With mobile advertising and marketing budgets growing, agencies are scrambling to bolster in-house expertise to match client demand. In that respect, SapientNitro, AKQA, Ogilvy, TribalDDB and Razorfish lead the pack, according to the first Wave report from Forrester that ranks digital agencies by mobile capability. To qualify for the evaluation, Forrester required agencies to provide a comprehensive set of mobile marketing services, have at least five years of mobile experience, a strong and growing revenue stream from mobile marketing and appear frequently as a competitor for new business and on brands’ short lists. The ranking criteria also included the agencies’ methodologies for strategy development and program execution, their approaches to technology for measurement and analytics and the strength of their company vision for mobile. That process ultimately boiled down to nine leading U.S. vendors, which also included iCrossing, VML, Rosetta and Possible Worldwide, described as “strong performers” behind the top five. Overall, SapientNitro received the highest client scores on a scale of zero (weak) to five (strong) across roughly 12 metrics spanning their current services, strategy and market presence. “The agency challenges its clients to think creatively about mobile’s role in strategic development and has the execution chops to implement. SapientNitro also brings a very long-tenured and experienced mobile management team that is well positioned to bring to life its clear and forward-looking vision for mobile,” stated the Forrester report. Runner-up AKQA was cited as a strong choice for any brand “looking to make a big splash in mobile,” but the study said the agency could improve its marketing skills and tactics. Ogilvy was credited with having a detailed long-term plan for mobile expansion, but needs to balance its vision with greater focus on clients’ immediate needs. Similarly, the report gave TribalDDB high marks for expansive client relationships and the ability to integrate mobile with other strategic initiatives, but faulted its optimization efforts' post-campaign launch. Razorfish was dinged for being too expensive. “The clients we spoke with feel that Razorfish costs more than other agencies with comparable services. However, the agency has a very good client retention rate. So if cost is a concern, it’s not keeping the vast majority of its clients from maintaining the relationship,” stated the report. Rosetta was also viewed as pricier than competitors. Among others, iCrossing was noted for using its background in search to develop more detailed audience personas than other agencies and provide strong mobile analytics. VML earned the highest scores for collaboration, “making it a great choice for any brand that has a full agency roster and needs to add a mobile partner to the mix,” according to Forrester. While the top-ranked agencies had varying strengths and weaknesses, the study underscored certain common approaches to mobile. These include spreading mobile expertise across different departments or disciplines within agencies so mobile know-how isn’t siloed within one group. Likewise, the vast majority of mobile programs studied were part of a larger, integrated digital effort. Even where an agency is hired for just the mobile piece of a campaign, it must work with other agencies to ensure a consistent approach for engaging the customer. All the agencies also predict that mobile will eventually eclipse PC-based use and that the medium will become the key connection between online and offline worlds. That, in turn, will lead mobile strategies and technology to end up in everything from cars to cable boxes.
Russia's search engine Yandex said Monday it has purchased map licenses from Nokia subsidiary Navteq to develop detailed world maps for its Yandex.Maps service. The maps from Europe, North America, Australia and Asia will show city roads, urban traffic networks, streets and buildings. Using the Yandex.Maps API, Web site owners can embed maps of various countries on their sites. Yandex had purchased map data of Turkey from Navteq. Now it plans to add content to desktop and mobile applications that supports all major platforms. Changes point to declining market share for Yandex, as it tries to hold onto its market share in Russia. Since last summer, Yandex's search market share slipped from about 65% to 60% today, conceding to Google. The company managed to grab 26% of market share in Russia, up from 22%, according to Piper Jaffray, citing Liveinternet.ru. "In December, Yandex's share had stabilized slightly above 60%, but some have noted that Yandex appears to have lost some slight share through the holidays, touching 59.4% in the first week of January," Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster wrote in a research note, admitting that shares bounced back to roughly 60% in the following week. Munster believes this "slight blip" in share during the holidays was likely a seasonal change from reduced overall search volume and not necessarily a continuation of the share loss trend. The map data from Navteq should become the pedestal for mobile and local services. Last year, Yandex stepped up efforts to support mobile users. The search engine became the default for the Windows Phone operating system in Russia. Although Windows has a minor market share in Russia, Munster believes Microsoft will eventually make a significant push and gain some share globally. The search engine also acquired SPB Software, which has a solution for a mobile phone interface. The move could help Yandex compete better with Google's Android.
