Revisiting proximity marketing

I cut my teeth in mobile marketing in location-based services, or proximity marketing as it's now known, way back in 2000. I was Head of Customer Experience for a new outfit called ZagMe (now long gone) where we sent SMS text messages to customers at Lakeside and Bluewater shopping malls while they were out shopping. We were not only pioneers of mobile advertising, we were also pioneers of location based mobile advertising, and we were way ahead of our time.

Fast forward 16 years and proximity marketing is making the headlines again. Retailers are experimenting with geo-fencing, location based targeted advertising online and beacon-enabled apps. It has been a couple of years since I last took a good look at the sector. You can see the video here of the interview I did with David Murphy from Mobile Marketing Magazine talking about the history of location based services.

If you have an interest in this technology and its practical application, you my be interested at this upcoming Mediatel event, sponsored by Proxama, that I'm participating in on the morning of Monday 12th September in London. I'm looking forward to hearing about up to date case studies and I'm hoping brands and agencies have learned the lessons from the past. We'll see... 

You can find out more about the event and how to attend here.

And if you'd like a history lesson in how mobile proximity marketing began, here are a couple of videos from BBC News and Channel 5 explaining how ZagMe worked. 

And the winners are....

The magazine supplement for this year's #emmas (Effective Mobile Marketing Awards) award winners dropped into my inbox today from David Murphy at Mobile Marketing Magazine. The awards were last month so some of you will already be familiar with the winners but in case you missed it, it's worth a look.

What struck me most about the range of winners and campaigns is that mobile marketing has grown up - mainstream brands doing large-scale, innovative campaigns. I guess it's about time, 15 years on, that this is happening.

So if you're after some inspiration about what's possible with mobile marketing, then take a look at this year's winners and check out their work.

The Effective Mobile Marketing Awards are now open for entries

The 2015 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards are open for business. Brought to you by the Mobile Marketing Magazine team, The Awards, now in their sixth year, recognise excellence in mobile marketing across 35 categories, and have attracted more than 200 entries in each of the last three years. I’ve previously been a judge for these awards.

Mothercare, Tesco, Renault, North Face, IKEA, Subway and Lloyds Banking Group were among the brands picking up awards last time round, while Manning Gottlieb OMD, Mindshare, Mobile 5, Future Platforms and OMD were among the victorious agencies.

In addition to the 35 primary categories, there will also once again be four People’s Choice Awards, with the shortlist drawn up by a panel of industry experts and the winners chosen by a public vote. The cost to enter starts at £175 for a single entry with discounts for multiple entries by the same company.

To enter the Awards, download the Entry form here, fill it in and return via email to awards@mobilemarketingmagazine.com before the entry deadline – 5pm UK time, Friday 7 August 2015.

More information about the awards over on their website.

There’s a skills gap in mobile marketing

And here’s my bi-monthly column in Mobile Marketing Magazine about it. I’m on the last page. I’d welcome your thoughts. Is there a skills gap? Will the mobile marketing & advertising sectors reach their full potential despite the skills gap? What can or should we be doing about this?

Hints & Tips for Winning Awards

I’m very lucky to judge many different awards ranging from mobile industry specific ones like the Meffys and the Effective Mobile Marketing Awards to ones that are not immersed in mobile like the Sony Radio Academy Awards and the Wirehive 100 to innovation awards like Vodafone Mobile Clicks and Vodafone Foundation Smart Accessibility Awards. As such, over the years, I’ve seen many awards entries and see what a winning entry looks like.

