Blackberry parent company Research in Motion “is “bowing to critics and market forces,” as the New York Times headline puts it, by replacing the co-CEOs who developed “the innovative device that was the first to reliably deliver email over airwaves.” Thorsten Heins, who joined RIM in 2007 and most recently has been COO for software, hardware and sales, becomes CEO effective today. Mike Lazaridis, who co- founded RIM with a childhood friend in 1985, becomes vice chairman and will lead an “innovation committee,” Ian Austen reports. Jim Balsillie, who invested $250,000 in the company in 1992, remains a director and will maintain his stake in the company. A German national who is well respected in the industry but is not necessarily known on Wall Street, Heins previously was CTO at Siemens AG. “Going forward, we will continue to focus both on short-term and long-term growth, strategic planning, a customer- and market-based product approach, and flawless execution,” Heins says in a statement released Sunday. “We are in the process of recruiting a new Chief Marketing Officer to work closely with our product and sales teams to deliver the most compelling products and services.” Observers, however, are already wondering exactly what will change, and if it will be sufficient to keep the company viable in the rapidly evolving market. Indeed, Heins himself tells Iain Malow: “Change to what? Change for what?” “In the company’s release,” Forbes’ Elizabeth Woyke points out, “Heins described RIM’s current direction, which is focused on a transition to a new operating system and an increased investment in marketing, as “the right path.’” That path took a precipitous downward slope several years ago. “Although the stock price has been on a slide since February 2011 and new bad news seems to come out of management every few weeks,” Tim Plaehn wrote on Seeking Alpha last month, “the forces causing Research In Motion's decline in profitability have been several years in the making.” In short, RIM squandered its lead to Apple and Android smart phones and botched its attempt to market a tablet called PlayBook, which The Guardian called “a flop from start to finish.” And it has suffered delays in its next generation operating system. RIM commanded just 11% of the market by the third quarter of 2011, according to NPD Group and reported by Forbes’ Elizabeth Woyke –- “far behind phones powered by Google’s Android operating system, which claimed 53% of the market, and Apple’s iPhones, which made up 29% of the market.” “Think back and you'll recall a time when RIM devices seemed to exude rubber-clad cool: if you didn't have a BlackBerry you wanted one, and business users who did possess them loved them so much they'd work in bed with them, creating armies of BlackBerry widows in the process,” writes Jonny Evans in his tellingly named “Apple Holic” blog at Computerworld. The changes at the top aren’t going to bring back those glory days, he says, because Apple went after the widows by focusing on the user’s experience “and when their business-focused husbands saw what they were doing, they wanted a little iAction too.” A survey that ranks smartphone “satisfaction” with various brands conducted by ChangeWave Research shows Apple alone at the top of the heap with 75% of respondents claiming they are “very satisfied. RIM is dead last with 22%. Sandwiched in between are Samsung (47%), HTC (47%), Motorola (45%), LG (31%) and Nokia (23%). In an editorial headlined “RIM's New CEO Isn't The Shakeup It Needed,” Engadget’s Darren Murph claims that “this CEO speak smacks of the exact same thinking that has positioned RIM where it is today: miles behind Android and iOS.” Later in the piece he writes: “RIM needs more than an enthusiastic, intelligent guy who has already been soaked up in the company's culture. RIM needs a shock to the system. RIM needs a reboot.” Not so, according to Heins. "It's going to be continuity, but it's not going to be a standstill," he tells Will Connors in the Wall Street Journal. Heins believes RIM’s next-generation operating system will “attract critical mass among developers and wow consumers and business users alike,” writes Connors and, if he’s right, it might consider leasing the software to other companies “on a case by case basis.”
