Communities Dominate Brands

Thinking Like a Social Media Slut - Should we publish Twitter handle on Business Card?

We are having an interesting debate and discussion on Twitter about the use of the Twitter handle or nickname - like for me my Twitter nickname is @tomiahonen (no surprise) - on the business card. If you want to follow - and join - the debate, the hashtag is #twbizcard - add your thoughts.

But to summarize so far. I thought it was pretty obvious and included my TW handle already a few years ago. I thought it was 'a no brainer' ie obviously beneficial. Then on TW we started that debate and clearly there are very good reasons why not. First, that business cards are provided by employers (businesses) and the Twitter name may be personal. Some companies may not want that, and the individual - who may not remain with that employer forever - may not want to give the Twitter name to the (former) employer. I never thought of that, as I am my own boss haha..  And then there is the personal vs business use of Twitter. Again, for me its no issue, of course I use TW just like this blog to promote myself and my business. But many use TW for personal stuff and it may not be obvious to include the TW name on a business card.

Separately we have the discussion about the pending death of business cards. Many have stopped printing them and only use electronic cards. For that, I just say that for now, here in Asia, if you do not have an actual business card, you are not 'very modern' - you are 'insignificant' haha. Here the culture demands that if you are important enough to come to a meeting, you must have 'name cards' - the more impressive the better (and there is a whole etiquette on how to present and receive business cards). 

So just to let blog followers know, if you hop in on Twitter to the hashtag #twbizcard - you can read the debate so far and please add your thoughts. Should we all be printing our Twitter nicknames to our business cards (and I add when talking of business cards, if you are a true mobilista - make sure your next business card has a QR code if it doesn't have one already.)  

No Straight Lines: an open access participatory book

An invitation to come and read No Straight Lines: making sense of our non-linear world as an open access participatory book.

It looks at how we can build better more sustainable societies, organisations and vibrant economies through innovative practice.

It argues we need to design and create for the needs of humanity not industrial systems. You can read the entire book (open access) by clicking on READ THE BROWSER BOOK link on the No Straight Lines webpage

There is an entire chapter devoted to mobile.

I explore mobile from the perspective of what it can do at an organisational and at a societal level.

From the Achuar tribe in the Amazon rainforest using mobile and GPS enable digital technologies to challenge the Peruvian government and the mining companies trying to exploit their habitat and way of life to children using iPhones at school for learning in new exploratory ways - I make the point that mobile plays an important role in the evolution of every aspect of our society.

So NSL looks at education from Africa and India to the western world, it looks at how bricks and mortor organisations can become platforms and become part of a global economy, we look at how people living on $2 a day could be doubling their daily income by working on their mobile phones – we look at the politcal consequences of rapidly shared knowledge and information, we look at data and the impact on how commerce per se will evolve enabled by mobile. And we celebrate organisations like Ushahidi that are showing us the way in how innovation really works. In Japan we look at ground breaking business models that are already nearly 10 years old and we wonder why the fashion industry is not fully up to speed, nor indeed the media industries either.

I also argue that if organisations are not able to really design with mobile they could be missing a significant opportunity.

Here is a sample of the introduction.

Gutenberg is a moblogger: economic, organisational and societal transformation through mobile communications

There is another aspect of our non-linear world which plays an important role in what comes next. We are inevitably moving towards a society where our mobile devices become the remote control for our daily lives. Any technology that allows us to better connect, communicate, share knowledge and information and get stuff done will be widely adopted.[1] Some of the stories already presented suggest the changes to people’s lives big and small that mobile communications will usher in.

We are but at the beginning of our journey of transformation which will take some time, generations even, to play out. Vint Cerf, one of the founders of the world wide web, has a view that much has already been achieved to create a better world: ‘It has provided access to information on a scale never before imaginable, lowered the barriers to creative expression, challenged old business models and enabled new ones.’ He continues: ‘It has succeeded because we designed it to be both flexible and open. These features have allowed it to accommodate innovation without massive changes to its infrastructure.’[1]

 

Gutenberg is a moblogger

When discussing or teaching disruption, I ask the question whether the church ever saw Gutenberg coming. The church was a powerful monopoly controlling all before it did so by ensuring that knowledge, the protein for innovation and creativity, was safely kept out of the hands of feudal man and woman. Power was knowledge, and knowledge could only ever be accessed by joining the church. Gutenberg, busy in his garret in Mainz, had no idea what he was unleashing upon the world, yet were Gutenberg to be alive today, he would be creating technology so that he could be taking pictures and shooting videos with his mobile; he would be blogging and vlogging via his mobile, paying for his car parking spaces via his mobile, getting his library books renewed via SMS, dating on Flirtomatic and getting his healthcare from the 3G Doctor. When technology becomes successful, it becomes ubiquitously invisible and so our mobile devices become our personalised remote controls for life.

The numbers of mobile devices in the world, currently some 5 billion, with 80% of the world’s population living within range of a mobile network, including the Masai and the Bedouin, is extraordinary. Never in the history of the human race have so many people been able to connect to each other – the scale is simply unprecedented. In developing economies, people are finding innovative ways to use mobile technology. Grameen's microfinance and village phone programmes in Bangladesh and elsewhere are known and respected around the world, but there are many less famous examples. During the Kenyan elections, Mobile Planet provided its subscribers with up-to-the-minute results by text message. And in his Presidential election campaign, Barack Obama did not miss the opportunity to mobilise his supporter network through mobile connectivity. Writing in the Observer, Cerf states: ‘As the cost of mobile technologies fall, the opportunities for such innovation will continue to grow. We're nearing the tipping point for mobile computing to deliver timely, geographically and socially relevant information.’ He goes on to comment on how researchers in Japan have proposed using data from vehicles' windscreen wipers and embedded GPS receivers to track the movement of weather systems through towns and cities with a precision never before possible. ‘It may seem academic’, he adds, ‘but understanding the way severe weather, such as a typhoon, moves through a city could save lives. Further exploration can shed light on demographic, intellectual and epidemiological phenomena, to name just a few areas.’

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[1] Vint Cerf, ‘If you thought the internet was cool, wait until it goes space age’, Observer, Sunday, 17 August 2008.

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[1] McGuire’s Law: the utility of any activity increases with its mobility. http://mcguireslaw.com/.

