buyers.

A complicating issue with that, however, could be that the state of the American wireless networks as a whole aren’t quite ready for prime time. Some could handle the bandwidth of such applications, but for most, we’re at least 2-3 years away. But as alluded to in the Reuters link above to the Boston Globe about wireless Web usage, there’s only upside from here.

And it only makes sense that it would evolve this way. The auto industry spends more on ad dollars than any other in the U.S., but is closely followed by beer and - you guessed it - telecom (notably by wireless companies).

There is a bright side to all you ad haters out there - it could come to pass that the two industries (cars and cell phones) combine to make just one ad, cutting down on the noise and letting me get back to what’s up with Sayed on the boat in Lost.

But then again, that’s wishful thinking.

It might be too soon for “I told you so,” but …

I can’t believe I missed this in the shuffle last week, but here goes:

 Turns out that Nielsen has done another survey - this time on the efficacy of mobile advertisements.

According to the Reuters piece linked above, the number of cell phone users who saw an ad on their device rose 38 percent. A total of 58 million people saw ads (but it doesn’t say how many were distinctive users). Also no info on take rates or the like, but clearly, that is not a number to sneeze at.

But the story cites Nielsen as saying that a third of those with data services would be willing to get ads on their phones if it lowered their bills. Now couple that with cool content such as songs/ringtones/wallpapers/ringbacks - and you could have a content-for-ad swap dynamic.

In fact, the survey says that 13 percent of respondents would agree to ads if that improved the content on their phones.

To me, this is a clear indication that if the model is right, people won’t feel as if such ads are spam.

Speaking of content, link here to see about a cool new music service for the BlackBerry that is trying to rival the iPhone at the same time that Apple is trying to add more “businessman specials” to the iPhone’s application lineup with the beta release of its SDK earlier this week.

Cleanup on aisle 7! Watch out for all the silicon chips!

Supermarket of the future?

A couple of things led to this post: last week’s announcement/coverage of Akoo International of its new service that allows a consumer to use their cell phone to pick the songs/videos/movies playing at a retail outlet. All they have to do in return is be willing to submit to a little advertising on their phone.

Then earlier today I had coffee with Jack Finke, a specialist in digital signage advertising. We got to talking about how soon, the deli boards at your local Kroger will be controlled from one central location using the Internet.

And my take on it was that those signs would be able to pump coupons/ads/content to customers’ cell phones in an integrated environment. How about being able to have all that data Kroger collects on you using the Kroger Plus card put to use by shooting preferences or shopping lists or the day’s specials to your phone when you walk into the store.

Those days are coming - given the advances in location-based services, RFID tags, and intelligent networks.

And then you can swipe the phone to pay for your order. Akoo might even play with this space, as you could control what you see on different signs throughout the store or what music you can have streamed to your phone while shopping. Beats the in-store “Kroger Radio” that’s pretty lame.

Come to think of it, my wife just texted me the shopping list, so I gotta go.

Making wings for dinner tonight.

That comes with a side order of weekend minutes …

So now you can get a break on hummus your using your cell phone.

The latest food chain to use with mobile couponing is Extreme Pita, joining the likes of Taco Bueno Hollywood Video, and Hardee’s. The service provider doing this is Cellfire, which uses an onboard program to map to UPC codes that are swipable at the restaurants. (By the way, anyone ever tried one of their pitas?)

This is only going to grow, as the industry careens toward as close to an operating system standard as it can get.

Service providers hooking into this system include Alltel, Cincinnati Bell, Verizon Wireless and several more.

The list of compatible phones looks hard to get from trying the site, but I know the RAZR and any Windows Mobile device will work.

Now the next step is to marry this with location-based or GPS enabled phones so you get coupons (opting in of course) when you walk by a restaurant or store. And the networks are evolving to get that smart - the question is whether consumers will want it and opt in.

Well, do you?