AT&T has been busy boosting the profile of its targeted advertising business since relaunching the unit as AT&T AdWorks last year and opening a media lab facility in New York in October. In between, the AdWorks network spanning mobile, online display and interactive television, has landed among the top four U.S. ad networks behind Google, Yahoo and AOL, according to comScore. To further underscore its ad push, AT&T has released new findings from a survey of 200 brand marketers and agency executives and planners as well as data from pilot programs and test campaigns conducted in recent months. In the realm of audience targeting, for instance, the study found 60% of marketers believe data-driven targeting will replace traditional content-based advertising. By leveraging its wealth of subscriber data across online, mobile and TV, AT&T aims to play a key role in helping advertisers reach precisely targeted audiences across the three screens. (While AdWorks can target audiences within each, specific timing on integrated ad-serving and reporting across all three channels has yet to be announced.) Still, in mobile alone, AT&T boasts some 100 million wireless subscribers generating 10 billion impressions a month. “We're the only network with access to that anonymous aggregated monthly subscriber data,” noted Maria Mandel Dunsche, VP, marketing and media innovation at AdWorks, during a tour of the unit’s media lab Friday. The 2000-square-foot space in midtown Manhattan features large-screen displays for showcasing the range of services AdWorks provides including data visualization, branded TV channels, IPTV telescoping, custom ad targeting, and TV commerce. In addition to its vast mobile audience, AT&T also has 17.8 million high-speed Internet customers, including 3.6 million U-Verse TV subscribers, along with millions more accessing the company’s online search offerings such as YP.com. The AdWorks network includes third-party inventory as well. As an example of its audience targeting capability, AT&T pointed to a recent online campaign for an airline credit card company aimed at travel intenders across air, auto and auto rental segments that resulted in a .13% click-through rate -- double the industry standard 0.5% rate. In the mobile space, AdWorks also ran a recent campaign on behalf of Levi's Curve ID jeans featuring its opt-in Store Finder ad units that enable people to find nearby retail locations. The ads, targeted to a custom beauty, fashion and retail audience, drove more than 85,000 clicks to the Store Finder button in less than a month. Among other mobile projects, AdWorks has been testing coupons delivered via SMS text message rather than barcodes because most retailers still don't have payments systems that can handle 2D codes. In a trial with Procter & Gamble last year, it said the text coupons delivered twice the response rate of traditional print ones. “It's a low-tech solution that works across a broad audience,” said Mandel Dunsche. According to the AT&T study, 80% of participants said mobile advertising has the ability to target audiences more than any other platform, and will substantially increase revenue growth in 2012 and beyond. Furthermore, more than half (57%) of marketers plan to ramp up multiplatform budgets in the next 12 months, with nearly a third aiming to earmark more spending to cross-platform advertising with better ad integrations. Toward that end, AdWorks has teamed with comScore to recruit a panel of 25,000 three-screen households, which it says would be the largest audience behavior and media measurement panel of its kind. It would combine data from AT&T wireless, U-verse and Internet usage with comScore’s Internet and mobile data. Mandel Dunsche said the cross-platform tracking would be especially useful in helping agencies and advertisers with their media mix modeling, which typically isn't as effective in integrating mobile because of the lack of audience data. So far, AT&T and comScore are halfway toward lining up 25,000 opt-in panelists and eight advertisers to help test the research initiative.
The share of U.S. adults who own tablet computers nearly doubled from 10% to 19% during the holiday season, fueled in part by the launch of less expensive devices like the Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet, according to a new study. The research by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that e-reader ownership also jumped from 10% to 19% between mid-December and mid-January, while the proportion of Americans with either type of device climbed from 18% to 29%. The surge is all the more striking because it follows a period from mid-2011 into the fall, when there was little change in the growth of tablet and e-reader adoption. But following the rollouts of the $199 Kindle Fire and the $250 Nook Tablet in mid-November -- taking on the $499 iPad -- consumers began opening up their wallets in large numbers. “In the time we have been doing surveys about the adoption and use of digital technology, we have never seen growth quite like this,” noted Lee Rainie, director of Pew’s Internet & American Life Project. “These findings have major implications for every media company -- especially book publishers, everyone in a knowledge business, and key community institutions like libraries. They show how radically the tectonic plates of information creation and dissemination are shifting under our feet.” While Amazon has not revealed exactly how many Kindle Fires it sold in the fourth quarter, it said in December it was selling Kindle devices overall at a rate of 1 million a week. The Fire has been its top-selling product since it went on sale. Wall Street analysts had projected that Amazon sold as many as 5 million Kindle Fires in the quarter. Barnes & Noble touted strong sales of its Nook devices over the holidays, although conceding Nook Tablet sales did not meet expectations. The company had said it is considering spinning off its Nook business a separate unit to capitalize on its growth as a digital media platform. Apple's iPad has dominated the tablet category to date, accounting for roughly 60% of sales through the third quarter. It is rumored to be unveiling the latest version of its 10-inch device as soon as next month, prior to a March launch. The new Pew findings should only heighten manufacturer expectations for tablet and e-reader sales in 2012. The results were based on a series of surveys the research organization conducted between mid-November and early January. The December 2011 findings come from a sample of 2,986 people ages 16 or older surveyed between Nov. 16 and Dec. 21. A separate pair of surveys with two groups of about 1,000 adults 18+ was conducted from Jan. 5-8 and Jan. 12-15. To help distinguish between tablets and e-readers, Pew asked in one survey question whether people owned “a handheld device made primarily for e-book reading, such as a Nook or Kindle e-book reading." Study participants were separately asked whether they had “a tablet computer like an iPad, Samsung Galaxy, Motorola Xoom, or Kindle Fire.” The research found the jump in tablet adoption was especially notable among more affluent consumers -- households earning more than $75,000. More than a third of people (36%) in that category now own tablets, and almost a third (31%) with a college or higher education have one. Uptake of tablets was steepest among those under 50, with the 30-49 segment showing the highest growth, at 24%. When it came to e-readers, women continue to be more avid buyers than men. Wealthier and better-educated people also are more like to have e-readers, but the gap between them and others is not as dramatic as with tablets. For example, 19% of those in households earning $30,000-$50,000 have e-book readers compared to 31% of those in the $75,000-and-up income group. The gap between those income levels in relation to tablet ownership, by contrast, is 20 percentage points.