Mobile and Money: Dave Birch thoughts from Forum Oxford Conference

This is one of the blogs that has waited on my to-do list for a long while, but I had to get to it. And I think Alan Moore's new book No Straight Lines is a perfect opportunity to talk about mobile money. And on mobile money we should listen to the master on that topic, Dave Birch of Consult Hyperion, whose book Digital Identity Management is also a must-read. So yes, Dave spoke at the Forum Oxford Conference last year and I really wanted to post a blog about his thinking about mobile and money and perhaps a few other related things too.

WHEN EVERYBODY HATES EVERYBODY

First of all, Dave has been studying the digital money opportunity for many years and observed the evolution of the mobile money ecosystem. He said of the mobile money industry that "The mobile wallet market structure is basically that everybody hates everybody else." So in mobile this just like the mobile industry in general (of its usual mutual distrust that can degenerate into hatered and back-stabbing) but with far more global players. It includes the mobile network operators/carriers, who hate the handset makers, who hate the operating system providers, who hate the payments providers, who hate the plastic and contactless payments system providers, who hate the credit card providers, who hate the banks, who hate the retailers; and then all of whom then together hate each of the related regulators which now means banking regulators, telecoms regulators and consumer protection regulators (plus competition regulators ie anti-monopoly watchdogs).

Spot on Dave! This is a quagmire haha, and it seems to only take off, if either the market has a very strong player who can do it alone, like NTT DoCoMo in Japan or Safaricom/Vodafone in Kenya etc; or else if after years and years of collaboration, the industry players can come together like in South Korea.

So if you thought mobile money is 'obvious' and has such superb benefits it has to happen immediately, and now as more and more players from Nokia to Google to Visa to Vodafone to Coca Cola to Tesco to Paypal to many big banks are talking mobile money, don't think it will happen overnight. Remember, Turkey is the first country to issue a target date for the end of cash, and that year is 2025. So don't throw away your credit cards just yet haha..

EVERY PHONE CAN.. RECEIVE PAYMENTS

The Dave talked a lot about mobile in the money opportunity, with great insights. Dave said first of all, that "The point of mobile payment is not that your phone is your card, but that the phone is your terminal." Brilliant, absolutely true Dave! I've been saying this for a while too. Totally true, yes. The easy thing to notice, is that you can use your phone to make the payment, to replace the plastic card or banknote or coin, to pay for your parking or your Coca Cola at the vending machine or your train ticket. That is an evolutionary shift, from one electronic gadget in our pocket (the plastic card with the magnetic stripe and the security chip) to another (our mobile phone). But the radical shift is the other side, receiving payments. The average person cannot receive payments from a plastic card like a Visa card or Mastercard or a banking card. We have no way to verify that card is valid, and that it has a balance, and to deduct the paymnt from it. But any mobile phone can act as the receiving terminal for payments. We consumers can become 'merchants' in that way, to handle payments, and real merchants can upgrade to digital payments without the expensive credit card handling equipment. This is what is powering so much of the mobile retail in countries from the Philippines to the beaches in Brazil.

And that is something Dave talked about as 'Mobile Enhanced Retailing'. Its not that mobile will replace the retail shop - which it can do in some extreme cases like the internet did with music, books, travel etc. Sure in some extreme cases in retail, an m-commerce site can replace the retail store; but in most cases, the mobile is best suited to enhance our retail experience in anything from driving footfall to the stores, to adding to the experience within the store such as treasure hunts and getting more information about the goods, to speedier handling of the payments etc.

BETTER TO LOSE PHONE THAN WALLET

Then the usual problem most of us 'Luddites' have about mobile payments, is that we fear the single point of contact problem. That it would be dangerous to have our full wallet on our phone, and what if we lose our phone, or its stolen, or it is broken, or the battery runs out. Haha, yes, true, but the same problem is also with our plastic, what if your Visa card or American Express is lost, or stolen, or broken in an accident, or wears out so that it cannot be read anymore, etc. Dave made the very relevant point that we all in mobile money make almost daily - a payment solution is far more secure and far easier to recover from than any other payment mechanism. Yes its true. Dave said it this way: "Its much better to lose your phone than your wallet." Why? First, if you lose your wallet, all the cash in it will usually be gone no matter what, in most countries and most situations. So even if you are lucky to get your wallet back, you'll probably have lost the cash that was in it.

But what of the credit cards and banking cards and your driver's licence and other identity cards, etc. How tedious is it to replace those. How long will it take for you to be rush-delivered a replacement American Express card? And then imagine how much worse that all can be if you are travelling and where is the next place where you will be long enough for a Fedex delivery of your rush replacement credit card can even be delivered. Compare that to mobile. On mobile, your mobile wallet solution can have user-set limits that you can alter when you want, on what levels of payments (if any) can be authorized without security pin codes etc - so the mobile can work like a contactless card like Octopus, Oyster etc. But this is far more safe, because you can lock your phone with a password (that you cannot do for the contactless card) and you can further protect your banking access with its own limits and security.

Then take your credit card and banking card, with their "chip and PIN" security etc. That all is already built into the phone, but actually your mobile phone is far more secure natively than the best chip and PIN card. And this is before you then set your own limits if you want, that an be altered by the user, and the further security that can be deployed in the handset, in anything from thumbprint readers to retina scans to voice pattern recognition - all things that a plastic card cannot hope to match. And this is before we take the power from the network - like location-based security and proximity based security. If the network knows you usually move from your home to your office to the school of your children and the shopping center near your home it can provide minimal security at that level. If suddenly the mobile phone moves to another city - then it can be set to notice the unusual travel pattern - and only then ask for a verification password etc. Same for proximity, so imagine a family travelling. As long as the phones are together, no passwords are needed (its almost impossible for a pickpocket to steal simultaneously all phones from the pockets of four family members at the same time) but the moment one of the phones moves away from the group, the password protection is enabled. Etc etc etc.

HOW TO REPLACE MOBILE WALLET

But that was on the security side, actually the bigger benefit is if you lose your mobile. If you lose your cash, or contactless payment card, that money is gone. If you lose your credit card or banking card, you may lose some of your money and you have to call the bank to cancel the cards and then it takes at least days, may take weeks, to have your cards replaced. It will typically be even more of a hassle to replace identity cards like your driver's licence or passport.

