Strategies to Fight Ad-sponsored Rivals

I just read this great article by Thom Kennon and thought it would be worthwhile to re-publish it on my blog to spread the word. This is an absolute must read for every marketer. It is a wake-up call for all those who still think that mobile marketing can be “the fifth wheel” of a marketing strategy or, worse still, that mobile marketing does not need to feature at all.

Making mobile the heart of multichannel marketing in next planning cycle

Thom Kennon is vice president of strategy at Wunderman

I bet you have become as weary as me when, each year, usually during the post-Thanksgiving prediction season, we start reading those pieces about “This year [coming year] is definitely the Year of Mobile.”

In the spirit of this tradition, we offer up a short pop quiz to help you calculate exactly when your own personal year of mobile was:

Diageo launches searchable night life, entertainment database and mobile on-demand service – NiteFly. Available to subscribers in select British cities, NiteFly lets opt-in punters stumble from clubs at closing hours, ping the service from their mobile phones and quickly find what’s next on the drinking and dining dance card for an after-hours lark.

OK – guess the year. 2009? 2007? Maybe back in the dark ages of 2003? Nope. It was pre-digital apocalypse – 2000. Although I do not know why they trusted me and us, I lead the digital marketing team that concocted it.

Case and point being, whether you are a brand or a marketer, at this point in the game it is highly recommended that you sort out your own personal year of mobile – and get on with it.

Chances are you have a similar story, perhaps even of similar vintage.

Even for those of us still awaiting some great, communal customer-led surge into the mobile channel (hint: stop that), there are, of course, things left to do, frontiers to brave, case studies to create, business to be won and customers to be captured.   Many, I would boldly suggest, through mobile.

We’re gonna need a new map
So, what is your plan?

Unless you are a dedicated mobile agency, provider or channel specialist, when you sit down to plan your – or your client’s – marketing campaign calendar, how often do you start with mobile?

I am suggesting we not simply move “mobile” to the front of the planning queue from its current position as the last box ticked. Perhaps you start each new planning cycle with a simple, must-answer question: “What’s mobile’s role in my all-channel plans and how will it be integrated?”

Here is an example. You are a credit card issuer who traditionally focused mostly on direct mail, digital display and search engine marketing when it came to hitting your acquisition numbers.

After a duck-and-cover year (for many of us), you are now ready to venture from the bunker and resume with the important work of getting new customers. What if you modified your planning process by asking yourself this, instead of where does mobile – maybe – fit within my digital strategy:
 
What’s the role of mobile within my overall marketing strategy? Heck, let us be specific. What’s the role of mobile within my above-the-line and advertising strategy?  What’s the role of mobile in my integrated search strategy? My out-of-home and print strategies? How about my retail, merchandising and customer/partner marketing programs and campaigns?

Pretty soon your card customer acquisition campaigns will all start including mobile as a primary call to action for your out-of-home ads. As a critical push/pull from Web with SMS links to register or buy. Even incentivized “txt to a friend” offers tapping mobile’s viral reach, ease and affect. Oh, of course, optimizing for mobile search visibility to capture mobile searchers for bank branches.    

See where I am heading? You need a new map to get you there. A map that lets you see where, how, and when mobile fits everywhere into the plan. A map which, perhaps, presumes that mobile’s role is not at the end or even at the beginning of your all-up campaign channel and media planning process. It is at the heart.

New model planning
As we all emerge from the same bunker as our credit card brand colleague above, whether we are marketing soda, mobile phones, insurance, hamburgers, or luxury autos it is not too far of a stretch to suggest that “digital” – in all its components and expressions – can, should, must now live at the heart of our fully integrated marketeering strategy.

And, at the heart of our digital channel and media strategy, we boldly place mobile.  Call it an exercise, call it a lark. 

Call it a new way of thinking inside-out, about how we plan, implement and optimize our all-channel/all-media marketing. Call it a new planning model that better fits with the brave new world we inhabit as we improvise, invent and innovate our way towards wringing the maximum efficiency from all our marketing spend.

