Bluetooth Marketing doesn’t have to be contentious, controversial or annoying

No, seriously, it doesn’t have to be this way. Regular readers of my blog will know that I’m not the biggest fan of bluetooth proximity marketing and that’s because implementation to date, has usually been a bit cack-handed with little thought to customers, their privacy and what they might actually want.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel with Troy Norcross’s latest report entitled Proximity Marketing with Bluetooth. The report is available to buy for $295 – I’ve seen it and it is a comprehensive best practice guide for marketing via bluetooth to ensure it doesn’t become bluespam. In addition, there are some key findings from the research the authors conducted, including

• Consumers are 50% more likely to accept Bluetooth marketing if you have a poster describing the activity than without
• Bluetooth Marketing is able to target an audience with pinpoint accuracy, based on location
• While it is legal to broadcast Bluetooth messages to anybody, without permission, the Direct Marketing Association recommends more strict guidelines for this sort of communication
• The public's understanding of Bluetooth technology has improved greatly in the last two years
• Big media agencies are still wary of the technology, and traditional media buyers are yet to routinely include it in their media planning
• When best practice is followed, there is little chance of users considering the communication as spam
• The area in which you use Bluetooth is very important, it should never be a public space, only commercial
• The cost of implementing a Bluetooth campaign is always more predictable and usually lower than SMS campaigns

If this is an area of interest for you, then you could do worse than buy the report or at least check out the teaser.

Technorati Tags: bluetooth,mobile marketing,bluespam

Links ‘n stuff cos it’s Wednesday

As usual I have too many browser tabs and emails open so it’s time to close them down by documenting them here. Forgive them being a bit random but hopefully there’s a few things here that might catch your eye to take a further look.

T-Mobile is using bluetooth to attract customers into store with special offers. I’ve written about bluetooth marketing bluespam before. On private property, I have no problem with it but when it’s catching random people in the street, because they happen to have their bluetooth switched on it makes me feel uncomfortable. Anyway, it seems T-Mobile doesn’t feel uncomfortable with it (or uncufderbull as my 8 year old neighbour once wrote to me describing his boarding school bed).

BMW spend $30k on an engaging MMS campaign and sell $45 million of accessories to existing customers… now that’s pretty cool.

Young people who embrace technology can feel overconnected (well, I would add, that you don’t need to be a teenager to feel this – I’m definitely in that number… I’m frequently overwhelmed by information and communication coming in at me from all directions).

The latest Pew Internet Report is out. Essential reading for all folks working or interested in digital and mobile.

The economic downturn bodes well for mobile couponing companies according to RCR Wireless. I suspect few of the services on offer are really delivering on the mobile couponing promise – I know a thing or two about mobile coupons and there are a lot of skittles to get in a row before it succeeds. That said, Planet Funk sees 377% ROI on their mobile couponing promotion so when you get it right, it can be very powerful.

Orange UK also announces key findings from their mobile marketing research:

• 81% of mobile media users access mobile media once a week with strong usage in the home, as well as on public transport and around town
• Mobile media users are very much open to mobile marketing with 70% of participants attracted by interactive marketing formats
• The most popular forms of mobile marketing currently are click-through advertisements and voucher redemption codes
• Mobile is viewed as the most innovative and personal media channel compared to all other traditional and digital channels

Other key findings on mobile media usage included:

• The average age for mobile media users is 36, and 81% use mobile media more than once a week with 46% using it daily
• Men generally use mobile media more, although women are much more likely to use picture messaging
• The mobile internet pages viewed most often are search engines, email, news, music and film although, interestingly, a high proportion (55%) of people browse the mobile internet with no specific agenda, providing an opportunity for marketers to attract their attention

The research also confirms that customers are after value and relevance. No big surprise there then. Marketers take note.

Technorati Tags: mobile marketing,mobile media,research,mobile internet,mobile coupons,bluetooth,bluespam,MMS

Tuesday linkage

Mobile gaming and LBS
Have you played The Journey II yet? It's a mobile game - designed for Symbian phones (so that'll be Nokia Series 60 phones then).

"The Journey II" interweaves your real environment with the setting of a thrilling detective story. To solve the mysterious case, you have to go outside and walk around, literally. This concept makes "The Journey II" the world's first location based mobile adventure game!"

If you have tried it, do let me know how it worked. [Via Tom Hume]

Text to Win Sales Promotion
Coca Cola Company's new text to win a Wii campaign goes live on 14th May until the beginning of July 2007. Running on 182m cans and bottles of Fanta, Sprite and Dr Pepper, you have a chance to win 10 'ultimate Wii Games Rooms' which consists of a Nintendo Wii Console, Wii Sports game, Samsunb 26" LCD TV, a mini fridge and a case each of 330ml Fanta, Sprite and Dr Pepper. The campaign is heftily supported by above the line advertising and extensive PR as well as the Get Up and Play website. You enter by texting in the unique code on the underside of the ring pull or on the back of the bottle label.