Since it’s the run up to the Effective Mobile Marketing Awards, David Murphy, Editor, Mobile Marketing Magazine, asked a selection of judges to join a Tweet Chat to discuss this year’s entries – what was good, what was lacking and what we’d like to see more of. It was a really interesting discussion with Rob Thurner, Russell Buckley, myself and James Cameron. You can see the collection of tweets over on Mobile Marketing Magazine http://www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com/content/awards-preview-judges-twitter-panel

Some common mistakes creep in to these things. Often the task of filling in the form is delegated to someone junior or someone who has not been hands on with the campaign. I still see a lack of evidence. Saying something along the lines of ‘the client was really happy with the results’ just doesn’t cut it. You could have the coolest sounding concept, but if you can’t tell the judges what the results were, then we can’t judge you and your entry will be discarded. I also see entries that have not answered the questions and also have clearly been cut and pasted from a case study or press release which means it can be harder to discover the nuggets of information that you need to judge one entry over another. And I see entries for categories where I really can’t see the connection at all. So my advice is, keep it to the point, answer the questions and justify why you deserve to win the award with actual demonstration of innovation, originality, effectiveness etc. And include the numbers. The information is kept private and is not published. Be proud of your work and take the time to communicate why it’s so good with the judges. Make our jobs harder each time!

If you’re interested to see who made the shortlist (and there are some fab companies and campaigns on that list), you can find more information here http://mobilemarketingmagazine.com/awards/ and you can also book your tickets to the Award Ceremony on 29th November. I think there are a handful of tickets left. If the last two years are anything to go by, it should be a good night.

I recently talked about this stuff for the MEFFYs too on video which you also may find useful.

So for the next time you enter an award, best of luck and don’t let yours be the entry that gets discarded for not completing the entry form properly.

Carnival of the Mobilists #277

 

Yes, it’s come around again and I’m this week’s curator of the Carnival of the Mobilists and what a week it has been. Plenty going on in the world of Nokia and RIM. Innovation is being supported with various awards and accelerator programs. And mobile is still most definitely big news. So here’s my round-up.

Awards and other Programs for Mobile Entrepreneurs

The Annual Effective Mobile Marketing Awards are open for entries until 10 August. There are 20 categories and they are free to enter and are global. Disclaimer, I’m a judge and I co-hosted the awards last year.

The 9th Annual Meffys are open for entries until 19 July. Just a few days to go so don’t delay. These are global awards with special categories and prices for start-ups. More details here. Disclaimer, I’m a judge.

Russell Buckley tells us about UK accelerator programme, Springboard, why he supports it (including investing in it) and what the opportunities are for mobile entrepreneurs this year with the very first mobile-focussed accelerator. Closing date to apply is 22 July so not long to go.

QPrize is now open for entries too. This is Qualcomm Ventures seed investment competition. I don’t know much about it yet (I’m doing a bit more research into it), but just highlighting it for reference.

Handset Wars

Goodness me, watching the demise of Nokia and now RIM is not a pleasant experience. The chatter about both is endless at the moment. How to you make head or tail of it? Are both dead in the water? Will we see them fight back? Will they be bought, die or rise from their ashes like a phoenix? …

Tomi Ahonen thinks Stephen Elop is the worst CEO of all time. With Nokia’s share price at an all time low of $1.92 at the time of writing, Elop and the Nokia board certainly have some serious questions to answer. This one isn’t so much as a blog post as an essay so don’t expect a quick read. Grab a cuppa and set aside some time to read this one and take in the comments too. I have friends at Nokia. I have friends who have been made redundant from Nokia. I have a drawer full of beloved Nokia phones. I like Windows Phone too. I don’t want to see Nokia die but there’s no denying they are in deep, deep trouble.

And then there’s RIM. Another one who has been in the wars lately. Delaying the BB10 launch is a bit of a nightmare. There were 5,000 enthusiastic developers who went home from BlackBerry World in Orlando and many hundreds, if not thousands returning home from various BB10Jam meet-ups globally with their prototype devices and told their friends and family they were excited about the upcoming launch of BB10 for Christmas. BlackBerry hasn’t just let down their developer community, they’ve let down their loyal customers who are desperate for an upgrade if they haven’t jumped ship already to Android or iOS. There are three articles of note I’d like to point you to on this one. First is untether.tv’s post which takes a look at the numbers and thinks RIM needs to focus on saving the company, Terence Eden ponders how to solve a problem like BlackBerry and Michael Selvidge thinks RIM can be saved in three easy steps. What do you think?

