WPP agencies GroupM and Tenth Avenue have joined forces to launch a mobile marketing presence in China through the acquisition of local mobile agency Wisereach. The new entity, known as MJoule, will combine assets of Tenth Avenue’s mobile specialty unit Joule with the existing mobile operations of GroupM in China. MJoule will be a full-service mobile advertising and marketing agency led by former Wisereach CEO Craig Zhang, who will report to Joule CEO Michael Collins. “Mobile is fast becoming a dominant channel for brands to connect with consumers,” says Bessie Lee, CEO, GroupM China, in a statement. “MJoule will ensure GroupM China maintains a leadership position in mobile and continue to provide our clients with a competitive advantage.” The push into China is the latest international expansion for Joule, which has recently opened branches in Paris, London, Sydney and Melbourne, in addition to offices in New York and Los Angeles. Last month, it named former Microsoft executive Jonathan Tom vice president, media for EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) out of its Paris location. “This expansion will allow Joule to better serve our global clients. plus bring the knowledge and expertise of our global network to our clients and agency partners in China,” said Collins. “In addition, it will give us access to innovation from China, which is experiencing massive growth in mobile, that we can bring to our clients in local markets around the world.” According to an eMarketer report last year, the number of mobile Internet users in China will reach 957 million by 2014, while total mobile subscribers will grow to 1.3 billion. Clearly, WPP sees a major opportunity in being able to monetize that immense potential audience. Terms of the Wisereach acquisition were not disclosed.
With the spread of smartphones, more people are embracing a range of mobile content and services. A new Forrester report urges marketers to keep up with consumers and to spend more time in mobile to build brand awareness and interaction on handheld devices. The research firm estimates that roughly four in 10 U.S. adults now have a smartphone, setting the stage for the upswing in mobile media consumption. The share of people downloading an app, for instance, increased to 15% from 7% between 2010 and 2011. The proportion of those researching products has doubled to 10%, while that for actual mobile purchases has doubled to 4%. Among other activities, 41% are receiving text messages, up from 34% a year ago, and 23% are checking the news/sports/weather on their phones compared to 14% last year. The Forrester survey conducted in the third quarter of 2011 involved more than 8,000 U.S. adults who owned both feature phones and smartphones. The report recognizes that most companies are still at an early stage of mobile marketing -- mostly testing and repurposing existing creative for mobile campaigns. To help brands see where they stand, Forrester outlines five phases of mobile marketing evolution: foundation, experimentation, device strategy, channel strategy, and comprehensive strategy. Wherever a company is, the study argues that any mobile execution should meet three principal criteria: immediacy, simplicity and context. Immediacy emphasizes the timeliness of content delivered to consumers via mobile. Forrester points to a Hilton Hotels effort that sent SMS notification of instantly redeemable on-site specials to customers, and Home Depot’s use of 2D barcodes on product labels to provide more information. Keeping things simple is also key in mobile, given the smaller screen and usually lower bandwidth than on a PC. That means reducing steps for consumers to complete tasks and using features like apps and the camera to connect users with content. Robitussin, for instance, partnered with TribalDDB for the “Robitussin Relief Finder” campaign, which included a branded app that enables users to match symptoms to the relevant Robitussin product. As a more personal device than the PC, the mobile phone has features that allow marketers to tailor messages according to a user’s location in real-time and based on past behavior. Dunkin’ Donuts worked with mobile ad network Where to include the address and distance to the nearest location in its mobile banner ad. Virgin America partnered with geosocial app vendor Loopt to push deals from nearby stores to travelers in its new SFO terminal. Privacy concerns about location-tracking via mobile, however, have also prompted legislation in the last year. Sens. Al Franken (D-Minn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) last year introduced the Location Privacy Protection Act, requiring that companies obtain users' consent before collecting location data or sharing the information with third parties. The Mobile Marketing Association in October released new privacy guidelines for app developers that outline best practices and provide sample language for privacy policies.
