Oct 9, 2009 2:15 PM, By Sarah Reedy

Mobile marketing vendors are achieving growth as brands reevaluate their ad campaigns with a focus on mobile

SAN DIEGO, CALIF. – Mobile is coming out ahead as brands reevaluate their advertising budgets. The mobile advertising and marketing market has been a long time in the making, but vendors at the CTIA IT & Entertainment show say it is making progress – thanks in large part to the bad economy. The recession has helped make a case for mobile as brands move away from generic campaigns to more personalized, relevant marketing tactics.

According to the Mobile Marketing Association, no company spent more than $200,000 to advertise on mobile last year, but that has quickly begun to change. As of March, Land Rover and Jaguar became the first to invest in multimillion dollar mobile campaigns and many other brands are following in the car makers’ footsteps and exploring new forms of mobile interaction.

“The majority of campaigns run in messaging today,” said Kristine van Dillen, director of industry initiatives and partnerships at the MMA. “Messaging is where brands are spending most of their money then banner ads then applications.”

There is lots of interest in applications, created by the iPhone, van Dillen said. The distribution has become easier as has discoverability with new storefronts popping up. In-apps are still a challenged form of mobile marketing, however, as fragmentation and unsteady business case affect the industry. Ads within apps aren’t always the best experience too, David Ko, senior vice president of Yahoo Mobile, acknowledged in a CTIA Keynote address. They often open the browser and kick a user out of the app they were using. As part of its expanding mobile strategy, Ko said that Yahoo is taking advantage of HTML and its relationships with advertisers to integrate ads into the apps in as seamless and unobtrusive a way as possible.

While developers are still working out the kinks with app ads, search and SMS are two areas that continue to grow. Google this week expanded its mobile search platform, AdSense, enabling it on a slew of new handsets, including the iPhone, Android and Palm webOS phones. According to Google, the goal is to enable mobile publishers to earn money and fund more web content and mobile-specific sites.

Multiple vendors are banking on SMS messaging campaigns, one of the first iterations of mobile marketing, as well. The size of the market in the US will grow from $718 million in 2009 to $2.2 billion in 2010, according to Juniper Research. Mobile ad vendor OpenMarket responded to that opportunity with the launch of its SMS-Advertising service this week. The service connects text content providers with a host of targeted ads to embed in their messages.

VeriSign also announced this week that its Messaging and Mobile Media division is teaming up with iLoop mobile to provide an SMS marketing solution directed at enterprises. It already includes HP as a customer using the integrated platform to power mobile marketing campaigns to its 80 million Snapfish users. iLoop Mobile and VeriSign are targeting enterprises of all sizes, as well as advertising and direct marketing agencies, media, entertainment, professional sports and Web entities.

Another vendor, mobileStorm, now in its tenth year of business, got its start in SMS campaigns for the music industry. The company has since moved away from music to focus on a marketing and email campaigns for a host of customers, ranging from Overstock.com to retail stores to Kaiser Permanente. CEO Jared Reitzin said the mobile concept has taken on like wildfire in a lot of industries, while others are still approaching it with caution. mobileStorm does three-month pilot programs with these customers to help them shape their mobile strategy, and Reitzin said there is always an education element in the process. Even so, the company has seen consistent growth in the last year as brands that may be scaling back their overall ad budget move away from standard blast marketing campaigns and towards digital marketing for the targeting and real-time reporting it can provide.

“Traditional media is down so much that brands want something new,” added Lee Durham, CEO of Local Solutions Network (LSN). “There’s a groundswell; it just makes sense.” LSN provides localized content and ads to its brands and partners with all the major carriers to have their content syndicated on mobile. Durham said the company is working with the carriers on adding location to advertisements, but is still in the discussion phase right now.

There are still challenges in the mobile marketing, including the lack of a strong method of tracking mobile ad metrics, but van Dillen said the MMA is tacking this with a two-pronged approach that looks at both ad measurement and industry metrics.

“We have all these mobile marketing channels we are looking at, and different brands care about different metrics,” van Dillen said. “It goes so much further than just an impression. We are working with the [Media Rating Council] to establish the global market guidelines, which will be published mid-next year.”

The guidelines will have a baseline requirements for how to measure basic elements in mobile, including banner ads and click-throughs, as well as technical details on how to measure impressions. Some issues the MMA is tackling include whether impressions should be measured on the client or server side, when a message is sent, delivered or read, and how to best capture and report engagement.

Ninety per cent of cell phone users in the U.S. can receive text messages. Marketing to these cell phone users via text messages could be an opportunity for ecommerce merchants. mobileStorm is a text-message-marketing company and its CEO, Jared Reitzen, visited with Practical eCommerce’s Kerry Murdock on how text-message (also known as short message service, or “SMS”) marketing works.

By Alexis Stevens

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Students aren’t usually allowed to use their cellphones at school. But under the “Text a Cop” plan, Marietta High School students won’t face disciplinary action for their efforts to keep their school safe.

The Marietta school board voted 6-0 Tuesday night to allow students to send text messages to two police officers on campus.

“It’s just the way our students communicate these days,” said Marietta High principal Leigh Colburn, who said parents are excited about the progressive program. “Marietta wants to be out front of school safety.”

