More targeted and creative mobile ad campaigns

By Giselle Abramovich

January 14, 2008

Mobile Marketer's Mobile Outlook 2008

Direct marketing or brand advertising – the march toward more sophisticated mobile advertising is gathering strength.

Experts predict that mobile ad campaigns will reflect a more extensive use of SMS-oriented PIN code transactions, increased numbers of WAP sites and a jump in the amount of event- and artist-driven mobile efforts.

“There will likely be more event- and community-specific campaign initiation,” said Peter Diemer, executive vice president of strategy and development of Hip Digital Media, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

“There will be more direct targeting of the consumer through various channels – age, demographics, individual stats and preferences,” he said.

Hip Digital is a digital music marketing company that works with marketers to create digital music promotions. The company offers CRM services and incentives such as music gift cards, direct marketing, retail bonuses and loyalty rewards.

Greg Scholl, The Orchard

To better target mobile consumers, Mr. Diemer anticipates strong use of existing database marketing. In addition, loyalty plans will allow marketers to be more directly engaged with the consumer.

With the increasing number of artist-driven mobile marketing campaigns, the audience base might be smaller in aggregate terms. However, the total audience reached through these types of campaigns will sharply increase, said Greg Scholl, president/CEO of The Orchard, New York.

“Today, few artists reach their fans through operator portals,” Mr. Scholl said. “As platforms continue to open and toolsets evolve, artists will begin to use the phone as a more integral part of cultivating and building their audiences.

“This will strengthen artists’ relationships with their core fan bases, which logically should drive digital music sales, ticket sales and the like,” he said.

The Orchard provides digital music, video and new media services. It has a catalog of more than 1 million music recordings for sale and 4,000 hours of video content under management from artists, producers and labels.

Targeting? Bull’s aye
Mr. Scholl believes that addressable networks of artists will emerge, with the opportunity for brands to buy across them and message to highly targeted audiences. In turn, artists could even participate in the advertising revenue.

“It’s something we’re working on at The Orchard,” he said.

For marketers, increased use of the mobile channel as a marketing medium means broader reach of the mobile consumer, with very targeted campaigns, said Nick Montes, president of Viva Vision, San Diego.

“This means huge opportunities to speak to, and engage with, their target audience,” he said.

Viva Vision provides branded, user-generated and original mobile video programming worldwide.

The rapid evolution of traditional marketing channels will shift the allocation of marketing dollars. In addition, as these channels fragment and fracture, audiences are becoming more sophisticated and are raising the bar in terms of creativity, production and context.

More importantly, the degree to which campaign effectiveness can be measured is increasing, so the return on a brand’s marketing spend is becoming more transparent, Mr. Scholl said.

“It is a formidable challenge for marketers, and especially for agencies,” Mr. Scholl said.

“While brand marketing will remain important, direct and targeted marketing will become more sophisticated and more a core part of the marketing campaign: more programs with smaller reach, more expensive from a CPC or CPM standpoint but presumably, more productive and measurable in term of effectiveness,” he said.

Technical limitations will begin to become less of a point of contention with marketers, as there is currently an abundance of technology and software.

Rule call
A common lament from mobile marketers is the lack of operator guidelines and how it constrains the channel.

This is changing.

“Google has contributed by giving developers tools to innovate, following the path Facebook took with regards to opening their platform on the PC and distributing a Facebook application for BlackBerry,” Mr. Scholl said.

“Even Verizon, a company that has traditionally been very top-down in controlling its marketing, made a similar announcement recently,  the broad theme being, it’s good for operators to let third-parties create value, because that creates value for operators’ subscribers,” he said.

Developing meaningful promotions that will work across platforms that target a mass audience is one of the challenges Viva Vision’s Mr. Montes predicts for 2008.

“This may create a unique opportunity to micro-target and micro-manage smaller and more highly targeted and less costly campaigns,” Mr. Montes said.

“The flood of new devices coming into the marketplace will confuse the average consumer,” he said.

“Another challenge will be to find a way to make delivery and fulfillment cost more effective.”
Here are some other issues to expect this year: Getting smart about how to aggregate large audiences from lots of smaller, more targeted ones, and rolling out cost-effective programs in that context.

“Agencies must develop campaigns that prove consumers respond to mobile ads and are reading and responding to opt-in text messages and the like, let alone more sophisticated and ambitious types of programs,” The Orchard’s Mr. Scholl said.

Put simply, marketers need to clearly define their mobile goals and objectives.

Consumers need to be given more than just one reason to use their portable device for more than just communication. Converging mobile devices as media players, games and PDAs – they become more important in everyday life and will therefore be used more.

“One good rule of thumb might be to make sure campaigns work ubiquitously across all operators,” Mr. Scholl said. “Ubiquity is critical – to reach and accomplish objectives, and to ensuring a good user experience.”

This article appeared in Mobile Marketer’s Mobile Outlook 2008. It is saved in the Classic Guides section on www.mobilemarketer.com. Please click here to download the PDF file.