U.K.-based mobile payments firm Bango said Wednesday it had struck a deal to provide “payment services” to Facebook. The terse quality of the announcement was similar to one the company made when disclosing a partnership with Amazon in December. The release stated “it is too early in the relationship to accurately forecast the level of business which it may generate.” The agreement suggests Bango could provide wireless billing services to Facebook as the social networking giant seeks to monetize its mobile platform prior to its IPO. While boasting 425 million monthly active mobile users, Facebook conceded in its IPO filing that it hasn’t generated meaningful revenue from this side of its business to date. In addition to Amazon, Bango has worked with clients such as EA Mobile, Opera, BlackBerry App World and Fox Mobile Group o provide payments systems for phone bills and credit cards, as well as back-end analytics. Facebook may plan to use Bango to handle payments for apps, virtual goods or other mobile transactions. Facebook has launched an iPad app and opened up its mobile platform for the first time to third-party developers. According to Inside Facebook, the company currently uses Boku to process mobile phone payments for HTML5 games like CityVille. “This is only possible in the mobile Web version of Facebook, not native applications, because Apple and Android take 30% of in-app transactions on their platforms,” it stated in a post today. Carrier-based billing could provide an alternative to in-app purchases through the App Store or Android Market. Bango says its technology is optimized for Web-based apps. According to reports, Facebook plans to unveil a mobile advertising platform next month. About 85% of its $3.7 billion in revenue came from advertising, and the balance from its payments business. But the latter could get a further boost from the Bango partnership.
Clicks on tablet ads from paid-search campaigns rose five times higher in January compared with the same period a year ago, according to research released Wednesday from Rimm-Kaufmann Group (RKG), a digital marketing agency. Not all tablets generate the same click rate. Apple's iPad generates the majority of tablet traffic, with an 88% share, while Amazon's Fire managed to step in as a low-priced alternative, generating slightly more than 4% of tablet ad clicks in late December before dropping to 3.5% at the end of January. The traffic from non-iPad tablets still comprises less than or around 1% of total traffic for most. In January, RKG estimates the traffic at 0.8%. About 68.1 million tablet units shipped worldwide in 2011, up from about 19.6 million in 2010 worldwide, according to the IHS iSuppli Worldwide Tablet Market Tracker Q1 2012. The research firm estimates tablet manufacturers will ship an estimated 124 million units in 2012. Analyzing conversion metrics across tablets, phones and desktop, RKG found that clicks from shoppers using the Kindle Fire were far less valuable in January than those from users on almost any other device. When it came to generating revenue per click (RPC), the Kindle Fire ranked worse compared with all other tablets and iPhone. RPC for Fire came in at 83% lower than desktop and 84% lower than the iPad. Ironically, Fire runs a version of Google's Android operating system (OS), but still fared poorly compared with other Android tablets, which could not hold up as well to desktop computers or the iPad. RKG found greater variance in conversion rate than average order value. The AOV for the Fire came in at 28% lower than for desktop, but had a 76% lower conversion rate. Both metrics put Amazon's tablet closer to a typical Android phone than an Android tablet. RKG believes Kindle's performance suffers, in part, because of its smaller screen size, which makes it more challenging to make online purchases. Users are likely less affluent than those who own the iPad. The analysis points to comScore's findings that owners of the iPad have a yearly salary of more than $100,000, so owners are more likely to make frequent purchases. Size is one feature the Amazon Fire has in its favor, other than costing a fraction of the iPad. Tablet owners are more inclined to take the Fire with them. But Amazon loses money on Fire -- about $3 per unit, the company said in its Q4 earnings report.
