Vote George Kidd NOW!!

It's the New Media Age Awards soon and they want to know from all of us who's had greatest influence in the last 12 months. There are some heavyweights up there, of course, like James Murdoch and very disappointingly, no women. But putting that aside, I reckon a vote for our very own George Kidd from ICSTIS wouldn't be a wasted vote. Yes, I know ICSTIS is the regulator, but for a regulatory body, they do a pretty good job and are helpful rather than antagonistic (well, that's been my experience of them to date) and in operating that way, help drive the industry forward. And then today I received an unofficial pitch from an "insider" on the Support George Kidd Team:

"So to paraphrase Elvis, 'A little less conversation, a little more action', ICSTIS is the regulatory body that helped monetise mobile, spike spammers and tame the tellybox. It delivered 100% per annum growth to £1.2bn, a 70% reduction in complaint levels and a funding levy a third the rate it was 10 years ago (sounds good so far - Ed). A body that has delivered Codes in a fast-changing world, reformed its governance and increased its openness (there are a few other Government body who could take a leaf out of the ICSTIS book). We have prosecuted without fear(mostly) when we had to, but tried wherever possible, with increasing success, to work with the industry to design its way out of having to.

Regulating premium rate can seem like riding a tiger, but Mr Kidd, at the helm of ICSTIS, have done so for many years and developed a framework that has been studie and copied in Europe, the USA, Australia, Africa and Asia.

Despite a shameful lack of language skills, George's capacity to make a memorable impact , often with sign and body language, has made ICSTIS legendary from Tower Bridge to Tokyo, from Bermondsey to Budapest and from Sydney to Swedish Beers nights."

It's dead easy to vote for George so there's no excuse. You just text NMA 4 (there's a space between NMA and the 4) and send it to 83338. Get your votes in before the 1st June. Winner announced on the 28th June at the NMA Awards at the Grosvenor House Hotel.

VOTE NOW!! You know it makes sense ;)

It's been a while

but I've been really busy with events and client stuff and life generally... So what *have* I been doing..

• A New Media day for a client in Oxford with my friend and colleague Lloyd
• A slot at the MDA half-day seminar on the future of mobile marketing
• A session with Dan from Sponge and George from Iris about the future of mobile and music with the lovely folks from Sony Ericsson in their fab meeting place just near Brick Lane (I can't tell you where it is otherwise I'd have to kill you!)
• The launch of Imaginary Futures by Richard Barbrook (a very interesting book explaining the history of the internet so we can see what the future might look like)
  
• The Said Business School Media Summit at Oxford University sponsored by Amdocs (notes and video clips available)
  
• A session on preparing students for 21st Century careers for academics at the University of Westminster (I'm alumni and I lecture on the MA in Integrated Marketing)
  
• Oh, and I've been trying to catch up on admin, client work (of which there's a fair bit to be getting on with), doing a bit of twittering, messing around with facebook and myspace, thinking about what to blog on MobileMessaging2 (I'm one of their bloggers which is very nice to be asked), thinking about what to blog here (and losing all my firefox tabs that were open and then didn't restore :( ) and preparing presentations for Knock Knock and the IDM.

Phew. So you can see why I have been a bit quiet of late. I promise I'll try and do better over the next few weeks. With a bit of luck you'll be seeing missives from Denmark as of tomorrow and Monte Carlo as of Monday next week.

Invaluable advice for new (and existing) managers

I've been catching up on some blog reading and stumbled across this excellent post on what being a manager means, especially where technical project management is required. Tom explains that the posts have been linked to from a few project management blogs over in the US and also, is required reading for several tech firms in Silicon Valley and beyond. And I've had a read, and it really is required reading for any manager, especially someone who's new to the role. Maybe there's a book in there Tom?

And while we're talking about management, here are some top communication tips for IT managers. More sensible advice and straight-talking and not just for techie folk! I know plenty people who still mumble and don't open their mouths when they talk and it's so unnecessary!

Some links for a Monday morning

It's been one of those weekends.. all the best intentions to catch up with everything and only a fraction done of what I'd intended. And part of the intention was to catch up on my blogging. Still, here's a linkage post on Mobile Video and TV which should keep you going for a Monday morning.

ScreenDigest figures the prospects are bright for mobile TV and despite generating revenues of only €169 million in 2006, the researchers reckon that TV will overtake both music and gaming in the mobile content space by 2011 as operators focus on the mass-market for growth. Read the rest of the article for more detail (free subscription may be required to read the article).

