• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, October 8, 2010

The old saw about mobile media is that the U.S. is "behind" Asian and European markets in the evolution of consumer usage patterns and marketing models. I am not entirely convinced that really is the case. Even as the technologies approach parity across the three major markets, we see significant variance in usage.

Yesterday comScore released a cross-cultural study of mobile behaviors in the Japanese, U.S. and European. The hubris of technological determinists is their presumption that hardware will inspire and channel new behaviors. In fact, culture tends to shape technology uses around the values, habits and traditions of a given context.

One glaring example of difference is in the rate at which Japanese mobile users access video or mobile TV (22%) vs. U.S. (4.8%) and Europe (5.45%). TV is such an all-powerful, century-defining medium, it is hard to believe people wouldn't want it literally everywhere. This is not an issue of access, either. Almost all smartphones and many feature phones are now running on 3G networks that offer video of some kind. But just this week, one of the most ambitious programs to transmit live TV to handsets, Qualcomm's FLO TV, announced it was ceasing direct-to-consumer marketing of the service. Dropping into live signals just doesn't make sense to U.S. consumers no matter how much they love their TV. Video on demand may make more sense in the long run, but comScore's numbers suggest there is a long climb ahead.  

Although it may look as if everyone is spending a good deal of their mobile time text messaging one another, in fact the U.S. actually falls in the middle of the pack worldwide in SMS penetration. In Europe, 81.7% of the mobile subscribers use text messaging compared to 66.8% in the U.S. and 40.1% in Japan. The mode of mobile communication most favored in Japan is email, where 54% use it on their phones compared to only 27.9% in the U.S. and 18.8% in Europe. If any of you have tried communicating with your kids via their email account lately, you may have discovered that their person-to-person media mode is now much more entrenched in SMS or in exchanges via social networks. That may be why we are leading the world in mobile social network use (21.3% of subscribers) and our most popular brands are Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter, in that order.

Just as the appeal of video on mobile seems to vary by culture, it will be important to map how other media and merchandise segments converge onto the handheld device. Conventional wisdom long held that the phone would replace the portable music player as their functions converged. Of course, this would make the phone the next great merchandising and marketing battleground for the struggling music industry. Several years ago, Verizon and Sprint built elaborate on-deck music services that merchandised the latest artists and allowed downloads to handsets. And of course, the iPhone fully integrates a player and music store with the experience. And yet, after all of that, only 13.9% of U.S. mobile subscribers listen to music on their phones. And don't look to Japan for signs of things to come, because even fewer (12.5%) use their handsets for music there. And yet in Europe, 24.2% access tunes on phone handsets. Some mobile prognosticators are fond of saying that overseas markets are predictive of usage patterns in the U.S. Well, in this case, which market do we regard as leading edge, Asia or Europe?  

The disparity between time spent and investment on the Internet has already demonstrated that marketing dollars are slow to follow the eyeballs onto new technologies. When it comes to mobile marketing investment, I suspect that the metric most worth watching right now is one that's among the smallest across all three major regions. When it comes to accessing online retail, either for m-commerce or just for reference, even the supposedly evolved Japanese market is at only 7.2%, with the U.S. at 5.5% and Europe at 4.1%. Several agency executives (especially the ones not yet vested in mobile) have told me this is the leading indicator for them of serious mobile marketing spend. When the phone is shown to have woven its way into the retail experience, then the ROI becomes undeniable and the marketing money will flow.  

But here is a case where the raw survey numbers don't really capture the behaviors that are well ahead of marketers and even researchers. How many people in grocery store aisles and staring at shelves in big box stores can already be found on the phone? They either are doing a look-up at a Web site or more likely calling home to get an opinion on an item. The mobile phone is already a necessary in-store tool. The 16% of U.S. mobile customers who consult maps on their phones already are likely looking for directions to a store or service. Not all significant behaviors are fully visible in the data.