Then there’s the story of Maemo from Randall Arnold. Do any of you remember that OS? I do. I had a Nokia 770 and if I remember rightly, Rovio of Angry Birds fame was developing games on that platform. Is there hope for Maemo to come out smiling out of the Nokia warzone?

Mobile Marketing, Advertising and Commerce

For the first year at Cannes Lions, there was a section for mobile. Finally, advertising agencies are catching up with their clients and taking notice of mobile as an integral part of any marketing campaign. This is a major step forward. Hey, I may even be tempted to take a trip to Cannes next year to check it all out. In the meantime, Andy Favell from MobiThinking has done a very comprehensive round-up of the winning entries (including their videos and case studies) and also the stats behind the awards. Both make for a good read. Again, this is something worth setting aside some time for but if you’re in the mobile marketing game, this one is for you.

Global Mobile Commerce: Removing Payment Friction & Boosting Customer Engagement by Diarmuid Mallon is a guest post on Mobile Groove and is the first of a series of articles which will form part of the Mobile Commerce Guide 2012. Common sense tells us that by making it easier for customers to buy they will buy more. You wouldn’t have a front door to a shop that took five minutes to open so why would you make the payment options overly complicated? It’s very, very easy to click away from a purchase.

Mobile Apps and Games

Here are a couple of good articles that should get app developers thinking and help then on their way to making more money for them and their clients. First up is a piece from CodeNgo which looks at the opportunity of making sure your app is available in different languages. The stats make sense to me. Next is one from the mainstream Techcrunch, but it was a good one so I’ve included it: 8 Ways Mobile Developers can Make the Most Money on Apps. Sensible advice indeed.

Missed out on Google I/O? Never fear, Tom Hume was there and he’s got some thoughts about the new Google Nexus tablet and the role it will have. A game changer? Maybe… have a read.

Mobile Games has been a hot topic recently around Technokitten Towers, not least, because I was helping the Mobile Monday Shoreditch team get set up and their first event was the A to Z of Mobile Gaming. You can read a round-up of the evening here and it includes links to video vox pops from the night too. We also enjoyed some AR gaming on the night and playing games on BlackBerry Playbooks. Well, MobyAffiliate has gone the extra mile and taken a comprehensive look at the companies in the mobile and social gaming space and written it all up for you to create a guide to the sector ‘The World’s Top Mobile Social Games Developers, Publishers and Platforms’.

Further Food for Thought

A couple of podcasts you might be interested in having a listen to or watch are the Disruptive Social Care Podcast where I was a guest last week and talked about the role of mobile in healthcare and the importance of making websites and services accessible on mobile and accessible to those with disabilities or impairments amongst other things with Shirley Ayres and Stuart Arnott.  Then there’s this one from Hashbang TV where Elizabeth Varley tells the TechHub story. OK, the latter isn’t mobile specific, but it’s still relevant inasmuch as it’s the story of an entrepreneur focussed on supporting tech start-ups. And both podcasts are about disruption in some shape or form.

And finally, some food for thought from Antoine RJ Wright. Were Mobile Phones the Wrong Turn? Antoine ponders if we haven’t missed the point with mobile technology and that perhaps it needs a rethink as we’re asking devices (read battery life and bandwidth) to do more than it can really deal with.

Post of the Week

My post of the week has to go to Andy Favell for such a comprehensive round-up of the Cannes Mobile Lions. It’s in my sweet spot of mobile marketing and it’s great to see it entering the mainstream in this way and it’s great to get up close and personal to such a variety of case studies. What’s your post of the week?

Next week

Next week’s Carnival will be hosted by Martin Wilson of Indigo 102. And you can also support the Carnival of the Mobilists by liking us on Facebook, following us on Twitter or sharing this post.

All photos sourced from Flickr and used under Creative Commons Licence.