But on mobile, the replacement is the fastest and most convenient. If your mobile wallet is enabled with your operator/carrier, all you need to do, is borrow someone else's phone, call your operator/carrier, tell them your mobile phone is lost or stolen (or broken, fell into swimming pool at your hotel). They will ask your usual security words etc, and then they can enable your full mobile wallet - including all your credit cards and bank accounts and payment systems exactly as they were - onto any other phone on any other SIM card you designate. So imagine the family dad having a bit of a show-off moment at the hotel, and falling into the pool, and finding that the phone is ruined. He just uses his child's phone, calls the operator/carrier, and has the mobile wallet functionality transferred to that child's phone (which daddy will borrow for a day before they can go to a phone store to buy a replacement phone for daddy).

This is BY FAR the most convenient way to replace lost or ruined or stolen or destroyed payment methods. It is far better to lose your phone, than to lose your wallet. And you are far better off, having your credit cards and banking accounts enabled onto the mobile than on any other forms like plastic cards. Now, obviously the retail world will need to catch up to this reality, only a few countries so far can do full payments in anything, in mobile, but that will soon evolve too.

Dave gave some interesting facts, like that Google has 750 people only in their payments team, this is far more than any telecoms operator and far more than any bank has in its mobile payments unit. No wonder Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said last year that mobile money was one of Google's three highest priorities.

MOBILE BECOMES STORING MECHANISM FOR REPUTATION

And the most far-reaching thought Dave expressed that I think comes to the core of what Alan and I have been writing about in our book Communities Dominate Brands and Alan in his follow-up book Social Media Marketing and now obviously in his latest, No Straight Lines, is that thought of the power of the data collected. What Alan called the new Black Gold for the 21st Century. Dave said it like this: "Mobile is the mechanism for storing your identity and reputation." Its more than payments. Its more than money. Its on those themes that Jonathan MacDonald writes about 'Advocurrency' and companies like Qustodian now are working on to help us manage our identity and reputation and its value, via mobile. Imagine how much information a retailer loyalty card will collect about us. Imagine how much information a credit card or bank account will collect about us. And imagine how much Amazon for example knows about our preferences and purchases.

Now imagine a near future when all of those data points get collected via a single point, our mobile phone. And our consumption behavior can be combined with our communication behavior. Its not just that Tomi likes James Bond and will see SkyFall the next 007 movie, but how many people did Tomi talk to about the movie before and after? Did Tomi influence others to go see the movie. The power of mobile money will be multiplied when we understand the value of influence, and that mobile, will merge with money, will merge with identity, will merge with communications, will merge with influence. That is why Google is in mobile money haha..  That is why this is such a huge race.

Excellent presentation Dave, truly excellent with great insights. 

Lets Talk About Mobile in Retail

I had the pleasure of returning to Toronto to present at the Mobile Media Week last week, where I did a pair of keynotes, to the Mobile Think Tank, and the Mobile Biz Bootcamp. In the bootcamp they had one of the focus areas on mobile commerce and we heard from many retailers what they are up to in the mobile space.

So this blog is not about mobile banking or mobile credit cards. It is not about 'all' mobile commerce, ie any digital goods sold directly to a phone do not really involve (or need to involve) bricks-and-mortar type of retail. So our music, movies, videogames, airline tickets, insurance etc do not require a separate visit to a retail establishment, because the service (or proof of purchase of service) intended (music, movie, game, air ticket, insurance etc) can be delivered completely to our phone.

That is only a minority of our retail. What of the locksmith, the hairdresser, the dentist office, the florist, the clothing retailer, supermarket and drug store - the typical 'high street' or 'mainstreet' shopping experience in any small town on the planet. What of them? If you need your locks changed, that cannot be done 'remotely' via a mobile phone or the PC. Or your haircut? Can't be done directly via mobile. Mobile can show you what your new haircut might look like, virtually, but the actual hair still needs to be cut with actual scissors by an actual hairdresser or barber. That can't be fulfilled via mobile. So lets look at the real bricks-and-mortar retail establishments. What is the role of mobile to them?

THREE AREAS

Its three-fold. There is 'marketing communication' (ie advertising) we can deliver to our customers before they come to our store - and use mobile also to 'drive foot-fall' ie drive actual human visitors to our stores. This is very important in an era when e-tailers like Amazon and Expedia and Ebay are expanding their product offerings and trying to sell everything online (and increasingly also on mobile). If you own prime retail space in the main shopping district in your town, you want your customers to keep coming to your stores and make purchases there. Mobile is a new way to help drive visitors to your store.

Then there is the experience within the store. As the retailers get to know mobile, they notice it is a very powerful activation tool for customers already inside their store, to help them try something, go to a different part of the store, and to engage with the customer, assisting with the shopping experience - all this while of course hoping to sell them more stuff, and differentiating the shopping experience from that inside other shops today. In a very small shop - imagine a typical jeweller for example - there isn't much movement inside a store, but then consider the megastores by retail giants - you can literally get lost inside a super-duper-store..

The third experience is after the shopping experience. The mobile goes everywhere, where our shopper goes with the newly bought goods. Even if your customer bought condoms for having sex, yes, that weird statistic from earlier this year, that 10% of British youth think its ok to send SMS text messages while having sex..  So yes, the mobile will follow your customer to wherever they go, including the bathroom and the bed.. So every loyalty program should start with mobile: a mobile is carried even when the wallet is not.

SOME EXAMPLES

Lets take concrete examples. The examples of the first kind are most common, because that is usually where most mobile marketing will know to start. Its the 'obvious' bit. I have spoken a lot about some early pioneers in this space, like the Guinness beer Java app for the Rugby Sevens tournament here in Hong Kong which offered clever utilities to the international tourists who had travelled to Hong Kong for the big international rugby tournament. So it offered the rugby scores and stats and team rosters and biographies of the star players and all what you'd expect from a sports news service. Then it offered the typical tourist guide advice, the maps to Hong Kong, where is your hotel, where is the nearest MTR subway train station, etc. It was very innovative in pre-installing a series of links to short phrases said in Cantonese, so the English-speaking tourist could just click on a link on the phone, and the phone would 'speak' in Cantonese, telling the driver where to go, or asking the bartender to order a pint of Guinness beer etc. All makes sense.