As presumptuous and vain as it might seem, things might start to look something like this …

What do we do now
OK, OK, I know this is a lot to suggest in one sitting. Toss a little water in your face, walk around a little, take a break. OK, we ready? Let us continue.

As we shift our above-the-line budgets from channels and media focused on impressions and clicks to more organic and responsive messaging to ignite discovery and sharing, I am suggesting that digital has every right to sit at the center of our planning process and models. And there is mobile, in the center of the plan model.

If you need a really persuasive reason for the board or your boss or you client, try this: When it comes to all-channel marketing nothing has changed the digital marketer’s playbook more than the emergence, adoption and increasing affordability of the mobile Web since search changed everything the last time.

To put this in an historic frame, before that, arguably, it was the birth of data-driven direct mail. Before that, and I know you beat me there – television.

The mobile Web. It is that big. What this means for marketers – especially for those amongst us who have yet to experience their own personal year of mobile – is this: you have no excuse for staying on the side lines.

Assuming you have been busy over the past decade getting really good at digital content strategy, search optimization, online CRM, ecommerce and response analytics you will be fine. Your mobile strategy and your digital strategy just became one and the same thing.
 
Pockets are everywhere and so are purses, briefcases and those weird holster things – and most of them have mobile devices in them. The simple fact is that there will soon be more than 1 billion Web-enabled mobile devices in global circulation and every one of them is attached to a potential customer of yours or mine.

So, as you plan for next year and beyond and chart the media, channel and touch point mix that will deliver your most efficient return on reaching specific business and marketing targets such as sales, downloads, visits, usage, referrals, repeats, renewals, average basket size, in-store traffic and bottom-line results, ask yourself: how many of those could use mobile as an essential touch point or consumption point in the mix?

Chances are, there’s not a campaign you could think of in 2010 and beyond – above the line, below the line and through the line – that could not be boosted, anchored, amplified or even saved by asking mobile to do its job. Mobile is at the heart of your new marketing model. 

Happy personal year of mobile – to repeat and first-time callers alike.

Thom Kennon is vice president of strategy at relationship marketing agency Wunderman New York. Reach him at thom.kennon@wunderman.com

A truely clever integration of traditional print marketing and digital marketing. Ok not everyones cup of tea but used to great effect in this execution.

To launch a new deodorant in Uruguay, the Lowe Ginkgo agency in Montevideo have combined traditional print media with mobile. So how does it work?

You open up a magazine, browse as normal, flickering through the ads as you do until you come across a picture of a quite simply gorgeous blonde with blank white spaces.

You frustratingly look around the ad for an explanation and read: To complete this ad send AXE to 2345 after 9 pm.

The moment the text is received, an MMS is sent to your mobile with the rest of the ad. Placed over the page, which of course you would do, suddenly makes the ad complete.

As reported by The Next web.com

Today the overwhelming majority of people with mobile phones use it to communicate with each other. Interactive communication is the most predominant, most consistent, and most active use of the mobile today.

The mobile phone is a communication and social tool. The mobile has given a freedom to the consumer to be contactable, organise, gather knowledge, to fill downtime. For brands to be successful in mobile they need to identify and tap into these ideals.  

Many today do not utilise the moments of interactive communication to inform consumers of products, services and opportunities. The most common approach is to create another mode of opted-in, one way communication.

Is no one in our mobile ecosystem reading the statistics about how people are actually using their phones?  As an industry, why are we not tapping into the primary use of the phone today – interactive communication – for marketing purposes?

Certainly, mobile ad networks have been successful, and will continue to be successful, for the right clients with the right campaign. Most support the traditional method of marketing – audience reach.

The question we really need to begin to ask is how can we create advertising that people want to receive and act upon as part of their daily interactive communication activity?  How can we position messages that influence but not in an assumptive and intrusive way?

While they are talking, while they are texting, while they are gathering and sharing information and knowledge, how can we leverage the personalised and contextualised process of interactive communication to help inform people of products, services and opportunities that appeal specifically to them at that particular moment in time?

