Tesco supports m-retail... or does it?

For those of you who don't know already, I spent the best part of 10 years of my working life in retail - mostly fashion, and mostly in and around London's Oxford Street and Knightsbridge. Later on in my career, I worked for ZagMe, the location based marketing company who marketed to customers via SMS at Lakeside and Bluewater shopping malls, and much of that time was spent working with retailers creating and running campaigns for them. So I have more than a passing interest in things retail.

So I've been keeping an eye on the m-retail or m-commerce world and was very interested to see that UK grocery retailer, Tesco has joined the world of m-retail after successful trials of ordering flowers via mobile for Valentine's Day and Mother's Day.

As an aside, Tesco also claims that it's wap portal is a great success attracting over 300,000 customers in December last year. And not only that, but that's it's customers are hungry for ads.

"Banner advertising served up on the portal delivered a click-through rate to tailored WAP campaign sites of between three and seven per cent, said Tesco. Brands advertising on the portal included Bee Movie, ITV, Nivea and Teletext.

Tesco said the user-base of the portal has a strong segment of female household budget owners with an average age of 36 - a demographic it said is particularly valuable for fast-moving consumer goods such as toiletries and cleaning products.
According to a survey commissioned by Tesco, more than half (60 per cent) of portal users are female and the same percentage said they visit the portal at least once a month, while 69 per cent claimed they would click on a relevant advert."

So this all bodes well for entering the world of m-commerce. So I thought I'd check it out.

Alas for me, going to http://www.tesco.com/ from my mobile takes me to the main Tesco website with no adaption for the mobile screen whatsoever - large file sizes (well comparatively large when dealing with mobile), navigation required up/down and left/right so you can't actually see anything properly.

It occurred to me that they'd probably done a mobile specific site so I also tried http://www.tesco.mobi/ and http://m.tesco.com/ and neither of those worked.

So it looks like I can't do a review of the service for you.

I then thought, well maybe it's for Tesco Mobile customers only (Tesco Mobile being the pay as you go MVNO with O2), especially since their wap portal has been such a success.

And then I saw how much data charges were on Tesco Mobile... £4 per megabyte. Yes, that's right, a whopping £4 a megabyte. And there's no mention of whether or not access to the Tesco Mobile Portal is free of charge or not. In fact, there's no mention at all of any Tesco Mobile Portal or any Tesco mobile shopping service.

There's a free Tesco sim offer on at the moment, I may give it a go although I really don't fancy spending £4 a megabyte to check out their mobile portal and m-commerce offerings.

On the commercial side of the equation, I know that 02 is heavily pushing mobile retail services and is touting Tesco as it's major success story and case study (there's even a video I've seen about it). But if you're going to make your shop invisible and then charge for entry, isn't that just a bit daft?

Hmm. What's going on?

If anyone can shed any light on what's going on with Tesco m-retail and Tesco's wap portal and relevant data charges, please let me know either via the blog or via email.

And on a parting note, I think this quote (via Silicon.com) from Ashley Schofield, head of customer management at Tesco Mobile, is somewhat ironic:

"Our customers are showing a real appetite for more products and services
through the mobile internet. Delivering more great experiences and value through
our portal is a priority for this year."

Ashley, I'm not sure how you can deliver more great experiences and more value through the portal when you're charging £4 a megabyte.

Monday musings

• Bill Thompson discusses security risks in the new i-phone and the wider implications of a networked customer base and how the corporates need to adapt to our needs and not the other way round. I think he has a point but it's a challenge.

• The BBC suspended all phone competitions last week and is under scrutiny from Ofcom for malpractice over the phone lines and fake competition winners to a variety of programmes including Children in Need, Comic Relief and Blue Peter. The media has also responded.

• Any phone can be a credit card as the clever folks at Masabi has come up with a new way to manage secure transactions using your mobile phone using just 3kb of handset memory.

• Desperate for the loo? Don't know where your nearest one is? Then help is at hand with Mizpee. Trouble is it only works in the US and I find it hard to believe they have every single loo in the US on their database. But hey, maybe they have. Anyone tried it?

• User generated content, social media and how to make money from it. Well these were the topics tackled by the w2forum last week. Unfortunately, no-one had any definitive answers as it's still too early to know how best to monetise this area.

"Roy Vella, Head of Mobile Payments at PayPal, summed up the feeling in the room when he pointed out that none of the best-known social networking sites on the web, such as MySpace and FaceBook, were initially about monetisation, and that “the monetisation stuff” is only happening because there are so many eyeballs.
“You want to know how do big companies make money out of all those eyeballs” said Vella. “The answer is, I don’t think we know yet.”

Vella also warned brands that they would need to exercise caution if they were going to try to establish a presence on social networking sites, mobile or otherwise. “If you threw a party and a corporation showed up, how would you feel about it?” he asked. “It’s a new space, and we all have to tread carefully. The way to succeed is the way it has always been – to delight customers.”