After some ambitious second-screen programs around last Sunday’s Super Bowl, mobile content programmers are moving quickly into awards season. For some of these companies, the big game was just a kickoff to a run of live TV events that seem tailor-made for smartphone and tablet complements. In a world of on-demand and time-shifted TV consumption, awards shows are among the remaining mass media live events that cater to synchronized "second screening." Next up: Sunday’s Grammy Award ceremony. Event on-air host CBS and the Recording Academy recently launched a cross-platform multimedia extravaganza to generate buzz for the record awards this Sunday. Grammy Live will offer three days of videos and social media chatter in advance of Sunday’s telecast. The content is being fed to the Web at Grammy.com/live as well as the Grammy Live App for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. The Grammy Live videos have their own hosts -- Alison Haislip, Drew Hinze and John Norris -- fronting the events and background material that occur all this week. The pre-show material will lead into a backstage pass second-screen experience: red carpet and backstage cams, interviews in the press room and even views into a photo session with the winners by photographer Danny Clinch. The app version of the Live content also allows for interactive polling, social media coverage and a live stream of music from Grammy nominees. The app was developed by Trailer Park and is sponsored by Target. Third-party apps are gearing up for awards as well. Yahoo’s IntoNow CEO Adam Cahan tells Mobile Marketing Daily that the apps will benefit from even more ambitious complementary content than the company deployed for the Super Bowl. He is promising exclusive reporting from the awards themselves. The other Yahoo brands, such as OMG and Shine, will be providing synchronized polls about the nominees and categories. The app will aggregate relevant Twitter feeds of nominees. There will be direct purchasing of music tracks to capture impulse buying. Cahan says that IntoNow enjoyed sizable growth from its enhanced programming around football season. The app has been downloaded more than 2.6 million times with about 60% occurring on the iPad.
The app train keeps moving, although the arrival of HTML5 will help ease (but not halt) the acceleration we have seen in recent years, says Juniper Research in a new study. The UK researchers argue that worldwide revenues from apps (excluding ad revenues) will reach $51.74 billion in 2016 -- more than double the $22.4 billion generated in 2011 and up sharply from the $29.6 billion expected this year. The rise of smartphones is the driver behind the growth, although a large portion of apps downloaded in the world today still go to feature phones. Juniper observes that smartphones are responsible for much of the revenue from apps (71% in 2011), while older handsets only realized 21% of overall app revenues despite their high volumes. At the same time, tablets will be an important new source of revenue in apps in the coming years, soaring from 7% of revenue in 2011 to 25% by 2016. The app ecosystem has radically disrupted the traditional carrier’s model and placed itself between the network operator and the consumer. Whether -- and how -- carriers reintroduce themselves into this relationship is an open question, the report argues. The new regime offers a number of third-party app stores that have created their own direct-to-consumer relationships. While only a handful of stores like Handango and Motricity existed a couple of years ago, dozens now vie for attention. The Juniper report finds that while Apple leads the pack with 380,000 paid apps and 160,000 free apps, Android offers 130,000 paid and 270,000 free, BlackBerry App World, 40,000 paid and free apps; and Nokia’s Ovi Store, 90,000 apps. But also in market are LG with 4,000 apps, China’s Mobile Market (4,000), and Samsung’s store (5,700 paid and 3,200 free), Airtel App Central (103,000), Opera App Store (33,000) and Windows Marketplace (22,000 free, 18,000 paid), by their counts. At the same time, however, the app world is being pressured by the popularity of HTML5 to cut out the app store as middleman. Juniper argues in a video whitepaper accompanying the report that the HTML5-powered mobile Web presence may not be the best course for all developers and publishers. It theorizes that the larger media companies like FT and its HTML5 site will benefit most from direct-to-consumer models. These companies have existing scale online and a Web footprint that can be leveraged effectively in moving customers to an HTML5 mobile site. Small and medium-sized players may fare better within the app environment because it gives them greater distribution and potential visibility in acquiring new users. HTML5 may help app growth rates reach their peak soon, Juniper says -- but it will not undermine the app economy, especially in emerging markets.
