Surely mobile marketing isn’t just mobile SPAM??

Rating: Spam, Spam go away come again another day

by Bena Roberts

Pontis, a company that provides Marketing Delivery Platforms commissioned a survey by GfK NOP on consumer issues related to mobile marketing.

The results are in. Basically, out of the 752 people interviewed in the UK –
70% of users believe the mobile marketing material sent to the phone is irrelevant;
64% get annoyed by mobile marketing promotions
11% had actually purchased something after receiving a marketing promotion.

From the press release
Guy Talmi, senior marketing director at Pontis said, “These results are proof of the fact that the mass marketing approach most operators still take today is not working. The findings represent both good and bad news for the service provider community: on one hand it shows that their inability to tailor services and content to the individual user’s interests and situation is not only failing to attract new revenue streams but - even worse – it’s alienating their customer base. On the other hand, it clearly points to a major opportunity for those operators who can harness vital information about a user’s interests and behaviour and offer them relevant services at the right time,, as a large number of users would be willing to change suppliers for just such a service.”

What we think?
So what happened to the calls for relevancy and personalization? It’s quite funny that many tout pushing relevancy first but in fact behavioural targeting takes a lot of time. This means that mobile marketing companies, mobile operators or even search advertising firms do have software that assists targeting marketing campaigns – but the problem is: that users are often pushed irrelevant ads first in order to kick the behavioural marketing machines into action.

We don’t believe that better personalization or marketing alone is the answer. We think that zoned communication and gender specific mobile Internet campaigns are the way forward. This is similar to what Orange is testing now for its new Orange World portal. The user interface of the portal is different for each market segment (male, female, youth). This means that with this information being channeled from the onset and Orange is able to target consumers more specifically. Zones of effective advertisements can then be created to push mobile marketing to consumers.

This means that instead of trying to micro-segment the mobile audience (a challenge in itself) mobile operators and marketing companies get a heads-up on at least one personal piece of information from the start. But this too is not bullet proof as because someone shares the same gender it does not mean that they share the same music or TV interests.

Moving forward, O2 and its mobile VIP coupon campaign for The O2 (music venu) visitors might prove a valuable way of collectively positioning marketing to the mass audience – irrelevant of gender: (see Analysis in Mobile Advertising and Marketing Analyst). O2 offers all its customers VIP entrance and stage areas at special events. This means that it knows which music the consumer likes and this can create interaction with the consumer. The best marketing campaigns are build on interaction and moving forward any company wishing to make mobile marketing a success and avoid being brandished as SPAM must focus on active interaction.

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2. US takes mobile spam and other abuse seriously
3. Halo Brands vs the SPAM anti-Christ says Richard Saggers from Vodafone
4. AdaptiveMobile unveils Spam is upwardly mobile on its 30th birthday!
5. Poll: Mobile Marketing Spam?