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Mobile marketing is everywhere we go, even as we sleep, says expert

November 13, 2007

Bruce Stewart, Connected Life Americas, Yahoo! Inc

BOSTON – Just how personal is mobile?

A lost wallet is typically reported every 48 hours, a lost mobile phone every 68 minutes. Six out of 10 consumers sleep with their mobile phones in bed and 70 percent use the mobile phone as their alarm clock.

“That’s what makes it a marketer’s dream – that it’s with us and with us at all times,” Bruce Stewart, vice president and general manager for Connected Life Americas at Sunnyvale, CA-based Yahoo Inc., told an audience of mobile technology specialists at the first Mobile Internet World.

Defining the user experience was key, he said. To ensure this, he stressed four key pillars: ease of use, discoverability, pricing transparency and openness.

Take ease of use, for example.

“This is not the ease of use about the device, it’s about the ease of use of the services,” Mr. Stewart said.

The audience was treated to a demonstration of Yahoo’s contribution to the mobile world: Yahoo! Go and Yahoo oneSearch.

Yahoo! Go is certified to more than 300 mobile devices and works with Windows Mobile and soon the Open Handset Alliance. The service launched Nov. 13 in Macau, China, offering a Mandarin version.

OneSearch delivers searches based on the user’s location and context query, relying on data from Yahoo and the pertinent carrier. An entered query generates answers instead of Web links.

“We felt that a Web search experience on mobile was broken,” Mr. Stewart said.

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