Wanna know about students and how to market to them?

Well try Luke Mitchell's book "Targeting Students: A Marketing Guide". You'll find out all about it on his website and have a chance to sign up to his very interesting email newsletter (I'm guessing RSS is next on his 'to-do' list). And of course, if you'd like to add mobile to the student marketing mix, then talk to me as well!

As it happens, I'm off to the University of Westminster in two weeks to run a workshop on interactive marketing for the Masters students there and next week, I'm off to the University of Hertfordshire to do my annual undergraduate lecture on mobile marketing.

I always find it fascinating talking to students about mobile. What I usually find is that they're all pretty heavy users of their mobile phones but, even though they're marketing students in the main, they haven't quite made the connection between marketing and mobile. I expect I'll confuse them even more when I start talking about Sony PSPs and video ipods! But I guess it's my job to help them create the link.

Calling all Kate Bush fans

Don't know about you, but I can still remember seeing Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights on Top of the Pops with my big sister and being wowed by it (guess I'm showing my age here). I'm eagerly awaiting my copy of the new album (just ordered it) but in the meantime, I stumbled across this lovely site of early Kate Bush demos 'n stuff. If you're a fan, you'll love it!

Why isn't MTV selling truetones?

I thought I'd take a look at MTV today as one of my clients is interested in advertising there next year. Of course, I couldn't resist but take a look at their mobile ringtone offering and was surprised to see that they're *not* selling truetones (with the exception of 'pimp my ride'). The Music Solution seems to do all their ringtones and I just wondered why they hadn't got round to doing the real music? Seems a bit backward to me - especially when they're already playing around with mobile content with Motorola and made-for- mobile video which is much more complex than ringtones. Anyone know the answer? Is it a DRM issue?

Wahey - The Starsight Project wins MDA Award

I got a MMS message last night from Steve Flaherty announcing that The Kolam Partnership won the Best Short Range Data Application Award for its Starsight Project in the MDA Awards at Painters’ Hall in the City of London last night. I'm very proud of the team - they really did deserve to win this award as it's a fantastic proposition. Pictured is Steve with his award.

The Starsight Project has a multi service architecture delivering solar powered WiFi within solar powered street lighting units, and providing light and broadband internet access with the future potential for voice.

The WiFi implementation within StarSight is primarily used to provide control of solar powered street lights, enabling its users to control battery life, on/off mechanisms and maintenance. It also provides security monitoring. As excess WiFi bandwidth is rolled out into the local community, it allows different types of business, Government and the local community to access standard ICT capabilities.

StarSight has other niche applications in security with WiFi enabled CCTV and also as a tsunami early warning system, with solar powered WiFi and sirens connected to local seismology centres. It has been designed to enable emerging nations and those undergoing transitional change, to roll out street lighting and ICT infrastructure via one economically and environmentally sustainable unit.

Other winners include Spinvox (I'm a big fan of Spinvox - I find it *really* useful), O2 (for best network!?) and Fastap. Find out more at the Mobile Data Association website. And congratulations again to Steve and the team for their award.

tags: mobile+technology & wifi & mobile & starsight+project & starsight & steve+flaherty & kolam+partnership

Spooks go mobile at the BBC

The Observer reported on Sunday that the BBC is offering a mobile game to complement the popular TV programme, Spooks. It mentioned in the article that the game had cost £100,000 to produce and that it was £2 to download. Hmm, that doesn't smell right to me. So I went and checked it out.

OK, I can't check how much it really cost to develop the game, so I have to take that as read. But I did go to the BBC Spooks website and found that there are 4 games to play and it's compatible with pretty much all Java capable handsets - no mean feat. So probably the development costs are no way out. It also includes some neat location elements and mobile interactivity which all adds up in development terms.

So, next the question about cost to download. Well, actually, the BBC doesn't charge anything for this at all. So it's free. Great. Or is it?

The game is free to download/play except for your usual SMS and data costs. And due to the interactive element of the fourth game in the series, the BBC predicts that your GPRS costs will be up to £1.90 so it's down to those pesky network operators again and their high data charges. I wonder when they will bring those data charges down so that us mere mortals don't panic when we're doing more than sending or receiving a text message, especially on Pay as You Go phones which are still 70% of the market?

If you want to check it out yourself, just text 'SPOOKS' to 81010. I'm going to try it out myself and I'll let you know if it's any good.

Mobile marketing is evolving to include Sony PSP

Well we've had news stories about advertising on video ipods and now PSP is joining the fray. FHM.com is launching a Sony PSP channel with a free content promotion (via Brand Republic). It will be launched at the end of the month and users will be offered 10 free content packs to view on their Sony PSP's. The content will be the usual FHM type of thing - images and videos of girls (in their underwear I expect), behind the scenes stuff, interviews with the girls and viral teasers of what's coming up in forthcoming issues of the offline and online magazine.

The channel will be used to promote FHM.com and its related mobile phone offering which is currently via network operator portals (Vodafone Live and O2 Activel). And FHM.com also plans to make use of PSP's wireless browsing capabilities to create a browsable version of their site in the near future.

So what do I think of this. Well, I think it's great that Emap has had the presence of mind to pursue the PSP channel - with anticipated sales of 1m PSPs by Christmas, of which I guess the majority will be in the hands of young men, this is a great thing to do. Spot on in terms of targeting, a good demonstration of the scope of the Sony PSP (and I saw one in action at the Electric Picnic in the summer, and it was a rather fabulous piece of kit).

It does beg the question of how to define mobile marketing though. When I first started out, it was easy as it was all text messaging based (ok, so that was over 5 years ago and you had to explain what a text message was), and then it moved to 'stuff you do on a phone like SMS, ringtones and pictures' and then more recently we moved on to include games, applications and wap and now it's 'stuff you do on a phone, a PDA, an ipod,a mp3 player, a Sony PSP and, and.' I wonder what's next. And what the impact of wi-fi might be too.

Don't get me wrong, I love all the technology, and the potential it will bring, but by fragmenting the means of access, and the means of delivery, it could make it confusing for the customer, more difficult for the developer (how many platforms do you support exactly - over 200 mobile phones already + psp + pda + ipod + Gizmondo?) and more to the point to the brand. How does the client decide which channel to invest their money in ? If you're not into technology, how on earth are you supposed to work it all out?! (Clue, you get me in to help you.) It took TV 50 years or more to become fragmented to the state we're in today with 100s of TV stations. The mobile media world has already become fragmented in less than 5 years with multiple devices and multiple technologies, and mobile media is barely off the ground! The technology seems to be making a lot of things more complicated not less so. But it's fascinating to watch.

tags: mobile+technology & mobile+marketing & mobile & video+ipod& sony+psp& emap