For mobile advertising to reach its potential we need to be less conscious of what we want to tell people and more conscious of what they are doing, saying, their environment and what they may find useful. It is in the specific moment of interaction that a message will resonate the loudest and have the greatest impact.

Having recently read about the raging debate at Marketing Week on the potential impact online video will have on television advertising. Yesterday the bus waiting experience came true. Nothing for a while then a couple come a long at the same time. Online video as a promotional medium – broadcasters may well be worried.

Ok. YouTube has been around for an age and the ability to view video online is not new. But one thing that struck me yesterday was the actual power that video holds as a marketing vehicle for businesses and brands. Traditionally I have though of the online vehicle as a great and cheap additional distribution mechanism for TV campaigns, especially when you consider the impact of viral distribution on a recent campaign such as Evian Live Young (created by BETC Euro RSCG). Viral has delivered significantly more audience reach than airing on the TV would ever have achieved.

Where it becomes interesting is if you virtually eliminate the costs of generating reach and significantly reduce the costs of production you suddenly have a medium that still carries the marketing impact but instantly becomes far more accessible to marketers.

The first video that got me thinking this way was for a revolutionary new probiotic product called Symprove (No I am not taking the stuff but a close friend is behind the launch). As a communication I think the execution is superb, creatively very good. It ticks all the boxes simple, informative and appealing. Yet all for a fraction of the cost of a typical TV ad. How will it get audience reach?  Well I have already sent it on to a number of people from as far afield as Kazakhstan and Australia, and you are reading this so you too have become the audience.

Shortly afterwards I viewed another three online videos.

The first was from an estate agent for a house they have for sale. The impact was amazing. It presented a highly visual interpretation of the property that simply could not be replicated using a printed brochure.  The interesting part was the video was made up of a series of still images very well placed together and a voice over applied, so it would have been very low cost to produce.

The second was for a privately owned country hotel. Again it was a series of still images with a voice over applied giving a full tour of the hotel and its core facilities. The execution gave what could only be described as an almost personal viewing, you actually gained a feel for the hotel and surrounding area, something that would have been virtually impossible to achieve in a written form. 

The third was for a Tax Consultancy that specialises in supporting businesses claim government rebates for investment made in product and research and development. In under a minute and a half the video covered the type of activities that are eligible for rebates, the potential rewards and the process to make a claim. A brief but very informative snap shot in to a businesses activity which I know would have made very dry reading in written form.

As a marketing vehicle each video was an extremely powerful communication, that is why TV advertising has such appeal. The interesting part was to see how this medium and type of execution could actually work for such a diverse set of businesses, their products and services. The dramatic reduction in costs mean for the first time I can genuinely see that this type of medium could actually be a very accessible part of the marketing mix for a whole array of small, medium and large businesses. Online video as a promotional medium – broadcasters may well be worried!

The mobile marketing opportunity around the 2010 World Cup is without a doubt going to be significant. The interest that a global event of this nature will attract is just massive. There will be a huge desire to feed on content and services linked to the event, whether football or location related. Mobile will one of the most accessible channels to the majority of fans before and during the tournament.

Marketers need to take on board that there will be an array of different contexts of people interacting with mobile content and services associated to the event. I suggest that for many this should start with answering three basic questions ‘How’ are you going to reach the audience, ‘Why’ are you relevant and ‘What’ do you expect from the consumer? Once answered this may then help ensure that at least the channel is being used for a  valid reason.

Secondly marketers need to understand the pitfalls that exist around the channel itself. For instance, if looking to target an audience when they are attending the event a firm consideration to the associated data charges needs to be made. Currently South Africa falls into one of the most expensive regions for roaming data in the world. It will be important that content and services consumed in situ are optimised well to ensure that interacting with a brand does not leave sour taste in the consumers mouth once they have got home and seen the bill.

How will savvy brands use mobile marketing to take advantage of the FIFA World Cup?  www.mobithinking.com