Marketing on mobile phones
Kirushanthy Kousthupamany Eastern University, Sri
Lanka.
Marketing on the mobile phone has become increasingly popular ever
since the rise of SMS (Short Message Service) in the early 2000s in
Europe and some parts of Asia when businesses started collecting mobile
phone numbers and sending off wanted (or unwanted) content.
Over the past few years SMS has become a legitimate advertising
channel in some parts of the world. This is because unlike email over
the public internet, the carriers who police their own networks have set
guidelines and best practices for the mobile media industry (including
mobile advertising).
The IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) and the Mobile Marketing
Association, as well, have established guidelines and are evangelizing
the use of the mobile channel for marketers.
While this has been fruitful in developed regions such as North
America, Western Europe and some other countries, mobile SPAM messages (SMS
sent to mobile subscribers without a legitimate and explicit opt-in by
the subscriber) remain an issue in many other parts or the world, partly
due to the carriers selling their member databases to third parties.
Mobile marketing via SMS has expanded rapidly in Europe and Asia as a
new channel to reach the consumer. SMS initially received negative media
coverage in many parts of Europe for being a new form of spam as some
advertisers purchased lists and sent unsolicited content to consumers’
phones; however, as guidelines are put in place by the mobile operators,
SMS has become the most popular branch of the Mobile Marketing industry
with several 100 million advertising SMS sent out every month in Europe
alone.
Over the past few years mobile short codes have been increasingly
popular as a new channel to communicate to the mobile consumer. Brands
have begun to treat the mobile shortcode as a mobile domain name
allowing the consumer to text message the brand at an event, in store
and off any traditional media.
SMS services typically run off a short code, but sending text
messages to an email address is another methodology. Short codes are
five or six digit numbers that have been assigned by all the mobile
operators in a given country for the use of brand campaign and other
consumer services. The mobile operators vet every application before
provisioning and monitor the service to make sure it does not diverge
from its original service description.
Besides short codes, inbound SMS is very often based on long numbers
(international number format, e.g. +44 7624 805000), which can be used
in place of short codes or premium-rated short messages for SMS
reception in several applications, such as product promotions and
campaigns.
Long numbers are internationally available, as well as enabling
businesses to have their own number, rather than short codes which are
usually shared across a number of brands. Additionally, long numbers are
non-premium inbound numbers.
One key criterion for provisioning is that the consumer opts in to
the service. The mobile operators demand a double opt in from the
consumer and the ability for the consumer to opt out of the service at
any time by sending the word STOP via SMS. These guidelines are
established in the MMA Consumer Best Practices Guidelines which are
followed by all mobile marketers in the United States.
Mobile marketing via MMS
MMS mobile marketing can contain a timed slideshow of images, text,
audio and video. This mobile content is delivered via MMS (Multimedia
Message Service). Nearly all new phones produced with a colour screen
are capable of sending and receiving standard MMS messages.
Brands are able to both send (mobile terminated) and receive (mobile
originated) rich content through MMS A2P (application-to-person) mobile
networks to mobile subscribers. In some networks, brands are also able
to sponsor messages that are sent P2P (person-to-person).
A good example of MMS mobile originated Motorola’s ongoing campaigns
at House of Blues venues where the brand allows the consumer to send
their mobile photos to the LED board in real-time as well as blog their
images online.
In-game mobile marketing
There are essentially four major trends in mobile gaming right now:
interactive real-time 3D games, massive multi-player games and social
networking games. This means a trend towards more complex and more
sophisticated, richer game play. On the other side, there are the
so-called casual games, i.e. games that are very simple and very easy to
play. Most mobile games today are such casual games and this will
probably stay so for quite a while to come.
Brands are now delivering promotional messages within mobile games or
sponsoring entire games to drive consumer engagement. This is known as
mobile advergaming or Ad-funded mobile game.
Mobile web marketing
Google and Yahoo! as displayed on mobile phones. Advertising on web
pages specifically meant for access by mobile devices is also an option.
The Mobile Marketing Association provides a set of guidelines and
standards that give the recommended format of ads, presentation, and
metrics used in reporting. Google, Yahoo, and other major mobile content
providers have been selling advertising placement on their properties
for years already as of the time of this writing. Advertising networks
focused on mobile properties and advertisers are also available.
Mobile marketing via Bluetooth
The rise of Bluetooth started around 2003 and a few companies in
Europe have started establishing successful businesses. Most of these
businesses offer “hotspot” systems which consist of some kind of
content-management system with a Bluetooth distribution function.
This technology has the advantages that it is permission-based, has
higher transfer speeds and is also a radio-based technology and can
therefore not be billed (i.e. is free of charge). The likely earliest
device built for mobile marketing via Bluetooth was the context tag of
the AmbieSense project (2001-2004). More recently Tata Motors conducted
one of the biggest Bluetooth marketing campaigns in India for its brand
the Sumo Grande.
Mobile marketing via Infrared
Infrared is the oldest and most limited form of mobile Marketing.
Some European companies have experimented with “shopping window
marketing” via free Infrared waves in the late ‘90s.
However, Infrared has a very limited range (~ approx. 10 cm - 1meter)
and could never really establish itself as a leading Mobile Marketing
technology.
Location-based services
Location-based services (LBS) are offered by some cell phone networks
as a way to send custom advertising and other information to cell-phone
subscribers based on their current location.
The cell-phone service provider gets the location from a GPS chip
built into the phone, or using radiolocation and trilateration based on
the signal-strength of the closest cell-phone towers (for phones without
GPS features). In the UK, networks do not use trilateration; LBS
services use a single base station, with a ‘radius’ of inaccuracy, to
determine a phone’s location.
Meantime, LBS can be enabled without GPS tracking technique. Mobile
WiMAX technology is utilized to give a new dimension to mobile
marketing. The new type of mobile marketing is envisioned between a
BS(Base Station) and a multitude of CPE(Consumer Premise Equipment)
mounted on vehicle dashtops.
Whenever vehicles come within the effective range of the BS, the
dashtop CPE with LCD touchscreen loads up a set of icons or banners of
individually different shapes that can only be activated by finger
touches or voice tags. On the screen, a user has a frame of 5 to 7 icons
or banners to choose from, and the frame rotates one after another. This
mobile WiMAX-compliant LBS is privacy-friendly and user-centric, when
compared with GPS-enabled LBS.
In July 2003 the first location-based services to go Live with all UK
mobile network operators were launched.
User-controlled media
Mobile marketing differs from most other forms of marketing
communication in that it is often user (consumer) initiated (mobile
originated, or MO) message, and requires the express consent of the
consumer to receive future communications.
A call delivered from a server (business) to a user (consumer) is
called a Mobile Terminated (MT) message. This infrastructure points to a
trend set by mobile marketing of consumer controlled marketing
communications.
Due to the demands for more user controlled media, mobile messaging
infrastructure providers have responded by developing architectures that
offer applications to operators with more freedom for the users, as
opposed to the network-controlled media.
Along with these advances to user-controlled Mobile Messaging 2.0,
blog events throughout the world have been implemented in order to
launch popularity in the latest advances in mobile technology.
In June 2007, Airwide Solutions became the official sponsor for the
Mobile Messaging 2.0 blog that provides the opinions of many through the
discussion of mobility with freedom
(Source: Mobile Marketing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.mht)
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