A short history of location-based services

I was invited to speak at Mobile Marketing Magazine’s mRetail Summit last week to talk about the history of location-based services. Some of you may or may not know that I spent my early career in fashion retail and then some years later in 2000, joined the mobile scene at ZagMe, where we sent text messages to shoppers at Lakeside and Bluewater shopping malls while people were actually out shopping. My retail experience certainly came in very handy there. Anyway, I was lucky enough to be, not only at the birth of mobile marketing, but also at the birth of mobile location-based services.

I’m not sure my slides will mean much without the dialogue, but they’re here if you want to take a look.

A short history of location-based services

View more presentations from Helen Keegan.

I suppose the key learnings for me from that time are

• Customers wanted a permission-based offers channel for their local shopping mall
• Once they’d signed up to the service, people assumed we knew where they were (we didn’t, we spoofed the location bit) and expected us to send them relevant messages
• We were at least 10 years ahead of our time
• It’s not about the technology, it’s about the application of technology. Understanding how to communicate with customers is essential. Understanding how retailers and retail staff operate is critical.
• The ZagMe concept is still sound, but despite several services attempting to do something similar in the last 10 years, they’ve all failed. My guess is that it’s because they focussed on the technology and thought that retailers would change the way they do things to adapt to the technology rather than the other way around.
• Location information is mostly useless without some context
• Past behaviour is not a good predictor of future behaviour. A recent example to demonstrate this… I’m going to Barcelona next month. I searched extensively on Google to find my accommodation. Now the only ads I see are adverts for accommodation in Barcelona. If you really did understand my behaviour, you’d know that the time to serve me those ads is in December and early January. By the end of January it’s too late. But behaviour predictors don’t have that level of granularity. But I guess that conversation is for another day.

Mobile Retail Summit–London 26 Jan 2012

Some of you may have seen me tweet about this already, but the lovely people at Mobile Marketing Magazine are putting on a one-day summit looking at all aspects of mobile retail. This is most certainly a hot topic and mainstream retailers are now beginning to see the light and are focussing efforts in m-commerce and m-retail. And it’s working for them. There are some terrific success stories out there.

I’m very happy to be involved in the summit. I’ll be there all day as I’m doing a short history of LBS (that’s location based services), moderating a panel on mobile payments and discussing the future of mobile at the end of the day with friends and colleagues Russell Buckley and Jonathan MacDonald.

The good news about the summit is that it’s free for retail, FMCG and CMG executives to attend. At the time of writing, there are just 30 places left and if you join the session, you’ll be mingling with the likes of John Lewis, Debenhams, Tesco, Oasis, Coca Cola, Amazon and Homebase. And if you’re not in that category, then you can buy a ticket for £595.

Check out the Agenda below, and head for mretailsummit.com to book your place. It should be a good day. Hope to see some of you there.

Agenda

8.15am - 9.00am Registration & Exposition

9.00am - 9.10am Chairman's Introduction. David Murphy, Editor, Mobile Marketing Magazine

9.10am - 9.25am Going Mobile - The Big Picture. Nic Newman, MD, Tigerspike

9.25am - 9.35am On Device Stat Attack. Alex Kozloff, Mobile Manager, IAB . Alex will reveal research showing the volume of mobile web browsing, how many people are engaged in mCommerce, etc.

9.35am - 9.50am mCommerce in Action. Hugh Ritzema-Carter, UK Commercial Director, YOC. Hugh will represent case studies showing how retailers have successfully deployed mCommerce solutions

9.50am - 10.15am Keynote Address. Sarah Baillie, Mobile Commerce Coordinator, Debenhams. Building a Holistic Mobile Offering Embracing Apps and Mobile Sites

10.15am - 10.30am How to build a mobile site and integrate it with your backend systems. Duncan Hallas, European Director Sales, Netbiscuits

10.30am - 10.45am 10 Rules for Building Mobile Apps. Rupert Ashwell, Head of Client services, UK Golden Gekko