So far we have the elements of any good sporting/travel related mobile web service. The whole thing was delivered via a Java app, so it works on 80% of all the phones on the planet (where an iPhone app would only work on 2% of all of the mobile phones in use, Android even less today). Then the clever bit about retail. You wanted the Guinness app to drive 'foot-fall' and to pubs that sell Guinness of course? And yes, it of course had included Guinness-serving bars listed on the maps it showed and helped tourists find the nearest pint of Guinness in Hong Kong.

How successful was it? Sean Rach of Ogilvy reported in Singapore earlier this year, that the Sevens Tournament Guinness app in Hong Kong had boosted Guinness sales by 25%. That is good use of mobile to drive retail sales.

In Toronto we heard for example from Chris Borek who runs the mobile initiatives for US retail giant Target stores. They have of course the mobile service that allows consumers to find out which of their Target stores has a given item in stock, and how many of those items are in that particular store, etc. This is all pretty 'obvious' to retail chains to consider when they start to deploy mobile marketing to their consumers.

I have countless such stories that I have collected into my 'Pearls' (and have many in my ebook as a collection of advertising related pearls in ebook Pearls Vol 1: Mobile Advertising). Mobile is used to drive retail visitors to stores from the Puma adver-game in China, to Victoria's Secret when they opened their new store in Chicago, to Borders bookstore, which reported 23% response rates to their personalized book offer coupons delivered via mobile. Perhaps the best known campaign is BMW's winter tyres campaign two years ago, which achieved a 30% conversion rate - measured actual purchases, driven by a simple personalized MMS campaign. And the world record as far as we know, is still the Gillette razor campaign in South Korea - where 98% of the mobile coupons were redeemed. Imagine that, a 98% conversion rate for a mobile coupon campaign.

Where e-tailers are direct rivals to the traditional bricks-and-mortar store, mobile is a friend to the traditional store-keepers. Mobile helps you bring visitors to your store. But it can be far more than that. However, before I go further, I have to make one obvious point.

MUST BE OPT-IN

Mobile can drive visitors to your store. But please don't think of the idea of the Tom Cruise movie 'Minority Report' and its style of personalized spam ads delivered by location. That idea of location-based ads delivered to random walkers-by is a myth, it is economically not viable and it is hated by consumers. Do not bother to spend one minute planning any location-based spam ad campaigns. If you're lucky you might get a tiny percentage of success but nothing like these award-winning campaigns I mention in this blog.

All of the above campaigns that I mentioned were on the basis of opt-in. You have to build your mobile marketing target database by opt-in basis. That is a slow process and you have to start now. But it can be incredibly powerful. Consider Japan. Today, out of the total Japanese population, one in 8 Japanese citizens has already signed up to receive coupons from McDonalds! Why would McDonald's ever bother to waste the money on advertising on TV or magazines or movies or radio - all of which are media where the majority of the message goes to consumers who are NOT customers of yours. When McDonalds can now reach the actual pockets of their actual consumers who not only use their products, but like McD enough to accept their offers and coupons and marketing, onto their mobile phones. Please do remember, Japan is a fish-eating nation (sushi bars are the real fast food of Japan) so 1 in 8 in Japan is an awesome achievement for McDonalds.

IN-STORE

The clever part comes to allow customers to engage with you when they are in-store. This is still in the early stages. But mobile should be used to move the customers around the store, to bring them to try new things you sell, and of course to offer them instant coupons and discounts and offers. Here we have the power of various non-cellular technologies we can use, such as Bluetooth and near field and even WiFi. We can also create further engagement of our current customer in our current store. I heard two great innovative examples this summer. In Singapore I heard of the Adidas store promotion, which was the world's first use of Augmented Reality 'in the first person' - when they introduced the digital mirror that allowed instant fittings of t-shirts with the help of a simple cameraphone and their clever use of the digital mirror. I blogged about it earlier so if you don't know the example, please take a look here (Adidas introduces first person AR)

Even more powerful is the idea from Tesco that I just heard three weeks ago when in Brazil, speaking at the Mobile Marketing Forum run by the Mobile Marketing Association in Sao Paulo. Tesco the UK's biggest supermarket chain, is now offering its intelligent shopping list service. The logic of using the mobile phone as your shopping list is pretty obvious for most consumers. The phone is always with us, so we can easily see what needs to go to the shopping list. If we integrate that with our Tesco's shopping experience, Tesco can offer to add items from our previous shopping visits directly to the shopping list - and using 2D barcodes (QR codes) they can make it really easy at one click to add new items to the shopping list while in the store, etc.

That all is 'to be expected'. A shopping list is very 'unsexy' and of little interest. Until we get to the magical part. Tesco's will ask you which Tesco store you want to visit, and then Tesco will automatically re-arrange the shopping list, in the order of the items in the shopping aisles - of that particular Tesco Store! Awesome! It is 'magical'. It is like Tesco and our mobile phone is reading our mind. Even as the stores will periodically re-arrange the stores completely (and confuse us shoppers..) - this app knows what was re-arranged and still intelligently routes us inside the store. And if we go to an unfamiliar Tesco store today - like the new one at the mall that just opened, all we need to say to the app is which store we want to go, and the shopping list is re-arranged based on the aisles of that store. Awesome!

Now, the really clever bit is of course under the skin. Its not that we help Tomi Ahonen do his shopping. Tesco's would know from my purchase pattern that Tomi clearly prefers Pepsi to Coca Cola. Well, if Tomi is using the Tesco shopping list app on the phone, next we will have Tesco selling incredibly powerful info to Coca Cola. Did you know Coca Cola, that a regular Pepsi drinker is now in Aisle 4 of Tesco store number 107, and on the next Aisle (Aisle 5) there are the soft drinks? Would you like to send a Coca Cola offer to this Pepsi drinker? We can actually identify the point of when a purchase decision is being made

Now, how important is opt in and personalization in this case? Tesco's has to have asked me permission to send marketing to me. And I will have had to have selected soft drinks as one of the categories for which I say yes. But yes, as I walk on the aisle, and I approach the soft drinks, and I am looking at my phone (as I am reading the Tesco shopping list)! - I receive an instant coupon for 2 bottles for price of 1 from Coca Cola... Or perhaps Coca Cola sends me a trial offer of one of their new flavors like cherry coke, vanilla coke or whatever new they now have..