Dallas-based wireless company MetroPCS is sponsoring the Olympic USA Basketball team with a road show called the "USA Basketball Dream Tour." The tour, which started in Orlando, visits 15 markets twice each over the next seven months. The tour wraps USA Basketball events, and meet-and-greets around a showcase of MetroPCS services and Samsung phones. The USA Basketball team will compete in the Summer 2012 Olympics in London. USA Basketball is the Colorado Springs, Colo.-based national governing body for men's and women's basketball. Patrick Wong, director of field marketing and sponsorships. says MetroPCS’ partnership with USA Basketball is centered on grassroots. He tells Marketing Daily that the program focuses on MetroPCS’ newest Samsung phone, the Samsung Galaxy Attain 4G, which was recently announced and will be available soon. Wong says the company has a range of sports programs. "There are a lot of instances where sports sponsorships make a lot of sense for our brand," he says. "Some sponsorships are national in scope, while others are strictly local. For example, we’ve got great local sponsorships with the Orlando Magic and New Jersey Nets, and then just three weeks ago we made our biggest announcement yet -- MetroPCS is the Official Wireless Partner of the (Ultimate Fighting Championship)." The Dream Tour includes a MetroPCS-themed (purple and orange) mobile basketball court where consumers can compete. There are also mobile phone games, basketball trivia on Samsung phones, and photo and autograph opportunities with USA Basketball legends. Among other cities, the tour will visit Miami, Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Dallas and Las Vegas. The company is integrating the tour with a Web site at www.metropcs.com/USABasketball and social media at www.facebook.com/metropcs. Wong says the company takes a strategic approach when it comes to selecting sponsorships. "For example, we saw that UFC’s audience is a near-perfect match with our customer profile, so a partnership there made a lot of sense. The same goes for this partnership with USA Basketball. It really hits a sweet spot for our consumers, and was a great opportunity." MetroPCS' core markets include Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Michigan (Detroit, Grand Rapids), Jacksonville, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Miami, New York City, Orlando, Philadelphia, Sacramento, San Francisco and Tampa. Wong points out that last week the company launched a new advertising campaign. "We’ll also look to build awareness not only through continued sponsorships, like USA Basketball and UFC, but also through generating positive word of mouth," he says. "People are starting to talk about their positive experiences with MetroPCS -- the simplicity of our no-contract plans, our vast selection of Android-powered smartphones and even the freedom our customers have to scale their plan month-to-month." He says digital properties like Facebook and Twitter will "certainly play a big role." MetroPCS is the fifth-largest facilities-based wireless carrier in the U.S. with over 9.3 million subscribers, per the company.
Advertisers are spending millions of dollars a minute to get fractional face time during the upcoming Super Bowl. Chevy is setting its sights higher (or lower) and wants to be on your lap throughout the game. Released this weekend for iOS and Android, the Chevy Game Time app is designed to be run in tandem with the Super Bowl as a second-screen experience, including polling and contests for winning 20 Chevrolet cars and other prizes from marketing partners such as Sirius XM Radio, Bridgestone, Motorola, the NFL, Papa John's Pizza, NFLShop and others. The app enables the user to play the Chevy TV spots by giving him a unique 7-character ID that wins if it matches a license plate in any of the ads. “Watch our commercials, win our cars,” the app instructs. Chevy commercials are available on demand in the app as well as Twitter streams, trivia and polls that post your responses to a connected Facebook account. The user will be entered automatically into contests when he answers questions correctly. Chevy says the game app is only one of several programs it will run around the Super Bowl. The brand will be an exclusive advertiser for the NBCSports desktop and tablet live-streaming coverage. The company has also partnered with Twitter and the NFL for a “Road to the #SuperBowl” promotion on that social network. According to Joel Ewanick, global chief marketing officer for General Motors, the app is part of a multi-pronged strategy to extend the brand’s reach well beyond the traditional and costly TV spots during the big game. “With these initiatives, the traditional ads on the Super Bowl broadcast and additional initiatives we will announce soon, we expect more than 1.5 billion impressions of our message on game day and beyond,” he says in a statement. Goodby, Silverstein & Partners created the app with Chevy. While the role of mobile media in past Super Bowls has been uneven and tepid at best, brands and media companies appear to have mobilized much more aggressively this year. This year’s Super Bowl not only will be streamed online -- for the first time it will go to Verizon customers on their smartphones via its NFL Mobile app.