Mobile companies will have to obtain users' express consent before installing monitoring software if a bill floated Monday by Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass) becomes law. The draft bill, named the Mobile Device Privacy Act, is aimed at addressing “the threat to consumers’ privacy posed by electronic monitoring software on mobile phones,” Markey stated. The lawmaker specifically cited software developed by the company Carrier IQ as an example of the type of monitoring software that should only be installed with users' consent. Last November, researcher Trevor Eckhart sparked controversy by posting a video showing how the company's software can log users' keystrokes. Since then, the company was hit with dozens of lawsuits over the software. The keystroke logging accusations also spurred lawmakers to question officials from Carrier IQ, as well as wireless companies about the technology. Carrier IQ issued a 19-page report last month acknowledging that a bug in its software sometimes results in the logging of messages. The company also said that the data is encoded and “not human readable.” The bill floated by Markey would require mobile companies to disclose the existence of monitoring software, the types of data collected, and the names of third parties that receive data. The bill also requires consumers to consent before the software begins collecting or transmitting data. The measure provides for damages of at least $1,000 per consumer per violation. Advocacy group Free Press praised the proposal. “Third-party companies with no relationship to the consumer must not be allowed to collect or sell user data under a veil of secrecy,” stated action fund political adviser Joel Kelsey. But Jules Polonetsky, director and co-chair of the Future of Privacy Forum, suggested that the bill should be refined to distinguish between transmission of diagnostic information and transmission of data that could be used for marketing. Ensuring that personal data is not used for profiling or marketing without user permission makes good sense. Interrupting necessary quality-of-service information may be less then beneficial to users,” he said in an email to Online Media Daily. He added that most Web users currently decline to send information to browser companies after a crash. “Some users may be concerned about privacy, some think it will slow their browsing, and others are just annoyed to be asked,” he said. “If users are asked about sending back diagnostic data from their phones, most will decline without thinking about the long-term consequences, leading to less feedback about why calls are dropped or data connections interrupted.”
Yes -- consumers used their cell- and smartphones to help them make decisions when it came to holiday purchases, but good, old-fashioned phone communications was the most prevalent use. According to the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life project, 52% of adult cell phone owners used their phones to aid decision making during the holiday shopping period. Thirty-eight percent called a friend while in a store to ask about a purchase they were considering. Twenty-four percent looked up reviews of a product, and 25% looked up prices. “For all that we talk about texting and apps, it remains the fact that voice calling is still the largest percentage of use out there,” Aaron Smith, senior research specialist at Pew Research, tells Marketing Daily. “That is a consistent theme, and [one] worth keeping in mind for all of these technologies out there.” Not surprisingly, those over 50 were less likely to use their phones for online product reviews and information than people in the 18-49 demographic. However, there was little difference between consumers 18-29 and 30-49, Smith says. Urban and suburban cell phone users were more likely to look up products online than rural users; non-white consumers were more likely to do so than white consumers and higher-educated consumers wore more likely to do so than less-educated consumers. One place where there wasn’t a profound difference, however, was among income levels. Among consumers who had household incomes less than $50,000, 48% said they either called a friend or looked up reviews online. For households above $50,000, 50% did the same. “The numbers are so similar,” Smith says. “[It shows] it doesn’t matter how much money you’ve got -- you’re always looking for a good deal.” Overall, about a third of cell phone owners used their phone recently (within the past 30 days) to look up either product reviews or prices online while in the store. Of them, 35% decided to purchase the item in the store, while 19% decided to purchase the product online. (Thirty-seven percent opted not to purchase the product at all.)
While more than half of both male and female tablet owners are interested in reading digital magazines, the proportion is especially high among males, with 77% of male tablet owners saying they want to read digital magazines on their device, compared to 68% of female tablet owners. That’s according to the latest research from GfK MRI’s iPanel, a new survey group composed exclusively of tablet and e-reader owners. Overall, 71% of tablet owners said they were interested in reading digital magazines on their devices. The proportion was even higher among younger adults, with 85% of male tablet owners 18-34 saying they would like to read digital magazines, along with 78% of female tablet owners in the same age range. Tablet ownership also encourages readers of both genders to read back issues of magazines: 19% of tablet owners who read a magazine on their device in the last 30 days also read back issues of the same title, according to GfK MRI -- including 20% of male tablet owners and 19% of females. In terms of how tablet owners read magazines, the most popular way is apps, with 65% of tablet owners who read a magazine in the last 30 days doing so via an app. Meanwhile, 47% of tablet owners accessed magazine content by visiting the Web site, and 37% read a digital reproduction of the magazine. Risa Becker, senior vice president of research for GfK MRI, observed: “The fact that younger men who own tablets are interested in reading digital magazines bodes well for digital magazine advertisers, since this demographic has been historically hard to reach.”