Note, Tesco will not reveal my name to Coca Cola. Tesco will not sell my phone number to Coca Cola. Tesco will not violate my identity in any way. If I said no to soft drink ads, Tesco will not even bother to tell Coca Cola. But if Tomi Ahonen said yes to soft drink ads, then Tesco can tell Coke that there is 'a Pepsi buyer' in that very specific store. And it will be Tesco, not Coca Cola, who will deliver the ad to me. I have not given Coke permission to market to me. But I will appreciate Tesco trying to find me good bargains in areas that I am interested in..

But very VERY importantly, Tesco know me well from my past purchase patterns. They know what TYPE of product of Pepsi I buy. I am buying regular fully caffeinated Pepsi, not sugarfree Pepsi Max, so Coca Cola can equally target me very accurately with their corresponding product(s). Because Tesco knows this, they can help Coca Cola give me the best possible offer - don't sell me Diet Coke haha, this customer doesn't buy any diet sodas, ever!

Tesco also know what format I buy. I don't buy the 2 liter or 3 liter bottles, I buy several of the small bottles. So again, if Coca Cola tried to sell me a 2 liter bottle of Coke, it would be a waste simply because I never buy any soda at that size (I live alone, that amount of soft drink would go stale long before I had finished the bottle). Tesco can help optimize and target the ad for its retail brands and also deliver for its customers the best value.

Think about it. If you don't have a strong brand preference one way or the other, and you got served discount coupons instantly while in the store, of only those goods that you buy anyway - I would never be offered baby diaper offers for example, as I do not have kids. And I use an electric razor, so I wouldn't get any offers of Gillette razors etc. Only the stuff I really buy, in the categories I buy. Totally relevant offers to me...

This is still only the beginning. We can do games in the stores, have customers collect points for visiting a specific department or desk, or viewing a particular promotion or engaging with an automated digital marketing gadget like some touch screen promotional panel for example. Give our customers some loyalty points or chances to win some trinkets and soon they cannot imagine shopping without having the phone in their hands all the time. And remember - get their permission to promote to them - and don't abuse that permission.

AFTER STORE

The part least understood so far, is the after-store experience. Retailers do not quite understand this part - that the mobile phone is upon our person - even after our wallet is not there anymore - we take our phones to the bathroom, we sleep with the phone in bed with us, and most amazingly, we keep the ringer on, while in bed. So mobile can even reach us in our sleep. No other mass medium has ever had such a total reach.

What can we do with this? Its the obvious channel to use for customer feedback. In Singapore today all three mobile operators do this with the visits to their stores. If you visit the mobile operator (carrier) store, after you leave you will receive an SMS message asking you if you were satisfied with your visit to the store. You can respond by simple SMS saying yes or no. That message obviously is not charged to your phone bill. And what if you say you were not satisfied.

Mobile telecoms competition in Singapore is already so mature and customer-oriented, all stores do this - if you say no, you will receive a call from headquarters, from a senior exec in sales, who will talk to you personally to find out what happened. And obviously that senior sales exec will be calling next the store manager of where you visited and that store manager will go have a talk with the sales clerk who may be having a bad day today, or perhaps did not pay attention to the training, or who - perhaps, if this pattern holds - is not really suited for a customer service job like retail. Imagine how powerful management tool this is, if you let customers talk directly to sales management...

This is the newest and most difficult part of the use of mobile in retail, so its rather easy to see that its the mobile operators/carriers who are first to adopt this. But it can also be simple other things like loyalty points, like follow-up communications, like updates, accessories, etc. Since we know what you bought, we can follow up.

In the USA, Rite Aid the pharmacist retail chain is now letting its loyalty card holders register their cellphone number to the loyalty card. Then the customer does not need to carry the Rite Aid printed loyalty card anymore, but only give the phone number at the cash register, to collect the loyalty points. Clever. But what does Rite Aid do with these customers? As it sells prescription drugs for example, it can send alerts when a given prescription is about to run out, a few days before, and remind the customer to go get a doctor's authorization to renew the prescription before it runs out, etc. This kind of 'after-care' is what mobile is by far the best tool to use.

Finnish libraries do that, by sending reminders to the library users two days before a book is due back, to remember to bring it back, and allowing the user to re-new the book loan via SMS (as long as the book is not ordered by another library patron). Isn't that cool. Renew your book by SMS, rather than lugging the books back to the library to be stamped...

CLEVER BITS

There are some other clever bits to retail use of mobile that I want to mention. One magical opportunity obviously is AR, Augmented Reality. But AR is currently mostly limited to smartphones, so your AR solution is one to deply at a later stage, when the basics have been covered. But consider this for magic. Ikea has an AR app for some smartphones, that allows you to select any items from the Ikea catalog, and 'virtually test' them in your home. To use the cameraphone view, to look at your own living room, then super-impose that new Ikea sofa onto the view, and see if the sofa brown color matches your curtains and goes with the coffee table you have, etc... That kind of thing. Magical.

Viral is another thing we should all be thinking of every time we are in anything with mobile. The Puma racing advergame I mentioned earlier, had this element. You get a chance to win Puma rewards if you are a good racer, yes, against other racers. But you also win Puma rewards if you are active in spreading the game to others. I love this idea. I just was in Athens this week at a customer event by internetq for several operator customers of internetq, where I was presenting about mobile marketing and advertising. And one of the examples I told was that of Orange Poland, who had this kind of incentive in their game (the daily prize was a BMW car, and they were promoting their new Club Orange). All those who were active in spreading the news about the game were also rewarded with points, which increased the chances of winning in the game. In all, the campaign was so successful that 1.5 million people participated - 13% of Orange Poland's total customer base. This is the kind of uses we need in all mobile campaigns. As Rudy de Waele likes to say, Think Global, Act Viral. Or how Fjord CEO Mike Beeston says, make all mobile services 'sufficiently contageous'. Viral is a very powerful element of mobile, we need to learn to use it well.

I just heard in Athens at that internetq event from Mike Walsh about fashion shows in Tokyo now, where as the models walk by, you can point your phone at the supermodel, and pick the item of clothing they are wearing, and order it on the spot, in your size, in the color of your choice, etc. Instant shopping. Cool, kawaii, as the Japanese would say. This is a sign of the things to come in the near future for all for us.