The idea is that students will be encouraged to report items of concern, whether it be rumored plans of other students, or something more personal, such as abuse.

Marietta Lt. Cliff Kelker said if something serious is happening on campus, text messages will provide quick response.

“We can get help faster than any other way we have out there,” said Kelker, who oversees school resource officers.

Marietta High’s 1,900 students are served by two officers, Andrew Fondas and Jeff Reed, as well as a black Lab named Blue.

Rather than a full phone number, students will be provided a six-digit number that they can message 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A company calledmobileStorm of California will monitor the texts and alert officers when needed, Kelker said.

Cellphone numbers are not easily tracked, helping preserve students’ anonymity when reporting issues.

“If it works once, it’s worth it,” said board member Tom Smith.

The Next Frontier: FTEU
By Monica Alleven
WirelessWeek – September 01, 2008

DMNews:E-mail marketing is on the move

Marketing e-mail through mobile devices can be a challenge for marketers, who may not yet be comfortable developing messages for the third screen. Four experts offer their tips.

Mike Thompson
Chief deliverability officer, ClickSquared

Challenging your audience to find what they want on a screen that is no more than an inch high is a surefire way to render apathy rather than fos­ter return readership. If possible, get your users to opt in to mobile device e-mails, so you can more easily identify and segment to build custom content.

Once you understand consumer preferences, design the content specifi­cally for its intended use. Make it simple to engage. People will navigate away from an e-mail in seconds if it doesn’t load. Mobile e-mails should be brief and require little scrolling. The call to action should be as close to the top as is possible.

Use a single-column setup. Most mobile e-mail readers, including those installed on Symbian devices, Palms and BlackBerrys, can’t display multiple side-by-side columns. They will haphaz­ardly reorganize the page back into a single-column screen.

Think about how you link. Hyper­linking text will not always render and remain clickable. Ensure that your links will be clickable by the broadest range of readers possible.

THE TAKEAWAY
Create an opt-in list to help you segment your target audience

Eydie Cubarrubia
Marketing communications manager, MobileStorm

E-mail is reaching consumers no mat­ter the time of day or where they are. However, technological limitations, dif­ferent phone models and screen size all mean that marketers need to carefully craft the messages they plan to send.

E-mail sent to BlackBerrys are a critical way for marketers to reach early technology adopters, who tend to have disposable income. Marketers should limit header sizes, put as much text as possible on the opening page and place links and images at the end of a message so as not to distract readers. Because BlackBerrys have minimal JavaScript capabilities, marketers should not use scripts within the HTML page.

Apple’s iPhone appeals to a broader demographic. The iPhone’s ability to offer a full-screen Internet experience closer to the personal computer means that design issues aren’t as important.

No matter what device, mobile e-mail allows for richer messages. Coupons, newsletters, and other content with an immediacy factor are some of the mobile e-mail opportunities awaiting marketers — and their engaged customers.

THE TAKEAWAY
Calibrate your message to display well on a wide range of mobile devices

Greg Cangialosi
CEO, Blue Sky Factory

Mobile e-mail offers little in the way of standardization, making it difficult to design creative that works across plat­forms. Further, marketers are unable to determine whether users are checking e-mail on a computer or on a mobile device. Some devices will only display text-based e-mails, while improperly rendering any HTML.

One common solution is using a mul­tipart multipurpose Internet mail exten­sion (MIME), which includes both an HTML and a text-only version in the same message and displays the version that the user’s e-mail client is set to dis­play. Another tactic is to link to a mobile friendly version of your e-mail at the top of the creative, allowing mobile recipi­ents to easily view a text- or browser-based version of the message.

Marketers must concentrate on focused, succinct content messaging. The proliferation of mobile devices and the increased demand for mobile e-mail requires a strategic response by e-mail marketers.

THE TAKEAWAY
Implement a multipart MIME to hedge against different devices’ e-mail clients

Len Shneyder
Director of partner rela­tions & individual communications, Pivotal Veracity

The vanguard of smartphone users have upgraded their devices annually, opting for better features and more powerful gadgetry. However, the e-mail clients on the most popular devices haven’t evolved as dramatically.

For years, Blackberry users have been reading HTML e-mails without the images, formatting and stylistic elements marketers intended them to see. Make sure that your carefully crafted mes­sage is multidimensional and there is as much meaning in your copy and text as your images.

Since mid 2007, both Enterprise Service and Blackberry IS display the HTML part of a multipart message, but with all HTML tags removed.

This is a key distinction, as you must ensure that what remains in your HTML e-mail after formatting and tags are removed will retain a coherent meaning. Blackberry recognizes URLs even when they are hyperlinked, and will display both the hyperlinked text (but not as clickable text) as well as the full URL, which will be clickable. Symbian, the most popular OS outside of North America, behaves similarly.

THE TAKEAWAY
Simplify your mobile e-mail messaging, eschewing HTML in favor of quality copy

Mr. Reitzin said that it all boils down to sending the “right message” to the “right person” at the “right time.” He focused on the pros and cons of email, still the predominant messaging channel, and SMS, which reaches a rapidly increasing number of consumers anywhere at any time.