10.45am - 11.15am coffee break, mobile exposition, mobile surgery

11.15am - 11.30am Mobile Search, Mobile App Discoverability Discussion Panel

Guest Moderator: Simon Andrews
Panellists:
Nicholas Cumisky, Sr. Industry Manager, Ad Mob
Emily Gudeman, Account Director, Efficient Frontier
Ramy Yared, MD, Adsmobi
Peter Glaeser, co-founder and CEO SponsorMob.
Andrew Emmerson, Senior Business Analyst, JD Williams

11.30am - 11.40am Multichannel Stat Attack. Matthew Hopkinson, Business Development Director, Local DataCompany. We take a look at how tough it is out there. With falling sales, and consumers shopping less in the recession period, this is a great time to use every tool at your disposal to get people into your shops, and here is how mobile can help retailers do just that

11.40am - 11.55am Mobile CRM. Anamaria Chiuzan, Retail Propositions Manager, Velti
How to build and manage an opted-in mobile CRM database to drive traffic into your retail outlets

11.55am - 12.10pm Using Social Media to Drive Footfall. Matt Gierhart, Head of Social, Ogilvy

12.10pm - 12.25pm A Brief History of Location-based Services. Helen Keegan, Specialist in Mobile Marketing, Advertising & Media. Helen offers a summary of the past 12 years of location-based services, from her work in the early noughties with ZagMe, through to the present day

12.25pm - 12.40pm Using Mobile Advertising to Drive Footfall. Stephen Jenkins, Marketing Director EMEA, Millennial Media

12.40pm - 1.00pm Mobile Advertising Advice Panel.

Moderated by: Russell Buckley, Chief Marketing Officer, Eagle Eye Solutions
Panellists:
Alex Rahamen, CEO of StrikeAd
Paul Childs, Chief Operations Officer, Adfonic
David Fieldhouse, Linking Mobile
Doug Chisholm, Founder and CEO, Rippll

1.00pm - 2.30pm lunch, exposition, mobile surgery, speed networking, mobile pitch panel

2.30pm - 2.40pm In-Store Stat Attack. Alistair Hill, On Device Research

2.40pm - 2.55pm In-Store Price Comparison. How the phone can help you close the sale in store, using on-shelf links to information on the mobile web. Dave Marutiak, Managing Director, Scanbuy

2.55pm - 3.10pm Mobile Couponing and Vouchering. Steve Rothwell - Eagle Eye Solutions
What is the state of play with mobile coupons and vouchers? What are the issues, how are they being overcome, and which retailers are successfully using mobile coupons and vouchers?

3.10pm - 3.30pm Mobile Payments - The Options. Discussion Panel. Overview of what's out there, from NFC to SMS-based mobile payment systems.

Guest Moderator: Helen Keegan, Specialist in Mobile Marketing, Advertising & Media
Panellists:
Ivor Morgan, Head of EMEA Marketing, Venda
John Milliken, MD, Mobile Money Network
Mary Carol Harris, Vice President, Mobile Development at Visa Europe
Iain Herd, PayPal

3.30pm - 4.00pm coffee break, exposition, mobile surgery

4.00pm - 4.15pm Augmented Reality Demos. Matt Mills, Head of Innovation, Autonomy

4.15pm - 4.30pm iPad Kiosks & Queue Busting Solutions. Justin Coward, MD, Global Bay

4.30pm - 4.50pm Google Demos. Amanda Rosenberg, Mobile Business Development Manager, EMEA, Google

4.50pm - 5.15pm Alternative Views on the Mobile Future

Moderated by: David Murphy, Editor, Mobile Marketing Magazine
Panelists:
Russell Buckley, Chief Marketing Officer, Eagle Eye Solutions
Jonathan MacDonald, Co-founder at This Fluid World & Co-Founder at Human Dialogue
Helen Keegan, Specialist in Mobile Marketing, Advertising & Media

5.15pm - 5.25pm Chairman's Closing Remarks. David Murphy, Editor, Mobile Marketing Magazine

5.30pm - 7.00pm networking drinks, exposition, mobile pitch results