And back to foot-fall. We know that the mobile is unique to each person, so personal, we don't even share it with our spouces. So when phone number 123-456-7890 walks into your store, it is certainly the same person with that phone number as visited your store two weeks ago or a year ago. Certainly. So we can do great things with that information.

We need to have the customer tell us they're in the store now. The Rite Aid loyalty card or Tesco Loyalty card is one way. We can do many other things - why not create a game where you can register via a 2D barcode or QR code which is only inside the store. Each of our stores has a different code, when you visit, you have a chance to win, but give a chance to win something in that store for all who visited that specific store, then give a grand prize where odds increase for all who visit many stores... Make it a game to try to get your customers to visit as many of your stores as possible..

ENGAGE THROUGH WINDOW DISPLAY

The last thought I want to leave you with today, is about when the store is closed. You pay a massive rent for that prime real estate on that specific street in your town, for your store. Most shops are not open 24 hours a day. If your store closes at some hour, and is on the street (ie not a shopping mall which itself also closes) - then there are people walking by your store after it is closed. Your expensive store space is 'idle' for what, 12 hours of every day? We can do better, with mobile.

You have your window display. It is designed to try to bring people into your store. It can be a very powerful sales person while you are closed. Why not make an interactive advertising game into your window display, to run automatically overnight, to collect phone numbers and permissions of passers-by to join the game. So if you are a jeweller, offer a chance to win a men's watch at the end of the month - in that window where you have men's jewelry, and the chance to win the corresponding women's watch in the window where you have womens' jewelry. Run a small video clip on a cheap DVD or flat screen PC monitor, just enough active, that anyone who is really watching the window, will be interested - but not a giant display so those who are not really interested (but want to enter every contest) would notice. A small portable DVD player is perfect for this, with a short 1 minute video on perpetual repeat. inviting passers-by to join the contest.

Then two critical parts - number 1 - make sure you give the passer-by the chance to double his chances if the customer visits the store itself, before now and the date the prize is awarded. You want the visitors to come into the store and fill out a short survey (by mobile or on a touch screen simple interface at the store like an iPad for example). And of course, the prize has to be picked up in person, inside the store.

Every single store with a store-front at any street in any town should have a simple interactive tool to engage with passers-by for after-hours. No matter what you sell or offer, give the passers-by a chance to win something nice. Make it something different every month, don't run the same promotion in any way inside the store - you don't want to give away stuff to regular customers, this is a away to connect with those who did not make it inside your store. Nothing stops your regular customers from playing in the game too - but they have to 'notice' the window ad (and most regular visitors won't be bothering to look at your window displays).

And as the customers register to your contest, ask them if they will allow you to promote to them via the phone. This is the process you should be doing at all times, everywhere. Keep asking permission to have your customer signed up to your opt-in database. Remember McDonald's in Japan. You have to do this continously over years, to get a big database of your actual customers. When you get the permission, make sure you offer only relevant ads - I am a man, don't offer me discounts on womens' things, etc..

SURVEY YOUR ACTUAL CUSTOMERS

Then use the mobile channel as your occasional customer surveys. A couple of times per year, only to a small sample of your total opt-in database, ask them about your next changes to your store. You are considering expanding the X department and shrinking A, B or C, which would your current customers want you to shrink first. Or you are considering adding brands Y, Z and W, which brand would they want you to add to your store shelves, etc..

This is far more powerful than any marketing intelligence you can find in any trade journals or by any wholesalers' marketing materials etc. You get actual factual information from your actual customers. Their exact preferences. Ask for them, not often, in small amounts on a small sample, so never more than once per year per person. But imagine how much more this will increase the loyalty of your customers, if you ask their opinion - and obviously - after you have processed the survey - since you know who was asked - TELL THEM. Not everyone of your customers gets what they asked for. So tell EVERYONE who participated, what was the result. Now they feel they were listened to. Then tell them you'll implement preferences number 1 and 2 (this time..).. Those who voted for number 3 will fully understand - IF you tell them that 1 & 2 got more votes.. Far too often, after a brand asks a consumer for his/her opinion, they don't come back to tell the consumer what was the final tally. Tell your customers what was the final result. They will love you for sharing this.

Customer loyalty and CRM in the age of mobile is radically different from before mobile. It is very early days, but the wonder of mobile is that it is in the pockets of every economically viable person on the planet. If you are a retailer, the only way to talk to every one of your prospective customers is through mobile. This is new, it only became viable a few years ago. Remember, its not an iPhone App or any smartphone app that you want. You want to engage with SMS and a simple mobile web page built on WAP. Thats it. If you want to get creative, you add MMS and Java. That gets you to 80% of all phones of all consumers to the planet. Smartphones will not even reach a tenth of that, so any retailer should not give one penny to any app development of smartphones today. The start is SMS and WAP (and possibly voice and IVR). That is where you start. Then the second stage is MMS or Java (and in CDMA markets like the USA, Korea, Japan, China: Brew). You have to have these deployed before you even listen to someone who is excited about a 'cool' iPhone app for you. You are in retail, that means serving mass market consumers. You are not in the making cool apps business.

NOW IS THE TIME

But retail.. Now is the time to get to understand mobile. This blog had a few simple early examples. Remember, you can go into mobile at three separate stages of your consumer's consumption pattern. You can talk to the consumer before the purchase, advertise to the consumer. You can also talk to the consumer when they are in your store. And you can still engage with the consumer after they have left your store with their purchase. Mobile is the ultimate customer relationship device. Make powerful use if it now, before all of your rivals are doing it, and you will find a competitive advantage out of mobile.

If you want more info, you may want to look into my seventh book, first in ebook format, Tomi Ahonen Pearls Vol 1: Mobile Advertising. It is obviously primarily about the advertising (first stage) part of this opportunity, but that is where most retailers will need to start anyway. My ebook has 50 case studies of mobile marketing excellence the world over, and very highly rated as a practical book of what you can do today.

Convergence Contest? For the 5 Trillion dollar Trophy.

Vacations are good for fresh thinking. I started today's morning preparing to come back to work and my mind was buzzing with thoughts of the truly big picture. Last spring and summer I often got caught up with the minutiae of the percentage in market share or the next user number in text messages or the latest added consumers to mobile, etc. But there is a big picture to it all. The Contest for Convergence for the 5 Trillion Dollar Trophy.