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Research company Infonetics reckons there'll be 46m mobile TV subscribers by 2010 with the first spike in traffic being around the Summer Olympics in Beijing in 2008 and Asia Pacific taking the lead in mobile video uptake.

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IBM also writes what the IPTV and mobile TV advertising landscape might look like and is positive at the prospect of targeted ads to users.

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And talking of advertising, 118118 is planning a series of mobile clips of their iconic 1970s runner characters as part of their current viral marketing campaign. This is part of a wider refocus to create 118118 as a destination web and mobile site to include sports, entertainment and celebrity news. The company will also allow users to upload their own videos to the revamped portal (which doesn't seem to be live yet).

As it happens, you can already claim ringtones and wallpapers from 118118 by clicking on the mobile phone image on the home page or by going to www.118118.com from your mobile phone and scrolling to the end to '118118 ringtones'. The mobile site is slow to load and I'm unable to preview the ringtones. And it's not obvious which link to press to claim your ringtone and what's even worse, is that there's no handset or network operator recognition so you have to rely on extremely clunky dropdown menus in order to tell them what kind of phone you have. It's also rather thoughtless to have a 16kb logo for those folks who are paying per kilobyte. This is especially disappointing for a company purporting to be mobile friendly. Let's hope they get that fixed in the next iteration.

A couple of viral campaigns with a touch of mobile

I've stumbled across a couple of nice viral campaigns, both with a hint of mobile video about them, via Alfie and Tom respectively.

The first is an exclusive McFly video of 'Baby's coming Back' with the band appearing on customised mobile phones. It's a really imaginative use of mobile video and put a smile on my face. I also signed up to the JoinUp campaign at http://www.sendmyfriend.org/mcfly/ where they're campaigning for education for all children globally. Once you've signed up, you can download your own arms and accessories for your mobile phone. And I hope, in time, we'll see some similar treatments of other music videos and/or some spoofs. Looks like it's pretty simple to do. Never mind the DRM ;)


The second example is a campaign for the Royal Navy called 'Get the Message'. Again using mobile video, here you can choose a method of delivery for your message ranging from a Diver to Helicopter Pilot, then you can choose to send the message to your friend's email address or mobile phone and then you can insert a short message. If you've chosen mobile (I sent one to myself), then you get sent a wap push message telling you that you have a confidential message waiting for you and a link to a wapsite to collect it. The link loads very quickly and you see a video and at the end, your message appears and is customised with your precise message. Very cool. You can see my test example here.



As you can see, my words aren't the most imaginative in the world, but you get the idea. The icing on the cake with this campaign would be to make it very easy to save and embed the video to leave a message with a mate on myspace for example. Instead I had to sideload my video from my phone to youtube and get the link from there. Nevertheless, it's a very nice campaign and an effective use of mobile video as part of a mobile marketing campaign.

How to do mobile marketing in China

I'm no expert on the Chinese market but I spotted this article on Contagious by Kaiser Kuo explaining the ins and outs of using mobile marketing in China and it seems solid advice and comment to me. Some key takeaway points for me are:

• Mobile phones have really taken off in China (no big surprise there - there are more mobile phones in China than there are people in the US) and it's commonplace to use SMS as a response mechanism to adverts.

• Wap advertising is also on the increase with several Admob-a-likes sprouting up as well as a raft of mobile search companies. The mobile advertising and marketing industry is poised for growth.
  

• 100m Chinese subscribers have tried wap and about a third of them (30 million) use it regularly.

• Chinese mobile subscribers suffer more from spam than we do here and that the authorities have not [yet] clamped down on this.

To sum up, Kaiser Kuo comes up with 10 top tips for running mobile marketing campaigns in China (or anywhere else for that matter - it's all pretty good advice):

10 Tips for Mobile Marketing Campaigns in China

1. Target with maximum precision: Leverage available user data, and aim by time, place

2. Hard sell turns off more users than it switches on

3. Play by the rules, and don’t anger operators or regulators

4. Keep it simple: WAP destination sites should be idiot-proof, with limited choices

5. Know the technology’s capabilities, and play to those: Technology can drive creativity

6. Pull is better than push: avoid spam as much as possible

7. Know when to get on a fad—and when to get off it

8. Use mobile to access user info, and own that data: mobile ad is relational marketing

9. Reward users for viral behavior

10. Mobile alone doesn’t work: make it part of a bigger campaign

I especially agree with point 4 - and not just for wapsites - make it all easy and idiot proof! Not sure that you need to reward users for viral behaviour if it detracts from your message and sometimes mobile only campaigns can work.