I wonder what the chances are of you actually winning anything bearing in mind the promotion is printed on 182m cans of drink...? I'll give it a go when it goes live and see what the interaction is like. Wouldn't mind winning one of those Wii Games Rooms myself!

Has the bluetooth permission marketing conundrum been solved?
TeriMobile claims to have sorted out the permission aspect of bluetooth marketing. They've offered me a trial of the service and I haven't had time to take them up on the offer yet, but if anyone else has, or has a comment about the service, please do let me know via email or by leaving a comment her on the blog.

Movers and shakers
Angel Gambino (ex MTV) and Laurence Pichot (ex Orange) have both joined Bebo recently - Angel will be driving their music strategy and Laurence will be looking after marketing and partnerships. And Hugh Griffiths (ex O2) joins Microsoft (seems to me to be the 'live' division which covers off MSN Messenger amongst other things). Seems with Microsoft's recent acquisition of mobile advertising firm ScreenTonic and Hugh's appointment, they are, at long last, taking mobile seriously.

How not to do mobile marketing via bluetooth

Another grumble today (well, yesterday actually, just getting round to writing it up today having read coverage at Finextra). I spotted on the BBC London evening news last night that HSBC was trialling bluespam bluetooth marketing in London's Regent Street. It seems that if you have your bluetooth switched on, and passed by HSBC on Regent Street, you get sent a bluetooth message with an offer about ISAs.

The BBC reporter interviews several passers-by and not a single one of them wanted to get the message and all felt it was intrusive and definitely spam.

HSBC was not available for comment but said:

"that they're running a small scale trial and the feedback from passers by and customers to date has been very positive."

The reporter aptly pointed out, that the way to *not* get the messages was to turn your bluetooth off (assuming you know where the bluetooth controls are on your phone or that you even have it)!

I'm very suprised that HSBC is running a trial at all for something that is still a very grey area legally. I've written about bluespam before and I still don't see what's legal about sending me a message to my phone that I haven't requested in the context of the laws around electronic marketing. Just because you don't know my phone number doesn't mean you can send me anything you fancy.

Update: One of my readers pointed out to me via email that this 'trial' has been going on for at least a year... now that doesn't sound like a trial to me anymore...

Comments on any of the above anyone?

To bluespam or not to bluespam, that is the question

I've just been catching up on my blog reading and quite a few of my regular reads are commenting about bluespam, or bluecasting if you're being posh.

First off, the Square Group is sending out free video clips from Avenue Q to passers by who happen to have their bluetooth switched on on their phone. The claim impressive results (well if you're in Direct Marketing or Sales Promotion they are). 9,595 active Bluetooth devices were detected and sent messages. Of these, 703 people accepted the offer of the video download – an average of 87 people each day. Seems good on the face of it. I applaud Square Group and Avenue Q for giving it a try. But how targeted was this audience if it was targeting passers-by? [of course, if it was aimed at fans of the show who were inside the theatre, then I could better understand it.]

Ewan shares his feelings about why bluetooth isn't designed for marketing or file sharing and is an, at best, clumsy user experience. Whilst David, from Mobile Marketing Magazine, wonders if these results are acceptable. David continues,

"Put another way, the campaign achieved a (positive) response rate of just over 7%. That, of course, is a response rate that any direct marketer would kill for, But that’s the point. Mobile marketing is not direct mail. It’s more personal than that, and brands that ignore this fact do so at their peril. And while Bluecasting may be legal, to my mind, if 93% of the people you offer a free download to decline the offer, that’s not really a success."

I actually doubt if 93% of people were annoyed at getting the bluetooth message. Some would have been mildly irritated, some would have ignored it completely, some would have left it to sort out later not realising that it was location specific and related to a bluetooth broadcasting system in the theatre, and for some, they may well have clicked on the system and it just didn't work (as in my Casino Royale experience), in which case the logs are likely to be inaccurate. And of course, there would be some people who would be annoyed and consider it as spam and completely evil. We just don't know what the breakdown is.

Putting the legalities aside which I discussed last week in relation to Virgin/Qwikker, I think this begs a larger question of marketing and advertising more generally which Carlo over at Mobhappy also hints at.

It's harder and harder to generate interest in products and services via *any* marketing methods - new or old or mobile or whatever. It's a law of diminishing returns and the youth of today don't understand the economics behind it all - i.e. that advertising has funded the majority of our entertainment for the last 50 years. So what do you do? Of course, there are clearly some wonderful success stories out there, but they are few and far between. If it was *that* easy, then we'd all be rich, but we're not - even when we have fabulous products and services to promote. It's not an easy equation to work out, even when you have the goods to start with.

