Payment union

In August, international payment provider Paysafecard partnered with BT to launch a service to enable mobile users on all UK networks to buy products online and charge them to their mobile bill.

Growth doubles

PricewaterhouseCoopers and the IAB reported that the UK mobile ad market was worth £28.6 million in 2008, a 99.2 per cent increase on the previous year.

Security alert

At the Black Hat Cybersecurity Conference in Las Vegas, researchers showed how they could ‘hijack every iPhone in the world' and hack virtually any other smartphone, using falsified SMS and MMS messages.

Location catches on

The number of consumers worldwide using location-based mobile services is set to double in 2009 to 95.7 million compared with 2008, according to a report from Gartner.

Display can work

A study conducted by Brand Driver for the IAB and KitKat found that mobile display ads can boost brand awareness by up to 36 per cent among consumers.

Blyk falls down

Ad-funded mobile network Blyk recently gave up on its standalone model and went into partnership with Orange. Blyk's 200,000 subscribers had their SIM cards deactivated in August, but an Orange-branded ad-funded service launched in the same month.

Search worth billions

Analyst firm The Kelsey Group predicts that mobile search revenues in western Europe will grow from €39m (£36m) in 2008 to €2.3 billion (£2.1bn) in 2013.

User numbers on the rise

The Mobile Data Association reports that 17.38 million people in the UK used their phone to access the internet in December 2008 compared with 16.7 million in the previous year.

A phone on your wrist

Orange is planning to launch the first touchscreen watch phone. The LG model is one of several ‘future phones' that Orange will be rolling out over the next 18 months.

Independent app store GetJar, the veteran of the app-store scene which launched in 2005, has also chipped in with 500 million downloads of its own. Between them, and in just over a year, the app-store operators have brought mobile marketing firmly to the mainstream. But as the brands pile into the cluttered app space, they are missing a trick if they believe that apps are the be-all and end-all of mobile marketing.

New technology

For a start, there are more new technologies for the innovative marketer to play with than ever before. Recently, the hype has been around QR codes, which provide easy access to mobile content by taking a picture of the code with a phone's camera. FMCG giants Pepsi and Coca-Cola have proved that QR codes are truly a mass-market marketing technique (see Casebook), and brands are ramping up experiments.

Augmented reality takes location-based services one stage further on the limited number of devices that have a digital compass built in. The technology enables the phone to know where you are and which way you are pointing, so when you aim the phone in a given direction, it can sense which building it is pointing at and return real-time information about it. IBM produced an AR app for the 2009 Wimbledon tennis championships, in which the user could point their Android-enabled phone at a court to find out the current score in the match being played there. AR will catch on but it could take some time.

Brands are also experimenting with near-field communication, which uses the phone as a contactless payment device, and mobile ticketing and barcodes, which replace paper tickets and coupons with a mobile equivalent for easy scanning or redemption at the turnstile or till.

There's no doubt that all these technologies have something of a wow factor, but some are hampered by the fact that they require additional hardware or software to be installed on handsets. This will change, of course, as point of sale and other systems are renewed, and even basic handsets become all the more sophisticated. But it's important that marketers do not get hung up on the technology. Instead, they need to focus on what they are trying to achieve and the part the mobile channel can play in helping them to do this.

Display can work

In the early days, mobile advertising was, not surprisingly, dominated by mobile-content companies, which saw, and indeed still do see, display ads as a great way to drive traffic to their mobile sites. Mainstream brands have joined in, attracted by the fact that targeting is similar to online, by virtue of where you place your ads and the profile of the typical visitor to that type of site. But if you are running a mobile-ad campaign, remember that you'll need a mobile website to which consumers can click through.

But display on mobile can be small and, as a result, of limited impact. Plus there's the problem of inefficiencies in buying mobile media. Independent mobile-media planners and buyers, such as RingRing Media and Yodel Digital, have recently emerged to take some of the pain out of the process.

"With around 25 buying points, it's time-consuming and can be confusing," says Harry Dewhirst, operations director at RingRing Media. "Some of the networks have different-sized creatives to others, there are different requirements for animated or non-animated graphics, and the ad-serving technology is not as robust or as customisable as online."
But despite these ongoing issues, Dewhirst says that RingRing has been booking mobile space to the tune of around £500,000 per month since its launch in May 2008. So there's no doubt that the demand is there for display ads on mobiles to increase in effectiveness.

Search is essential

The IAB's figures put the value of paid-for mobile search at £14.4 million, just over half of all spend on mobile advertising. Many feel that search could be mobile's killer app in terms of revenue generation. After all, if someone performs a search on their mobile phone for a particular brand, it suggests they're looking to buy something from the brand, rather than simply find information about it.

"Advertisers are realising that a lot of decisions are made by users when they are on the go, such as where to eat and where to go, so this is potentially a rich market for advertisers," says Google mobile product manager Robert Hamilton.

Google, and its competitors, seem to appreciate the unique nature of search on mobile. Both Google and Yahoo! offer results ranked by their proximity to the user's location, and both brands also offer a voice-enabled mobile search engine, to sidestep what can sometimes be a fiddly process of entering text on a phone.