In what may be the first study of its kind, Alexandria, Va. agency 11mark polled 1,000 Americans to find out how they're using their smartphones while going to the bathroom. Incredibly, three-fourths of those with a mobile phone say they actively use them while going to the bathroom. "Americans are texting, emailing, and yes -- as you may have heard -- talking on the phone in the bathroom," the "IT in The Toilet" report finds, adding: "Approximately one-quarter of Americans report they don’t go into the bathroom without their phone. 11mark says the goal of the report was to establish a "bathroom benchmark" examining "just how connected we have become." The report finds Droid users are slightly more likely to use their phones in the bathroom overall; 87% have used their phone while indisposed, versus 84% of BlackBerry users and 77% of iPhone users. BlackBerry users are most likely to answer a call in the bathroom (75% report they have done so, versus 67% of Droid and 60% of iPhone users. Droid and iPhone users are more likely to browse a social network or use an app in the bathroom than their BlackBerry colleagues. As might be expected, Gen Y respondents were the heaviest users of IT in the toilet. Ninety-one percent use their phone in the bathroom, but older generations are not far behind. Eighty percent of Gen X respondents report they use the phone in the bathroom, as well as 65% of Boomers. “The writing is on the stall,” says Nicole Burdette, principal of 11mark. “This study confirms what we all know -- that the last private place is no longer private. And, that the ‘mobile-everywhere’ phenomenon is flushing out a host of new opportunities for savvy communicators.”
The maker of the popular CheckPoints shopper rewards app has renamed its company as it also plans to launch a network of its own and partnered apps that target messaging at the point of product scanning. The inMarket Shopper Network says it will reach more than 20 million mobile-empowered shoppers while they are in the store and actively scanning items for product information, rewards points or discounts. “If you scan a product in the laundry category we could present messaging that speaks to what you are shopping for,” says inMarket Mobile Evangelist Dave Heinzinger. The CheckPoints app itself has already done this sort of point-of-scan messaging with many of its brand clients like Coca-Cola and Tyson Foods. But in a repositioning of the company, which has been renamed from CheckPoints to inMarket, the capability will now be part of a network of other apps with which the company has partnered or apps that use its APIs to embed scanning capabilities. As part of this move, inMarket also announced a partnership with longstanding shopping app ShopSavvy. “Partnering with inMarket was a natural extension of our commitment to provide unique, diversified content for our users,” says ShopSavvy CEO Alexander Muse. Heinzinger says that the model creates a network of shopping apps that can bring digital marketing accountability into the store. Marketing partners only pay when a customer has scanned their promoted product and has been delivered the right message. “It is like pay-per-click in the retail world,” says Heinzinger. Some brands are targeting people who have scanned their own product because they know that people who pick up an item in a store are much more likely to buy it. The prompt to scan promoted items in the store is aimed at heightening engagement at the point of sale. The company claims that these post-scan ads and promotions have lifted consumer purchase intent up to 400% in previous campaigns. The CheckPoints app, which will retain its current brand name, also has a scan-at-home feature that allows the user to scan promoted items they have already purchased. Here there is a real opportunity for brand conquesting or what inMarket calls “conversion campaigns.” inMarket will achieve part of its promised reach to 20 million mobile-enabled shoppers through CheckPoints, ShopSavvy, other unannounced owned-and-operated mobile shopping brands and partners it acquires through the SDK. Scheduled for release in the coming weeks, the inMarket SDK will enable app developers to include the scanner in their feature set. Heinzinger explains that for a game developer, scanning a product from within the game could reward the player with virtual currency for their own use. The original CheckPoints app was released in October 2010. It competes directly with shopping rewards app ShopKick.