It seems to go without saying that brands trying to spark viral success via social media always run the risk of a backfire. And yet someone needs to say it once again to McDonald’s. Late last week, the company’s official Twitter feed invited its quarter of a million followers to share their own favorite stories about visiting McD’s. “’When u make something w/pride, people can taste it.’ –McD potato supplier #McDStories” stated the invitation for others to share their views at the new hashtag. Oops. A torrent of bad reviews, accusations and vegetarian resistance ensued as many in the Twitterverse filed to bite on the invitation to sentimentalize the fast-food chain. Among the top tweets at the hashtag this weekend: “Haven’t eaten it since Dec 1999 and wouldn’t eat it if you paid me! ;)” writes Tweeter “Mike_Stewart.” “My memories of walking into a McDonald’s: the sensory experience of inhaling deeply from a freshly- opened can of dog food,” posts “vegan.” “It’s made of 100% beef, but they use stuff like cow eye & cow tongues in their hamburgers. Learned this today../” “XOMelissaEmily” accuses the company in her post. In its initial posts, McDonald’s intended to share background and human interest pieces about the farmers and suppliers who provide the chain with its ingredients. The kickoff post links to a well-produced YouTube video of a potato farmer talking about his work. The video has been viewed over 66,000 times, according to the YouTube count. Otherwise, the #McDStories seems to have been an open invitation for people to post about mishaps, myths and mayhem associated with the iconic brand. Mobile Marketing Daily attempted to contact McDonald’s for comment, but has received no statement from the company. UPDATE: McDonald’s Social Media Director Rick Wion spoke with Mobile Marketing Daily mid-Monday about the Twitter campaign. Wion said that the promoted Tweet initiating the hashtag was monitored closely as it attracted responses. It was one of two promoted tweets the company had acquired from Twitter for use last week, the other being #meetthefarmers. “This was something that was unfortunate,” he says. “We were watching it. And what we saw was that #McDStories at first was fairly balanced. But then it got more negative than positive. We quickly made the decision to go back to #meetthefarmers, so we pulled that hashtag. It was up for two hours. When we pulled it the conversation on #McDStories went down to nothing by 5 pm.” Look for a follow-up report with further details on the McDonald’s Twitter campaigns in an upcoming edition of Mobile Marketing Daily.
Content sharing is going mobile. Next to the familiar buttons of Facebook’s Like, Twitter’s Tweet and Google’s +1 comes Mogreet’s moShare. The idea is that publishers and content owners will add the new moShare button to their Web sites to facilitate sharing of their content to mobile phones. When the button is clicked, a small window pops up for the user to enter their phone number and the number of the recipient. Then the content is shared as a text message, including a link back to the original content. Rather than posting to a Web site or a particular circle of friends, moShare goes as a text message directly to the phone of the friend with whom you are sharing. The expectation is that publishers will increase page views as more people share the links through their personal networks of friends. “There are 90 billion pieces of content going out online,” says James Citron, CEO of MMS pioneer Mogreet. “What if you could share that by text? Text open rates are 95 percent.” The strength of the idea is that each piece of content shared is specifically from one person to another, with the sender clearly identified. In early trials with various companies, Citron says they found 20 to 30 percent of recipients clicking back to the site being referred. One early success was a pilot with Red Bull with the launch of its film "The Art of Flight," which included an early iteration of the moShare feature. One key to the sharing is that content of any type -- whether video, text, pictures and any other rich media -- can be shared through the network. The California company, which has been dealing with mobile video messaging since 2006, built moShare on top of its rich media messaging platform. In its work over the years delivering hundreds of millions of mobile marketing messages for brands including Fox Broadcasting, Nike, Cox Media Group, Reebok and Steve Madden, Mogreet had to become adept at delivering all content types to thousands of mobile devices on a range of networks. Essentially, Mogreet is taking its MMS-sausage-making knowledge and capabilities and extending them to another area, which looks like a logical mobile platform extension. Mike Johnson, co-founder of Next Impulse Media in Palo Alto, has been trying moShare for several weeks on his Web site CosbySweaters.com and closely monitoring the results. “We’ve seen a 200 percent rise in our mobile traffic without a cannibalization of Facebook or Twitter sharing,” says Johnson. The Web site, which features content such as sports and technology, is targeted to males 25 to 55 years old. “You can Tweet stuff and ‘Like’ all day, but if you want your buddy to see something, you send it directly,” he says. “It’s a different use case since moShare really seeks a target.” So now starts the chicken and egg of the volume of Web sites adding the moShare button to achieve critical mass and the associated measurements that publishers will monitor as more of their content is moShared. Chuck Martin is author of The Third Screen; Marketing to Your Customers in a World Gone Mobile, CEO of Mobile Future Institute and Director of the Center for Media Research at MediaPost Communications.
