Category: News Articles

mobileStorm’s marketing communications manager, Eydie Cubarrubia, wrote the cover story for the November 28, 2007 issue of iMedia Connection. Titled “Brand winners in your Xbox,” the article explains how branded games for the console can further a brand’s sense of relevancy for consumers, in ways that mere in-game or pre-roll ads can not. The story appears both in iMedia’s print newsletter and online: http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/17480.asp

Redwood City, CA — mobileStorm CEO and founder Jared Reitzin will speak at the Consumer Technology Innovations conference November 27. During his presentations, he will discuss digital advertising as well as mobileStorm’s expertise in the space. The conference, held November 27-28 at Sofitel San Francisco Bay in Redwood City, California, brings together digital industry heavyweights, hot startups, and tech elites.

Jared Reitzin, CEO and founder of mobileStorm, is a columnist in DMNews’ new “Essential Guide To E-mail Marketing.” The special supplement of the news publication—which covers direct, database, and Internet marketing—is available online as a PDF file. Mr. Reitzin’s piece, “So you want to reach the inbox,” gives advice on how to avoid spam filters and gain consumer trust with permission-based email marketing. “The rules keep changing and marketers need to adapt, or it’s going to hurt their pocket books,” he writes.

See the video here

bnetTV.com interviewed mobileStorm CEO Jared Reitzin at the recent CTIA conference in San Francisco. Mr. Reitzin spoke about mobileStorm’s do-it-yourself digital marketing platform and how it helps customers such as Quantas, Carl’s Jr., Buzznet, and Palms Casino—as well as small business clients who can spend as little as $20 per month to create their own messaging campaigns. Check out the entire video here.

Marketers can’t afford to target every fish in the sea. With better aim and finely honed tools, they can take more time to invest in their customer relationships to create highly compatible lists.

by Jessica Tsai
From CRM Magazine November 2007

Without customers, marketing efforts obviously fall on deaf ears. But without the right customers, you likely end up with the same results anyway. Almost every business relies on a healthy — and hopefully hefty — customer list; but raising a list in an increasingly customer-driven world has forced marketers to adjust their approach. Consumer information — too much information, in many cases — is available everywhere, so it’s up to the marketing department to sift through the available data and find the best fit between what its company offers and the audience it should be targeting.Businesses often tend to take the easy way out and favor quantity over quality when it comes to building their customer lists. “It’s hard to be targeted,” says Elana Anderson, an independent consultant and former analyst with Forrester Research. “It requires analytic skills to reach the right people.” She adds, “Tactics like TV have a lot more glamour associated with it.”

Television commercials also strive to reach a large audience–and when the landscape was dominated by The Big Three networks, TV used to be a fairly definitive form of mass marketing. Unfortunately, the literal meaning of “mass” marketing no longer exists. “If anything, it’s used as a pejorative term,” says Richard Hren, director of product marketing at analytics firm SPSS, “for ‘anything that’s less than finely targeted.’” (The closest relative, he adds, would be buying a general list where each recipient is listed as “Occupant.” Still, even this method involves some sort of targeting, such as location.)

Today, however, with several hundred cable TV channels–and target audiences for each one growing increasingly narrow–companies have to be selective about where they put their ads. It’s unrealistic for marketers to want to reach everyone, everywhere. Fortunately, they’ve realized that attempts to attract just eyeballs are not only a waste of money and resources, but also a guaranteed way to transform potential consumers into a frustrated audience.

But Anderson says the supposedly negative results aren’t entirely the fault of the marketer. “If you look at the way marketing organizations were measured, many marketers, even today, are still measured on overall reach as opposed to conversion of leads,” she says. With those evaluations being counterintuitive to effective marketing strategies, it’s no wonder marketers are facing a serious dilemma. “As long as that metric is in place, marketers aren’t encouraged to be more effective,” Anderson says.

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Mobile Marketing Agency MobileStorm Lands Series A
By Tomio Geron 10/31/2007

Mobile marketing agency mobileStorm has received a Series A round of funding from sole investor eonBusiness.

The amount of financing was not released, but Centennial, Colo.-based eonBusiness normally invests between $250,000 and $1 million in companies, said eonBusiness Chief Executive Dave Carlson. The deal closed about two weeks ago.

Los Angeles-based mobileStorm provides marketing to small and medium-sized businesses via email, mobile voice and text messages, and RSS. Small companies can sign up and operate their marketing on the Web, while mobileStorm does direct sales to larger customers. Clients include Qantas Airways Ltd., CKE Restaurants Inc.’s Carl’s Jr., and Squaw Valley Ski Corp.

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CRM seeks to break barriers
By Kelly Hill | August 25, 2007 – 9:16 pm EDT

If businesses had Ten Commandments, No. 1 would probably be “Know Thy Customer.”

Easier said than done.

Customer information plays a crucial role in customer relationship management, from determining the type of offers and incentives that are made to customers to impacting growth and retention. The Internet is opening up new frontiers in gathering customer information, and potential advertising revenues make it ever more important for wireless companies to have a good handle on what they know about their customer base—in addition to the importance of the information for their own sales and marketing purposes.

But challenges remain in making the data accurate and easy to access.

The customer information involved can include demographic information (such as location, age and income); a buying history of products a customer has purchased from the company; revenue history; and perhaps also a loyalty profile, such as whether you belong to any loyalty programs that a company might offer.