Shopping apps lit up retail outlets everywhere this past holiday season, and many merchants saw red rather than green. According to conventional wisdom, armies of super- smart smartphone-enabled aisle browsers were scoping out products, looking up specs and rival pricing on their apps, and buying elsewhere. The industry has dubbed the effect, whether real or imagined, “showrooming,” and mobile marketers are now quick to point out that they can be the cure -- not the cause -- of what ails retailers. Shopping rewards and promotion company shopkick announced today that its app was responsible for driving $110 million in in-store revenue for over a dozen partners in retail and entertainment in the last year. The shopkick app can be used both in- and out-of-store to locate deals and collect reward points for scanning select items on partners’ shelves. Claiming 3 million active users of the smartphone app, shopkick says its goal has been to drive foot traffic into stores -- not poach existing customers. CEO Cyriac Roeding sais in a company statement that “the demise of retail would have some seriously bad effects on the country’s economy” and that shopkick is designed to help enhance the brick-and-mortar experience. Counting Macy’s, Target, Best Buy, Old Navy and American Eagle among its partners, the company says it sees 150 million monthly interactions. When the shopper comes into a partner store with the app active, its presence is detected and the consumer is rewarded with “kickbucks” points that can be applied to gift cards or even charities. In December, shopkick detected and rewarded 5 million walk-ins -- a doubling of activity in just four months. Shopkick was launched in August 2010 with a high-profile investment from Kleiner Perkins’ iFund. Last week the company announced that it had passed the 3 million active-user milestone and that users had viewed over 1 billion deals. Its users have scanned over 10 million products, according to the company. “Showrooming” has become a more public concern of retailers after some suffered a disappointing sales season this holiday season. Target in particular has been recruiting suppliers to create products that set its brick-and-mortar experience apart from online retailers. Amazon attracted the ire of retailers last holiday when it offered its app users up to $5 in discounts if they purchased from the online seller an item the consumer had recently looked up in a physical store. Some mobile marketers, like shopkick and rival shopping app maker inMarket, would prefer to be seen as partners with retaiers that drive traffic and in-store sales. Today, inMarket -- the makers of the shopping rewards CheckPoints app -- announced it was creating a network of shopping apps that are designed to enrich the in-store shoping experiencer and motivate sales.
According to the GSMA,the global mobile industry trade group, the number of mobile-connected devices will double from 6 billion in 2011 to 12 billion by 2020. Are you ready to take full advantage of this digital juggernaut? Here are five tips on how you can get the most out of your mobile advertising investments. 1. Look beyond click-through rates when evaluating mobile campaigns. If you think mobile is just for direct response campaigns, you may be trapped in 2006. Mobile can drive tremendous brand engagement -- there’s no reason to evaluate mobile campaign performance through the vantage point of CTR. 2. Be open to testing. Don’t pigeonhole your campaigns into narrow audiences or device types. Think your campaign will perform best on tablets as opposed to feature phones? That’s fine. Test performance on tablets, but don’t abandon feature phones. Campaign performance is, in many cases, situational. One device does not work universally better than another. While you may be convinced your campaign will resonate with a certain segment, experiment with targeting tactics, and choose a vendor that employs prospecting techniques to identify new, potentially lucrative audiences (“lookalikes”). The most successful brands are not afraid to innovate, iterate and learn. 3. Leave all options on the table. We often recommend that clients pixel every page of their site. It helps us determine which mobile campaigns led to an outcome and helps the client learn what elements are working best. It also gives the freedom to optimize against any metric you choose -- content downloads, click-to-calls, app downloads, Facebook likes, etc. Campaigns that have a lot of targeting parameters layered on top, pigeon-hole themselves into limited distribution. 4. Realize that one size doesn’t fit all. Display performance doesn’t necessarily translate to mobile performance. We all know that running display creatives in mobile campaigns is a bad bet, due to disparities in screen size, but trying to mimic display tactics in mobile doesn't cut it, either. Sophisticated mobile DSPs have algorithms that work continuously in real time to find new audiences receptive to your brand, so why limit yourself with a single targeting parameter or creative concept? Let the platform decide what works best. 5. Incorporate mobile as part of a larger campaign strategy. Mobile doesn’t have to be a standalone channel; use mobile as part of a multichannel marketing approach to reach audiences. It should be a dedicated part of your integrated marketing mix. Mobile advertising efforts can tie in seamlessly with campaigns running across other marketing channels, digital or not: QR codes in print ads or billboards let users download apps or drive them to a WAP site. TV commercials can promote SMS text messaging to allow users to enter a contest. Mobile is no longer a supplement to display advertising.