“Digital messaging has become the preferred method for communication,” he said.

Mr. Reitzin spoke to students in Professor Mark Latonero’s Introduction to Entertainment and Tourism class. His engagement at Cal State Fullerton is one of the many events during the university’s 30th annual Communications Week.

mobileStorm

mobileStorm, which provides digital marketing products and services, announced a new premium short message service for its Stun! platform.

The service gives clients the option to earn money on certain text messages and content by having cellphone users pay for the service through their phone bill, said the company. mobileStorm said the service allows clients to promote voting contests that call for participants to pay a fee to vote for their favorites via SMS. Clients also can create subscription campaigns and charge a monthly fee for the premium content, it said.

The service is supported on several carrier and MVNO services, including, AT&T Mobility, Sprint Nextel Corp., T-Mobile USA Inc., Verizon Wireless, Boost Mobile, Midwest Wireless, Alltel Corp. and Virgin Mobile Inc., said mobileStorm.

With marketing budgets allotting more funds to e-mail advertising and companies valuing good service, it’s no wonder that e-mail service providers are reaping the advertising benefits. Today’s consumer does not wait for the Sunday paper to get in on the good deals (those days are over); there is no waiting in virtual space. mobileStorm is thriving in the multi-channel/multi-modal marketing world and is the voice of the small to midsize businesses, as validated by JupiterResearch report E-Mail Marketing Guide, 2008. In order for business to succeed it must adapt to the consumers’ expectation and mobileStorm has been meeting and exceeding the needs of the consumers.

In an article about products that are best for email and mobile marketing campaigns, Inc. listed mobileStorm among its six top selections.

Said the magazine, “Here’s our pick of services that let you manage subscriber lists, comply with spam regulations, monitor bouncebacks, and obsessively track who opened and clicked on what.”

For more details, read the Inc. article: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080301/dear-customer.html

Surely one of the greatest developments in the short history of e-mail marketing is the “report spam” button.

Once AOL developed the complaint button and in 2001 pioneered using a so-called feedback loop to supply e-mailers information on who complained—after which other inbox providers followed suit—marketers could no longer claim ISPs were blocking their messages unfairly and arbitrarily.

Now, e-mail service provider mobileStorm has taken the feedback loop one step further by integrating a “complain” tab into its e-mail template right next to the “unsubscribe” tab so clients must use it.

What’s more, mobileStorm has written into its terms of use a clause giving it the legal right to fine and fire clients who spam.

The contract even outlines a scaled pricing structure that gets more punishing as the percentage of spam complaints clients generate rises.

MobileStorm also monitors the feedback loops provided by the various inbox providers to see how many complaints clients generate at them, as well.

To warn clients off spamming, mobileStorm reserves the right to charge $10 per complaint to clients who get complaint rates of from 0.31% to 0.7%.

For comparison, it is generally understood that a complaint rate of 0.5% or higher will result in delivery troubles at the major ISPs.

As for marketers generating higher spam-complaint percentages, mobileStorm reserves the right to charge $25 per complaint to those who get rates of from 0.71% to 1%; $50 per complaint to those whose complaint rates are from 1.01% to 5% and $100 per complaint to customers whose rates are 5.01% or higher.

MobileStorm also monitors the number of complaints sent about clients to anti-spam blacklist SpamCop and contractually reserves the right to charge customers on an increasingly punishing basis for those as well—up to $500 per complaint for from 11 to 15, for example.

“Do we enforce it that often? No. We most likely get rid of the client first,” said mobileStorm’s CEO Jared Reitzin. “The policy is in place for people who we’ve warned and who we’ve gone on record as warning, so when we charge them there isn’t really much they can do about it because they’ve entered into this contract.”

However, he added: “We usually do enough due diligence with a client that we pretty much know they’re going to be good to go before they sign the contract.”

It’s not unusual for ESPs to monitor their clients’ spam complaints and other factors that go into creating a mailer’s so-called reputation, if for no other reason than to protect their own servers from getting blocked by ISPs. However, making clients provide their own report-spam button and sign a contract that says the ESP can fine them if they get too many complaints is unusual.

Does the contract prevent mobileStorm from getting some business? “It can, yeah,” said Reitzin.

He also said that on several occasions, would-be clients balked at the word “complain,” saying it was too harsh. He added he let a well-known shoe company that he declined to name change it to “grumble.” But other than that reasonably small concession, mobileStorm does not let clients’ e-mail hit people’s inboxes without that complaint tab.

“The only way you can grow [as an ESP] is if your delivery is good,” said Reitzin. “If you’re sending crap through your system all the time, you’re going to get blocked by the ISPs.”

He added: “ISPs have to protect their subscribers from spam. If their service sucks there will be attrition. At the same time they have to keep their subscribers happy by letting them receive the content they want to receive. I have to sit down at the dinner table with AOL, Yahoo and Hotmail and look them in the eyes and tell them that mobileStorm is doing everything it can to work with legitimate marketers.”

Maintaining an in-house feedback loop and reserving the right to fine spamming clients would seem to be a highly innovative way to do just that.