With the Super Bowl over, time to focus on the next widely televised and advertised event: March Madness. For mobile marketers, the Super Bowl ads’ use of mobile displayed five takeaways essential for success: 1. Use mobile to extend engagement beyond the TV spot Building on 2011’s momentum, this year's Super Bowl commercials demonstrated increasing an ad’s value beyond 30 seconds of screen time. Brands employed multiple engagement tactics, including Twitter hashtags (Anheuser-Busch Platinum), Shazam (Pepsi King’s Court), SMS (NFL Million Dollar Fan) and QR codes (Go Daddy Internet Cloud). The benefit of extending engagement to mobile is twofold. First, today’s consumers consume television with mobile. According to InMobi, 39% of 2012 Super Bowl viewers used mobile devices in response to TV ads and 45% estimated they would spend 30+ minutes on their mobile during the game. More importantly, extending engagement increases ROI, whether driving purchases, increasing awareness or eliciting referrals. 2. Optimize for a mobile-specific experience Given the personal nature of mobile phones, effective mobile engagement requires a seamless user experience. From a technology perspective, three ads used mobile-initiated calls to action to drive Web site traffic (Pepsi, NFL and Go Daddy). On the positive side, all three linked to mobile-optimized sites (crucial since mobile devices have different viewing and download capacities). On the negative side, Pepsi’s Web site directed consumers to a YouTube page, which consumers could have found without Shazam. From a strategy perspective, mobile marketers need to provide incentives and relevance. The NFL’s Million Dollar Fan campaign is self-explanatory with regards to incentives. Another campaign, sent to subscribers on Barak Obama’s SMS list, arrived midway through the game commenting on “commercials not being that good this year.” I received this message literally as my family discussed that exact topic. 3. Broadcast calls to action for a sufficient amount of time A tricky aspect of mobile calls to action is that they require several consumer steps, and thus time. The NFL’s Million Dollar campaign demonstrated the best example of providing sufficient time for engagement. Not only was the call to action posted throughout the ad, but in a way that didn’t distract viewers from content and could easily be referenced after the commercial ended. 4. Test calls to action for scalability That said, the NFL Million Dollar campaign did commit one mobile marketing error. Many consumers that texted in failed to receive a response for several hours. In order to run effective mobile marketing campaigns, brand and brands’ providers have to make sure that calls to action can handle the real time requests consumers expect when using their mobile. Test to ensure that mobile campaigns reflect the interactive and immediate nature of the medium. 5. Make a compelling first impression According to a study from Harris Interactive, 97% of people planned on watching the Super Bowl with another person, with 47% saying that multiple people would be on their mobiles simultaneously. Events like the Super Bowl and March Madness are communal. Thus, in addition to satisfying people’s need for instant gratification, brands should take advantage of the viral effects available to those campaigns that engage consumers to the point that they refer others. Brands scratched the surface of a dynamite first impression on Sunday, with exclusive content available to app or QR code users, but March Madness marketers can and should look to make a bigger splash.
As fellow Mediapost columnist and social/mobile guru David Berkowitz pointed out the other day in one of my MoBlogs, it is pretty much astonishing that Facebook has allowed such scale to accrue on mobile without a clear monetization path here. In fact, from a consumer’s perspective, Facebook was among the first smartphone apps to make the case that mobile could be a superior platform to the desktop for some core interactive media habits. Not only was the Facebook interface cleaner and more usable in an app, but the smartphone seamlessly converged all of the multimedia input tools that could bring the sharing of life moments alive. Think of all the add-ons PC users have had to suffer in order to turn what was once a business machine into a personable peer-to-peer communication device: webcams, camera-to-PC USB links, headsets and microphones. Smartphones really are the multimedia P2P communications device that a rich social network has been waiting for. In the past year I cringed at the prospect of having to go to my desktop Facebook page. My smartphone pings me with a message from the social network when I need to attend to it, and I just use my phone to interact, even when I am at my desk or laptop. Of course part of the clean, well-lit place that is Facebook on devices is the absence of that right rail of ads. At some point we all expected the company to get into some ad model. Amazingly, it waited until the active user base for mobile access reached 425 million and a looming IPO forced the issue. And we still don’t know what the company is planning. The IPO filing hinted at sponsored stories being inserted into the news feeds. Execution would be key here. Twitter seems to have deployed its promoted tweets in a way that feels inoffensive and reminds people of the sponsored search result they have already become accustomed to in Google. But I would argue Facebook’s News Feed is not really a news feed in the same sense Twitter’s is. I think