At last week’s Mobile Insider Summit in Key Largo, Fla., Yelp, Google Maps, Alfred, Where, and all the other usual suspects I consult for nearby resources were not going to be of much help here. We were in another world. The private, deliberately removed, enclosed, remote, painfully exclusive Ocean Reef Club wasn’t the kind of place where you will find quick takeout, a 7-Eleven or a chain of any sort. “We need another cheap suitcase for the trip back,” my wife insisted. We were way overweight on the one consolidated half-trunk we had brought down. “See if there is a Goodwill around here,” she teased. “We are encircled by multimillion-dollar yachts,” I protested. “They have dress codes here for every function…including croquet. There are more golf carts than people here. What makes you think you will find a Goodwill?” “Yeah but you have to figure that these people must throw away some really cool stuff. That would be a helluva Goodwill." No -- if we wanted to hear directly from local merchants using mobile marketing, we were going to have to airlift them in. Which we did. For a superb panel on how real local businesses are using the medium, we had from Miami Mike Broder, a comics shop owner and President of the Florida SuperCon event, and Field Harrison, the owner of Dallas-based Mint Dentistry. Both Mike and Field were emphatic about something that many agencies large and small may well forget about when activating the local channel: these small business owners are using their own personal funds to underwrite the marketing plan. Mike said that every marketing decision he makes comes out of his pocket. This isn’t someone else’s line item. I spoke with Field later about this and he reiterated that a small business like his is always fighting the temptation to pull back on marketing because it can too easily feel like you are saving money. “One of the worst things I ever did was not stick to my marketing plan,” he says. “The minute you think you can skim the marketing and still grow, you are going to lose money. But it is such a temptation." For his dental practice, Field has tried just about every local marketing platform, from radio to cable TV and print. But he was shocked by the response his local campaign on Pandora experienced. “I never felt like a bigger celebrity,” he says. People were coming up to him left and right to tell him they had heard the ad. Better still, he heard the ad. “With radio and TV, they tell you the ad ran four times and you have to take their word. But when you hear your ad three or four times while you are jogging, you feel more confident,” he says Mint Dentistry ran an audio and display campaign via Pandora at a hyper-local level for three months. The 30-seciond audio ad fed into the stream. It was accompanied by a full screen takeover during the spot, which shrank to a banner until the next promo. With its zip code registration, Pandora was able to target the ad to a ten-mile radius of Field’s practice. It ran between mid-August and mid-November and delivered 2.36 million impressions that resulted in over 10,700 clicks. Most of the traffic was coming from mobile-connected devices, and Field says on the next campaign he won’t even bother advertising on desktops. For an SMB, measuring success is often more impressionistic than precise. In addition to the obvious thrill of having patients new and old mention they had heard his ad on Pandora, Field says that the bottom line is always determined by his bottom line. Being a dentist who is already making appointments for his patients six months down the road, CRM is not the point. It is about acquisition. “The main thing I am looking at is ROI – am I growing? Will I do better this month than last year on this month?” Field became a quick believer in the power of mobile. It helped him target the immediate vicinity but also was good at finding his own demographic. Like many people in their 30s, Field actually listens to Pandora himself, as do the patients who would tend to feel most comfortable with him. One of the little peculiarities of marketing dentistry is that “it is easier for any dentist to market to their own generation,” he tells me. I didn’t know that, and I wonder how many marketers truly understand the specifics of the small local businesses they are trying to help. As Mike Broder said on the panel last week, he knows his own clientele intimately. The guys who will come to a comics convention tend to be eager but relatively broke. Moreover, he related how a much larger comics conference came into the Miami market recommending that he just give up his list and let them take over. As he tells it, their lack of understanding of the local clientele and where and how to market in Miami led them to a failed event. Mike’s SuperCon remained triumphant, he argues, because things like mobile marketing tied to a deep knowledge of the neighborhoods and prospects made his efforts more effective. And the smart SMBs understand the need for marketing. But getting the solutions to them is another thing altogether. Not only does their marketing budget come from their own pockets, but those pockets get filled by working long hours, not by reading columns like these about mobile marketing ideas. Pandora, while it worked well for Field, was the mobile platform with which he was familiar and the first one put before him. He hasn’t tried another channel like SMS because it hasn’t been offered. As much as the technology has evolved and local ad budgets have started to go digital, the same old problem remains: How do new platforms get in front of, help and genuinely listen to the needs and knowledge of real world business owners? No doubt there are countless SMS providers in Dallas who could get Field up to speed on messaging, but they aren’t where a busy dentist can see and evaluate them. “I would love to know how I could text messages to a million people,” he says, “but I don’t know who can do it.”