• Half a million web 'n walk users on t-mobile in the UK and expected to rise to 1m by the end of the year.

• Nokia has launched a mobile gig guide for Leeds and Reading festival.

Mobile marketing for pet lovers

Go2 has launched a wapsite dedicated to pet lovers which is sponsored by pet food major, Purina.

go2 Pets includes information such as pet-friendly outdoor dining, dog beaches, parks, campgrounds, trails, hotels, off-leash dog parks, airline travel policies, toll-free emergency numbers and much more. It also includes pet tips for cat behavior, dog training, dog walking and pet picture-taking thus incorporating UGC. You can find out more about it here.

I like the fact that this marketing for Purina is about added value rather than just pushing advertising messages. And hopefully, it is truly useful for pet owners. I expect we'll see more brands going down this route.

Unfortunately, the service is only available in the USA so if any of my US readers would like to give it a go (and since there are 71m homes in the US with pets, maybe there are one or two readers who might be up for it), then please come back and tell me how you got on by commenting here.

Monday's mobile marketing tidbits

Blyk's delaying its launch until October. No bad thing as July and August are quiet times in retail. IMHO, Blyk should be launching in September to get the school, college and university kids signed up as they go back for the Autumn term, and that starts early September for schools and Sixth Form Colleges. Come October, we'll already be into half-term and well into silly season for Christmas which may be too late to launch something. I wonder if Blyk realises what an enormous task they've taken on? And I wonder if they've managed to sort out data charges so they can offer their customers a proper mobile content and media experience via wap or mobile internet?

Borders is extending their mobile marketing effort to provide sample chapters to customers' phones for free to promote new book titles. Details are currently a bit sketchy. I'm interested to see how this works in practice. The best example I've seen of this in the past was a poster campaign I saw at a railway station promoting a new thriller, Mr Clarinet. You texted in a keyword to a shortcode and by return, got back a link to a wapsite where you could read a synopsis of the book, part of the first chapter, find out more about the author and also click to buy the book. Perfect for whiling away 10 or 20 minutes while you are waiting for a train.

Three UK has launched 3next.mobi which is a user generated catalogue of stuff to do on your phone. A very nice idea where you can add applications and services that you like and add them in with your review of the service. It's free to join and not restricted to Three customers although it's designed specifically for Three's X-Series customers. Worth a look as an example of how to market content services. http://www.3next.mobi

And finally, Admob has now served more than 4 billion wap adverts, the last billion being published in the last 35 days. Way to go!

Glastonbury Festival goes mobile

With Auntie Beeb. Great stuff - must check that out. And they ask you to type in one of the longest wap URLs you can imagine: http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/radio/glastonbury2007/

Why did they do that then? It's fiddly enough to type in when you're sober, dry and mud-free. But imagine drunken, muddy, damp festi-goer trying to remember the URL and then even better, trying to tell a pal what to type in, or to text it to them to check it out. I imagine hilarity or frustration or both will ensue. I guess http://m.bbc.co.uk/glasto would be too simple or more likely, just doesn't fit in with their page naming convention.

Anyway, in true mobilist fashion, I will check out the site over the weekend and see how it shapes up.

And for those of you not coming to Mudbury, I mean Glastonbury, you can join the Glastonbury Text Club and get free alerts via text message of the latest news and updates of BBC coverage straight to your phone. Just text GLASTO to 83111. All messages are free to receive, but do check the terms and conditions anyway.

Oh, and if you're interested, the weather forecast hasn't changed much but I haven't given up hope yet.

CNN Mobile site... any good?

I was planning to do a bit of a recce around a few mobile news sites to do a compare and contrast job in relation to something I'm doing for a client. So having heard a month or so ago via MocoNews that CNN was doing an all-singing all-dancing wap site with help from Ericsson, I thought it was worth a look. And I was also reminded about it in the latest CNN email newsletter which popped into my inbox yesterday.

Anyhoo, I head off to CNN on my 'puter to see what the service consisted of. It seems there's breaking news, video and also the wapsite which was the bit I was interested in. I type in the address http://m.cnn.com on my phone browser (Opera Mini) and get 'Forbidden. Your client is not allowed to access the requested object.' So I try again on my operator browser (T-zones) and get the same message. And indeed the same message on my PC. Hmm, maybe they're updating the site or something?

Err, it seems not. It seems that unless you're on a network with one of CNN's preferred partners you don't get access. Except, that with Opera Mini, of course, I can just go to CNN.com and see everything I want to see, albeit in a not as nice format I expect as the made for mobile site. So much for CNN 'making mobile news easy'! So I have to agree with Denis at WapReview... CNN really doesn't 'get' mobile.

Doh!