I also understand why Avenue Q would use something like bluecasting - there's no messaging cost to the network operator. This makes it hugely attractive financially. And it is marginally less intrusive than a text message as your mobile number is kept private. And for any marketing campaign, 7% is a good response rate. And after all, we live in a commercial world and if the maths adds up, then the maths adds up.

But you know what, bluecasting will be an interim technology at best. At some point in the near distant future, we will be always on on our mobiles with wap access, flat rate data charges, pre-installed QR code readers and phones that just work. In that scenario, we won't need bluetooth to file share, we'll just do it over the air, like we do from our PCs. We'll take a picture of a QRcode, it will link us to the wapsite and we'll download away to our heart's content and maybe even share with a friend via the 'send to a friend's phone' link.

So traditional marketers, take heart, we'll still need magazines and posters and audio and video communication in our digital nirvana, it's just we'll be more seamlessly connected so you need to understand how this digital jigsaw fits together rather than looking at channels in isolation. So you could do worse than check out the mobile marketing course next month from e-consultancy.

Maybe I'm dreaming of a future that's 20 years away but hey, a girl can dream. I do know that in the future, we'll also have a lot less tolerance for any kind of push messaging as it will be considered spam and unwanted and will have a negative effect on the brand. And we'll be even better at ignoring it all, which we're already pretty good at as the Avenue Q campaign demonstrates - 93% of the potential audience ignored it.

Right now, we're in a transition phase. The laws are still being worked out. The technology is still flaky some of the time and we're still in a trial and error stage. But try and err you must in order to learn. We're still not quite sure how this mobile game will pan out. But in this 21st Century age of blogging, file sharing, instant access, always on digital overload, there are no easy answers. You will never be able to please all of the people all of the time, but you'd better do your best because if they're unhappy, they're going to tell all their mates pretty quickly with all these new-fangled communications methods flying around.

Ignore new technology at your peril. It really is changing our lives.

Qwikker and Virgin Bites are up for a 3GSM Award

Qwikker, the mobile content distribution company, is up for an award for its work with Virgin Mobile (who incidentally 'don't believe in mobile marketing' or so it was claimed at a Virgin meeting I attended a few months ago!). The award they're up for is 'Best Mobile Advertising' category.

To keep Virgin Mobile customers amused, Qwikker created 'boredom busters' for Virgin BITES service. Also part of the promotion, Virgin Mobile wanted to reach beyond their own subscriber base and also promote acts at the V-Festivals by distributing mobile content via bluetooth.

Qwikker’s service enabled consumers to download the non-intrusive [sic], branded Virgin Bites mobile channel, via Bluetooth, and browse and select music-related mobile content, which was relevant to them. Critically the Virgin content channel remained on the consumers’ handset, which is updateable over-the-air (OTA) – further extending the brand relationship.

As the service is for Virgin customers only, I can't try it out to tell you exactly how it works. Nor was I at V-Festival to try it. And I'm wondering how many people actually played around with the system when they could be seeing live bands or drinking instead? Now *that* would be interesting to know more about rather than the concept per se.

If the O2 wireless festival is anything to go by, or FourDocs bluetooth poster campaign or the Casino Royale bluetooth cinema campaigns are anything to go by, there could be a high failure rate - none of the afore-mentioned campaigns worked on my phone :( - none of them were run by Qwikker AFAIK.

Having looked at the Qwikker website, I'm guessing it's a java based download which updates over the air in a similar way to mobizines.If you're in a Qwikker location (pub or London Underground station) then you may get a bluetooth message asking you if you want to receive the content and at that point you 'opt-in'. The trouble is, in sending the message to your phone at all, you haven't opted-in. Having spoken to some people in this area, because that initial message *isn't* stored on the phone, it's ok to send it and isn't covered by the European Data Privacy rules. I have *no* idea why that is acceptable rather than a text message per se. It's just as intrusive, it's just as time-consuming to deal with (or not) as a text message and it's still an electronic message. And I am yet to see a reliable bluetooth delivery system. Hmm, I'm not convinced. Come on Qwikker - convince me that bluetooth is ready for the masses and that my personal experiences are not the norm. I want to be convinced...

I wish Qwikker the best of luck with the award and with their service, but I don't see why it should be one rule for bluespam and another for text spam (equally odious IMHO). The direct mail analogy is that Junk Mail is equivalent to a text message but a Bluetooth notification is the equivalent of a door-drop - the difference being that you don't have the address (mobile number) of the recipient. You still end up with junk on your doormat (phone). Hmm, the vagaries of European law!

The GSM Association’s Global Mobile awards will be presented at 3GSM 2007, Barcelona on the 13^th February. More information is available at GSM Awards.