To understand how enormous number we are looking at, its more than ten times bigger than the global computer industry including all PC hardware from desktops to laptops and netbooks and tablet PCs like the Kindle and iPad... plus the applications and software industry enabled by the PC industry. Take all that, and multiply that by ten! Or take television and radio, the total broadcast industry - and multiply it by 15. Or take the global internet and all its revenues out of Google adwords and broadband fees etc, all of the internet revenues - and multiply that by 20. We are looking at the biggest economic prize of our lifetimes, and it is 'in play' as we speak, with Fortune 500 giants like Nokia, Apple, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Vodafone, Microsoft, Sony, Samsung etc all angling to be one of the winners in this ultimate race of the decade, perhaps even the race of the century. So a quick review of where we stand.

I have been preaching the convergence story in each of my 9 books and was personally involved in the early stages of the digital convergence, from creating the world's first computer company advertisement to the internet (media and internet convergence) to leading the team that created the world's first fixed-mobile converged solution (fixed and mobile telecoms convergence) to authoring early documents on the future of convergence (at Nokia's Telephony Gateways digital convergence unit, I authored the first White Paper for the industry to discuss how to do the internet on mobile). That was all more than a decade ago when I was actively involved in 'doing it' rather than a consultant 'preaching it' haha...  But I do know quite a lot about the realities of digital convergence not only from studying the matter, but from doing it myself.

So its no surprise to my readers and fans, and readers at this blog, that I believe passionately in digital convergence. So lets not review my view. Lets see what some others have said about digital convergence 'recently' - say past few years.

COMPUTERS, MEDIA

The computer industry is headed to mobile. After Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, and changed its name from Apple Computer to Apple, and now calls itself a mobile company, the bigger computer maker rivals have all joined the chorus. Now Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer etc all sing of the same hymn book. The future of the computer industry is mobile. Maybe that is not a big surprise, they have been predicting the pocket computer for two decades already..

The media industries are more interesting. The (former) Director General of the BBC said that all broadcast content will be available on mobile (and BBC's successful iPlayer is a perfect example of how a broadcaster can take a big slice out of the digital convergence into mobile). The CEOs of the major media giants from Publicis to Warner Music to EMI have all started to sing 'future of media is mobile' stories. Publicis CEO Maurice Levy said that within a few years "most of the music", "most of the information" and "most of the advertising" will "transit through your cell phone."

WEB AND ADVERTISING

What of the internet? Good question. A few years ago there was a big battle of will the internet win or the mobile? Now it seems to be clear, it will be that the internet will converge onto the mobile. In fact, the future of the internet is mobile. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been saying that for years already, and the new Google strategy, 'Mobile First' is a clear indication of how seriously they are taking it. And Google are not alone among internet giants believing in a mobile future. From 2007, Yahoo has been saying the same. So if you thought that perhaps the internet was threatening your business, that may be a short-lived threat, say for industries already feeling the full threat like bookstores or video rentals or music stores or travel agencies etc. If the internet itself is headed to mobile, the salvation for a bookseller or video or music or travel company is not to go online, it is to 'leapfrog' the technology gap and go directly to mobile. Like the book publishing industry is doing in Japan for example where mobile books outsell ebooks already.

Advertising goes where the media audiences go. Advertising has been on mobile phones for a decade already but in mostly small numbers and niche campaigns hidden in the digital ad budgets. That changed last year when the advertising industry woke up seriously to mobile. When the global ad budget declined, and all other forms of advertising shrunk in revenues, mobile advertising spending doubled worldwide. As I witnessed when I delivered my keynote to the Mobile Marketing Association global event in the meccha of advertising, Manhattan of the Mad Men of Madison Avenue haha, the big global ad agencies are all ramping up their competences in mobile, and I am witnessing it myself with far greater interest now in my mobile marketing workshops and seminars, such as delivering a keynote to the big MMA event in Sao Paulo this week. The global ad industry top management may be late to the mobile party, but they are dead serious about it now. As we learned from Universal McCann the advertising giant, one in seven media minutes is spent with mobile already today, as mobile is often the digital response channel for legacy media like television, radio, print etc. Voting for American Idol, that kind of experiences.

WHAT OF MONEY

So the telecoms industry itself is migrating to mobile, no surprise anymore this late in the game. The computer industry is going mobile. The internet is going mobile too. And the major media industries and advertising are headed to a pocket near you too. But thats not the full picture. I have said for many years now, that we have yet another 'dimension' in this race, of a major economic sector headed to mobile: Money. In practise, its banking and credit cards when considering the classic major financial industries, or digital money in a technical sense (insurance is also going to join the mobile revolution a bit later). The first two SMS-enabled vending machines were installed in Finland twelve years ago, and soon thereafter the first SMS-enabled parking was launched in Norway. We've had full mobile payment solutions in the Philippines for a decade already. Mobile credit cards are nearly as old. But the migration of money is very slow. We hear of some great successes - more than half of Helsinki area public transportation single tickes are sold via mobile, and all of parking in Estonia is mobile, and now more than half of all banking accounts in Kenya are mobile banking accounts. But its still tiny bits in small countries. Yes, about half of South Koreans and the Japanese have mobile digital money enabled phones and services, but its nowhere near yet where half of their economy would transit the phone, and they are the most advanced digitally converged nations.

In m-money it is very early going. Gartner told us that in 2009 there were 73 million people who used a mobile phone to make a payment. Informa counted that the world had  67 million people with a mobile banking account. Contrast that with the 2.1 Billion people with a banking account as reported by the BBC last year. If we want to measure the 'migration rate' then currently one third of one percent of all banking accounts have migrated to mobile. That is a very tiny fraction. But that was exactly how it was with smartphones vs personal computers in 2000, or how it was with the mobile internet users out of all internet users in 2002, or what it was with advetising in 2006. Less than one percent. Its easy for many in banking and credit cards to be fooled into thinking this tsunami wave of convergence will not hit their shores.