Most marketers talk about “integrated” marketing, but too often what results from an “integrated” campaign is a combination of banners, brochures, billboards, posters, postcards, Web pages, newsletters, email blasts, and perhaps even in-store displays. Each piece is designed to reach a prospect in a different media environment, and certainly all share a theme as well as similar text and graphics. What can bring all these components together is the use of a dynamic link to propel the customer from a direct mail postcard or insert to a carefully designed or even personalized Web page. This is the space where Quick Response (QR) codes operate, adding a truly proactive and unifying dimension to your multichannel marketing efforts. QR codes can be included on virtually any printed material, from direct mail postcards, flyers and brochures to billboards, invoices, and merchandise labels and tags. By themselves, QR codes are printed squares with a checkerboard appearance. However, in operation, they take a consumer from your direct mailer to your Web site or a specific Web page for in-depth information on products and services, to make an online purchase, or to a video demonstration, discount coupon or newsletter offer, The key to the rapidly increasing use of QR codes is the ever-expanding public embrace of smartphones. The recent Nielsen 2011 third-quarter survey of mobile users revealed that 43 percent of all U.S. mobile phone subscribers own a smartphone. The majority of subscribers under the age of 44 -- and 62 percent of mobile users ages 25-34 -- own smartphones. Typically, these phones are equipped with cameras capable of scanning QR codes, while a built-in or downloadable app “reads” the codes and instantly directs the smartphone to a designated Web site or Web page. What can you do with QR codes to support your marketing effort? The possibilities are limited only by your imagination. Here are a few examples: *QR codes on postcards can direct potential buyers instantly to an online catalog, optimized for mobile device viewing, to review available products and services. *If your product or service is best presented via an active demonstration, a QR code can direct your prospects to an online video. *Hotels can include QR codes in direct mail to show conference facilities, video tours and dinner menus, and allow users to make inquiries online when their interest is high. *QR codes can link to different pages at a company’s Web site to test a specific promotion or approach to see what is working and what isn't. Similarly, you can offer different QR codes to different target groups to test response. *QR codes can be personalized by having them embedded with a personalized URL (PURL), which takes a user to a customized microsite. These can be made for every prospect on a mailing list. To maximize mileage from QR codes, be sure to provide online content that adds value for the targeted consumer and makes it worth their while to scan the code. You might, for example, promise a discount coupon for visitors to the site, a brief video product demonstration, a secure online site for ordering tickets to an event, or a social media page that provides positive testimonials about a service. Another consideration is that QR codes directed to smartphone users should link to Web pages that are optimized for display and navigation by these mobile devices. Web sites designed to be viewed by a desktop PC or Mac will be problematic for the mobile user and likely will contain too much information for easy access. It is also important to ensure that the mobile site is designed for multiple types of mobile Web browsers. As a special benefit for marketers, QR codes can provide precise measurements of your campaign, including the number of scans a code generates, the time of day of the scans, and which mobile devices are doing the scanning. While useful for every campaign as well as for testing a particular concept or a new audience segment, when QR codes are used in conjunction with PURL microsites, this back-end reporting can be even more detailed and useful, and may provide specific information for targeting your next campaign. QR codes serve as an immediate call to action at the moment of consumer engagement. They offer a bridge between the static direct mail piece and what can be a wide array of online information. When included on printed postcards, flyers, or brochures, they operate as a vehicle to deliver traffic to your Web site or to specific Web pages. And, of course, they make your sites instantly accessible to smartphone users, whether they’re at home, at work, commuting, just browsing their mail or actively looking to buy. QR codes provide an immediate, active follow-up means to establish a relationship with consumers and enhance the effectiveness of your direct mail campaign.