Facebook is more personal. Twitter is a broadcast medium that for many of us works like an RSS reader. And unlike promoted tweets that tend to appear as one follows a specific hashtag (again a search-like pull maneuver), the risk seems greater if ads are being inserted into a personal stream of exchanges among declared friends. But in a quiet announcement overseas last night (which didn’t stay quiet for very long), mobile payments and analytics company Bango said it has struck a deal with Facebook. Echoing a similarly cloaked deal the company made with Amazon last year, the release was curt and deliberately non-specific. “Bango today announces that it has signed an agreement to provide payment services to Facebook,” the company told its own investors in a press release. “The terms of this agreement are not being discussed. The Board believes it is too early in the relationship to accurately forecast the level of business which it may generate.” There has already been some speculation that the deal is really tapping Bango’s considerable mobile analytics platform. But the statement does specify “payment services,” so we have to take them at their word. The Bango deal naturally hints what Facebook may be considering as one mobile revenue stream: apps and virtual currency. Bango already powers payments for RIM, Electronic Arts, and others. In many cases, it enables carrier billing, which removes much of the friction for m-payments. While the overwhelming majority of Facebook revenue comes from advertising, revenue from virtual currency is a natural model for its mobile app. The app-within-an-app model that HTML5 allows for Facebook essentially makes it a player in the mobile app market. Creating a more seamless way for people to pay for credits or directly for apps could be enormous. As social games migrate into the Facebook app itself, one can imagine the app becoming a rival to the mobile operating systems on which it sits. For messaging, gaming and photo-storing, Facebook is already my daughter’s de facto operating system. Those habits can easily migrate to mobile, and some already have. Any in-app payment scheme is going to run up against Apple’s iOS App Store rules, which require Apple to get its cut of any in-app payments. Conceivably, the Bango deal could help Facebook do an FT-like end run around Apple. Carrier billing could make it easier for Facebook to sell virtual goods and credits via its mobile Web environment. It seems silly for Apple to let something like this happen, however. The iOS platform is a powerful driver of mobile usage for any partner. The integration of Twitter with iOS 5 helped that microblog increase monthly sign-ups 25%. The otherwise niche Wolfram Alpha search engine now gets a quarter of its overall traffic from the Siri voice assistant after Apple made the search service one of its default providers. It seems more likely Apple and Facebook will cut some kind of deal, especially as the social network starts taking on the contours of a rival mobile OS. To update Michael Corleone, keep your friends close and your frenemies closer. When Facebook brings a robust app ecosystem onto mobile, the game may very well change.
The mobile social network Path landed in the middle of a privacy firestorm this week, thanks to developer Arun Thampi, who learned that the company was uploading users' entire address books to its servers. "I’m not insinuating that Path is doing something nefarious with my address book but I feel quite violated that my address book is being held remotely on a third-party service," Thampi wrote in a post outlining his findings. "I love Path as an iOS app and I think there are some brilliant people working on it, but this seems a little creepy." Today, Path CEO Dave Morin apologized. He said the company has rolled out a new version of its program that prompts users to either opt in or opt out of sharing their address books. Morin added that Path has already deleted the data it collected about users' contacts. "We are deeply sorry if you were uncomfortable with how our application used your phone contacts," Morin said. He added that the Path's use of the data "is limited to improving the quality of friend suggestions when you use the ‘Add Friends’ feature and to notify you when one of your contacts joins Path." Morin was smart to have acted quickly. Still, the incident is yet one more instance of a tech company treating privacy as an afterthought. Consider, last year KISSmetrics and Carrier IQ found themselves embroiled in privacy dust-ups after independent experts reported on the companies' technology. In the case of KISSmetrics, privacy experts showed that the company was using ETags to store data in users' browser caches; when people erased their cookies, the company was able to recreate them with the information in the ETags. Carrier IQ has been under fire since late last year, when a developer posted a video showing how the company's software could log keystrokes. Both companies initially downplayed the significance of those findings. Both have since revised their software, or promised to do so. As with Carrier IQ and KISSmetrics, Path could well soon face litigation over the uploads. Scott Kamber, who has sued numerous Web companies for privacy violations, tells MediaPost that Path's data collection is actionable. "It's no longer a valid excuse to hear app developers say, 'Now that you've caught us, we'll fix it,'" Kamber says. "If these guys truly don't get it by now, they don't deserve custody of the personal information they're harvesting."