According to Steve Bamberger, vice president of media, communications and utilities for Oracle, it simply isn’t enough to warehouse data on customers. It needs to be accessible yet secure, able to be queried and analyzed, accurate and up-to date.

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It’s now easier for mobileStorm.com visitors to use the company’s resources, thanks to a new RSS feed and a better way to search the mobileStorm site. Visitors can now instantaneously search mobileStorm’s extensive industry blogs, news articles and releases, and product update announcements–all of which will help marketers learn more about the industry as well as about mobileStorm’s offerings.

To get the latest information even more quickly, people can sign up for mobileStorm’s RSS feed, allowing them to receive notice of the latest postings in all four of the company’s blogs: Digital Marketing, Press, Product/News Updates, and CEO Jared Reitzen’s entrepreneur success blog. Users can also elect to receive postings by topic.

Check out our RSS page at /feed/rss/

by Jessica Tsai | DestinationCRM – August 2007

Mobile marketing is on the rise and the June 29 release of Apple’s new iPhone could be a marketer’s dream come true. With more enhanced features, more people will be interacting with their phones, which means more opportunities for companies to snag consumers. However, amidst this new wave of mobile marketing technology, there are still many companies that aren’t taking advantage of this resource. And for those that are, there are precautions that must be taken in order to optimize efficiency and increase customer receptiveness. So will high-end gadgets like the iPhone take mobile marketing to the next level?

In a study conducted by IDC, Scott Ellison, vice president of wireless and mobile communications, reported, “Mobile marketing is one of the few mobile opportunities in which the potential of the opportunity actually exceeds its current hype.” Many companies are still a little gun-shy when it comes to mobile marketing, and some don’t even know the technology is available to them. Ellison asserts, “If the mobile ecosystem is fully leveraged, mobile marketing can create a very different and more relevant customer experience of marketing and advertising.” Indeed, data is expected to surpass voice by 2011, says Jared Reitzin, CEO of mobileStorm.

Given this knowledge, one would expect the iPhone to be the perfect venue as it has the ability to receive and view emails, SMS messages, and video and audio clips, all at great quality. Still, there is concern that the iPhone may not live up to the hype, particularly because of its extravagant cost, and concerns about its last-generation transmission speeds. The iPhone itself costs from $499 to $599, plus the cost of switching carriers if you’re not with AT&T. IDC found that while 60 percent of 456 individuals surveyed are interested in the iPhone, only 10 percent are actually interested in paying full price for it. “There is a big leap between curiosity and commitment,” says Aaron Radelet, a spokesman for Sprint, which, thanks to Apple’s exclusive carriage deal with AT&T, has been locked out of the iPhone jackpot. (Early estimates claimed that Apple moved a half million iPhones in the first weekend of release.)

Apple also announced that the iPhone will have a battery life longer than any other smartphone on the market: 8 hours of talk time, 6 hours of Internet use, 7 hours of video playback, or 24 hours of audio playback. “With the iPhone, we’re gong to see a lot of ads where you’re walking down the street and you get a text message from the store a block away saying, ‘Hey, get an additional 10 percent off right now, come on in!’” Reitzin says.

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SUMMARY: Ready to hear the horrible truth? 64% of key decision makers are viewing your carefully crafted email on their BlackBerrys and other mobile devices, according to new MarketingSherpa data. And, chances are, your email looks downright awful.

By Chris Heine | MarketingSherpa – July 2007

What do you do? First, find a BlackBerry and see for yourself. Then, call for an immediate meeting with your email design team. To help, we’ve put together a list of tactics and creative samples so you can see just how truly bad it is. Plus, hotlinks to two cool simulators.
BlackBerrys are the device of choice for the business users over Treos and Palm Pilots. And while reviews on Apple’s iPhone are that it’s an incredibly wonderful Web tool, it’s not yet as mission-critical as the BlackBerry for email — especially when it comes to enterprise email applications.

Most marketers we talked to echoed Overamerica Media Group CEO Jon Levy, who says, “We believe that a significant percentage of our subscribers read their email in mobiles as the first point of contact. We are starting to commit ourselves to optimizing our email to work better in mobile because of it.”

You don’t have to send in just text-only email to reach BlackBerry users. If you’re truly dedicated to gaining an edge in this the-time-is-now niche through testing techniques and researching your database, there are ways of delivering richer media experiences to the BlackBerry crowd. Although more B-to-B people use BlackBerrys at the moment, that’s changing. The good thing is that our roundup of tips work for consumer marketers, too.

Demographics & Usage

Young adults are the primary users of mobile devices. According to new research from ExactTarget, which surveyed 4,202 mobile phone users, 7% of whom identified themselves as mobile email users:
o 38% are ages 18-44 vs 12% for ages 45-64
o 80% access their mobile email at home
o 39% admit to checking email while driving their cars

Users are also a wealthier demographic — 19% of mobile phone users with an annual household income of more than $100,000 regularly use their mobile devices to access email. For households earning $200,000+, that number doubles to 38%.

Another key point — people use mobile email differently. Primarily, it’s to stay on top of matters that users deem as urgent. 87% access the same email accounts from both their mobile device and through a computer at home or work, says Morgan Stewart, Director Research & Strategy, ExactTarget. Rendering, screen resolution and hard-to-use keyboards make mobile less desirable than desktops or laptops for accessing email.

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