6 feet of junk mail or a 29% response rate? Blyk shows the way

Its a bit of a no brainer really.

There are a few themes here that I want to touch on.

But this post relates to Blyk and where its recent results suggest where and how advertising money is going to be spent in the very near future.

And the reason is this. Blyk announces that there is a clear trend emerging from the 498 campaigns delivered on the blyk service during Sep 24, 2007 – Jan 24, 2008. These are:

Average response rate 29%

Average SMS response rate 41%

Average MMS response rate 22%

Really engaging communications consistently receive responses over 50%

So - firstly we see a disproportionate success rate when campaigns are Engaging but also an incredible mean average of 29%. Nick Fuller, Chair, DMA Mobile - 2nd November 2007 declared that

Response rates for cold [Mobile] campaigns are in the 3- 6% range while campaigns using client’s own customer data fare much better with response rates ranging between 1.3% and 20%

Also Blyk is able to deliver highly accurate customer profiles - this provides precise targeting for advertisers
and equally relevance ensured to members. So advertising migrates from mass media and Just in Case to: Timely, Relevant and Contextual Communications. It also means advertising can now play a different role where it has the potential to offer a different type of currency - information vs. interruption.

This means that companies can start to look at their markets as a series of interconnecting networks that interrelate with each other. The ability to deliver a much higher ROi is significantly enhanced. Which then leads us onto the idea of...

Recounting the audience

Brian Jacobs wrote in an SMLXL paper in 2004 What gets measured gets made Brian is currently working with SMLXL on a revised edition of that paper.

Whilst it is the case that in media planning the basic metrics of GRPs, reach and frequency will always be important indicators of performance, they are not the only data out there. It also does not follow that only measured media deliver results.

There is a danger that the media measurement tail will start to wag the communications dog. But media audience numbers (although crucial as a trading currency) are not truth. In fact, they are not even (except in the case of TV and then only in some markets, such as the UK) a measure of exposure to the advertisement. They are an estimation of the likelihood of someone having been exposed to the ad.

Just because a medium (or combination of media) cannot easily be measured, or is not measured at all, it does not follow that said medium has no audience, or has no effect on consumers.

John Gertner, wrote in the New York Times

Change the way you count, for instance, and you can change where advertising dollars go.

And Amanda Lotz in her book the Television will be revolutionized wrote

Audience measurement is also increasingly important during periods of industrial change, and so it is particularly vital in forming an understanding of the emerging post-network era.

So with Blyk there is more accurate counting and measurement and feedback. There are dynamic and real-time results. And all campaigns are interactive. Last year I wrote BB & AB: Before Blyk and After Blyk Unique Intelligence = $$$ and Blyk has deep knowledge of its members. Also, Blyk works with Xtract the Social Marketing and Social Advertising Intelligence company, which is a pioneer in this new field of marketing and advertising. Their competency is used by leading mobile and Media companies and they are now getting real interest from broadcasters as well. Part of their offering is a self-learning capability. So the more information that is feed into their tools and products, the more intelligent their data refining becomes. Such capability combined with a service like Blyk's is nothing short of transformational.

Some people at this point will get all squeamish - but I argue people need brands and brands need people. The real skill in the early 21st Century is to help those people and those brands to find each other at a point when they need each other the most. That means that next year I won't be getting a 6 foot+ pile of junk mail which is completely irrelevant to me and my life, but information that is driven by commercial $$$ but also has a currency to me and that's the Killer App.

In a world where there are already 3 times as many phones as TV sets, hence we argue mobile is the 7th Mass Media and here Where certain companies can unpick 54 billion data points to develop social network maps that look like this

Where we can count every individual - and therefore recount the audience to a degree of accuracy never before thought possible which is called Social Marketing Intelligence And be able to understand the dynamics of that network, one must see that counting via CPM's or GRP's is as relevant as hand propelled spinning looms.

Understand that in the US 65% of all web traffic is peer-to-peer flows of communication and that mobile social networking is currently worth $7bn. On a global basis peer-to-peer flows of communication are up to 10 times greater than all other web traffic depending on the time of day. Welcome to the Wealth of Networks.

As Tomi asked Blyk what makes you tick? Well, now we know.

Onwards the Netherlands