So the search engines get mobile search, but do brands? Mick Rigby, chairman of Yodel Digital, has his doubts. "Mobile search is woefully overlooked by the majority of big brands in the UK; I just don't think they have really thought about it," he says. "If you try Googling a well-known name, the chances are it won't come up first in the mobile search, or another more ‘random' business will have bought the PPC link – usually a mobile-content supplier. One of the easiest and least expensive things to do in mobile is to get your search strategy sorted out."

Why SMS won't wow

While display and search are both essential ways of catching the eye of new customers, mobile CRM – which may appear to be as boring as hell – is important for brands because it's all about using the mobile channel to hang on to those existing customers. Mobile-data services provider Incentivated runs a variety of campaigns on behalf of the Greater London Authority. One enables people to find their nearest licensed taxi firm, another their closest recycling facility. Both use SMS, in combination with location information.

For some reason, in the UK at least, SMS has not caught on as an advertising medium, though it is popular in many other countries. In South Africa, for example, a campaign that enables a pre-paid mobile-phone user to send a free, ad-funded SMS to a friend asking the friend to call them, generates 22 million messages per day.

In the UK, Rapid Mobile Media is aiming to capitalise on the ubiquity of SMS with its ad2text platform, which enables an ad to be tagged onto the end of a text message sent to a mobile-phone user seeking a number from a directory-enquiry service, for example, or perhaps a goal alert from their favourite football team.

But there's little to suggest that SMS advertising is going to make its mark in the UK, as Blyk found when it was forced to pull the plug on its model that offered free phone credit to teens in return for their agreeing to receive ad messages.

So while there is more to mobile than apps, poor take-up of old technologies such as SMS, MMS and mobile sales promotion suggests that there's certainly no point in looking back.

While display and in particular search can provide a solid bedrock for any mobile marketing campaign, apps, AR and QR codes should provide the modern marketer with a brand new toolset, one that far out-does anything that's gone before and one that will become essential as mobile continues its explosive growth.

Smart think!ng: Mobile advertising

1. Don't get hung up on technology – think about your objectives and the mobile tools at your disposal

2. Use short codes to enable quick and easy response to your offline campaigns via mobile apps

3. Ignore mobile search at your peril. If your online search strategy is nailed down, it's easy to do the same or similar on mobile

4. Use mobile sales-promotion campaigns to collect mobile numbers, and secure opt-ins to use them for future marketing campaigns

5. Create a dedicated mobile website, then use mobile advertising to drive traffic to it

This mirrors the stats in the US, where according to Nielsen, mobile web browsing is up by 34 per cent, thanks to female consumers, teens and those aged 65 and over.

The explosion of smartphones, including Apple's iPhone, is enabling brands keen to experiment with mobile to interact with consumers at a time that is convenient to them, while providing them with a more interactive, engaging and memorable experience.

It's mainly the big-name brands that are embracing mobile and integrating the channel into their digital marketing mix. Pioneers include: Comic Relief for providing consumers with a mobile-donation mechanic; Vodafone for enabling users to create a fully personalised mobile internet experience; and Walkers, which has blended online, SMS, WAP, email, social media and apps as part of its ‘Do us a flavour' campaign. I'm confident that this innovation will continue into 2010 and beyond.

Ben Cusack is the group creative director of Mobile Interactive Group

In mobile, it pays to think carefully about your offer or your incentive, and how it relates to your target audience. When Coca-Cola was planning its latest campaign, it could have gone down a variety of routes using one of a number of technologies, from the ubiquitous iPhone app to something harnessing the power of QR Codes to connect consumers directly to mobile content.

Instead, it opted for a simple approach, which gives its customers free mobile credit in return for buying its Fanta, Dr Pepper and Sprite brands.

The ‘Every Pack Gets 50p' mobile credit promotion, designed and executed by Sponge, was launched in mid-July. It was intended to run for approximately one month, which was as long as the stocks were expected to last. It offered consumers 50p free mobile credit for every 330ml can and 500ml bottle of Fanta, Dr Pepper and Sprite they bought up to a maximum of £4. Each can and bottle carried a special code, the first of which had to be redeemed online at a bespoke website, gimmecredit.co.uk. Subsequent codes could be redeemed via the site, or by sending a text to short code: 85888.

The promotion, running across all mobile networks, recognised that mobile usage continues to grow among the teen audience. Coca-Cola says it has used this insight to give its core 16-plus teen market in the UK a reward they will really appreciate and use in the form of free mobile credit.

The offer is intended to be redeemed against all major network operators on both pay-as-you-go and contract phones.

"We are always looking at innovative ways to engage with our teen consumers," says Coca-Cola Great Britain marketing director Cathryn Sleight. "We know mobiles are integral to their lives and we wanted to bring them value and a point of difference that will fully engage them with the promotion."

Sponge chief executive Dan Parker adds: "You ask any teenager what they really want for their mobile phone and they always say the same thing: ‘gimme credit.' This campaign is the first to offer mobile credit on every network operator in the UK. It's been a monumental job to pull this together across every network and the many MVNOs, and we feel sure it will deliver a great result for Coca-Cola."