Yet in South Africa it is normal to get your paycheck paid directly to your mobile account. Norway was the first country to let you submit your tax return by mobile. South Korea was the first country to make 'cards' out of Credit Cards optional - all credit card services are automatically enabled onto your mobile phone (instantly when the credit is approved), and if you want, a free plastic traditional credit card can be mailed in a few days also to your home address - if you so desire. There is no need for plastic cards in South Korea, but you may travel to a less advanced country like say Germany or USA or Australia or France where they 'still use plastic credit cards' haha... In Japan the mobile wallet is the most advanced where it not just includes your banking and credit and payment and loyalty cards. It adds your keys to your home and car, the pass-keys to your office, your identity card, and now as the phone collects your payment behavior, they have launched the mobile consierge to the phone, to help manage your life. The users absolutely love it, suggesting the phone seems to read your mind..  And taking those lessons, Nokia launched Nokia Money in India and is enabling near field to all its new smartphones.

While the big banking execs are mostly blissfully ignorant, thinking that launching an iPhone App is tantamount to a mobile strategy, haha, the tsunami wave is well under way. So the migration has started. Sweden started this summer the first parliamentary discussions about when is the right time to abandon printing cash, and moving to a mobile money only digital money economy! They aren't about to do it any time soon, but they have started the serious discussion about the end of money as we knew it.

That covers the giant industries I want to mention in this blog today. Telecoms, broadcast and print media, advertising, computers, the internet, banking, credit cards. These are all industries whose size is above 200 Billion dollars annually - ie each is bigger than the total global handset business including smartphones and dumbphones and all phone based accessories like spare batteries and phone covers and memory cards etc (combined, is worth about 160 billion dollars in total - a small fraction of the 1.1 Trillion dollar mobile telecoms industry where the majority of the revenues come from mobile services like voice, SMS and premium mobile data services).

OTHER INDUSTRIES

There are many more industries, more small ones, that also are impacted by mobile, like cameras, music, videogaming, the watches and clocks industry etc, but those are so small (all under 100 billion dollars in size) that I won't spend much time on them now. They were involved in the first mobile battle of convergence, what I called the 'Battle for the Pocket' in my second book M-Profits in 2002.

There also are many other industries that are seeing impact from mobile, but who are unlikely to be totally cannibalized by mobile. So take air travel. Finnair launched the world's first mobile check-in in 2001 and today half of their passengers use the service. But mobile will not enable our air travel. We can't fly on the phone. We can book our seat and pay for the ticket and get a boarding pass to the phone, but we still need an airplane to burn jet fuel to fly from one airport to another. That isn't changing by mobile. So mobile can only influence a small part of the travel experience, whether in airplanes or hotels or trains etc. But in music, mobile can cannibalize all digital music. Same in the newsmedia or gaming or advertising or indeed money and banking and credit cards.

So yes, the automobile industry is eager to get into mobile too, many new cars feature SIM card slots for example and the next internet (after the internet has gone mobile) will be in cars. But again, if we need a car to get us from point A to point B, until they invent teleportation, we will keep needing that car (or some rival like a bicycle or bus etc). Mobile cannot cannibalize the whole car market like it can't cannibalize the air travel market or the hotel industry etc.

So this blog is about those industries that can expect far more than half of their total value, possibly the whole industry, to migrate to mobile in the coming years and decades. And that, if we take the dozen industries mentioned in this blog (excluding travel, cars, hotels etc) is worth a cool 5 Trillion dollars or about 9% of the total global economic spending of all economies on the planet.

HOW FAR HAVE WE COME?

So lets look a bit at how far we've migrated into mobile.

The telecoms industry is far along the way. 81% of the total telecoms industry has migrated from fixed landlines (0% in 1978) to mobile when counting total subscribers.

The internet had 0% mobile users in 1996. At the end of last year we reached mid-point, where half of all internet users accessed the web at least part of the time using a mobile phone (which includes the simple WAP type of mobile internet usage common in many parts of the Emerging World markets). So the internet has migrated 50% in 13 years.

Meanwhile there was no mobile phone that was a computer prior to 1997. There were stand-alone PDAs yes, but no advanced 'smartphone' to give computer like performance. Today all major PC makers have entered the smartphones battle and all say the future of the computer is the smartphone (something I have been saying for many years now). I counted on this blog that if we add both the traditional PCs including desktops and portable computers, and the smartphones, we get a total market size of 465 million units for 2009. Smartphone accounted for 37% of that amount last year. So we can say that in 13 years, mobile has already cannibalized over a third of the computer market.

Music was the first mobile content type in 1998 and today about 38% of all consumer music spending is mobile (when we include ringing tones). Videogaming followed and today a quarter of videogaming service revenues is generated on mobile. It would be an interesting market analysis to count all gaming-oriented smartphones (like the iPhone, most downloaded apps are games after all, the iPhone can be said to be the first globally successful gaming phone platform to rival the Nintendo and Playstation Portable..) and their value into the videogaming software value, the proportion would be bigger still.

I don't have a good measure for wristwatches and alarm clocks. But sufficient to say that clearly more than half of consumer uses of telling time - and of the wake-up alarm - is now from the mobile phone.

Of the big media industries like print, broadcast and the related advertising industries, their migration into mobile has only started and is in the low single digits in percent of total revenues or total content delivered. So these are all very early in the game.

And like I said, Banking and Credit Cards are at far under one percent of total users (and far far less than that in total value of the transactions going through mobile).

A LESSON

But I want to end on the 'lesson' for this blog. Cameras. The camera industry boldly and bravely (and foolishly) thought mobile phone based cameraphones would never catch on, and never rival their industry. That was a short-lived battle that was over in only 3 years. Sharp and J-Phone of Japan launched the world's first cameraphone in 2000. By 2003, more cameraphones were sold globally than all stand-alone digital cameras. By the next year, cameraphones alone outsold all types of stand-alone cameras (digital and film-based). Today cameraphones outsell stand-alone cameras by 10 to 1.

The camera industry correctly forecasted a dramatic growth in consumer adoption of digital cameras for this past decade. The growth was even better than they expected. But the growth was shifted from stand-alone digital cameras to cameraphones and the sales of stand-alone digital cameras stalled and stagnated. This is a common pattern in the 'Battle for the Pocket' as I have chronicled from the PDA vs Smartphone battle to the musicphone vs iPod battle, etc. Same pattern always. So what happened to the big four camera brands? In 2000 when the cameraphone was launched the world's biggest camera brands were  Canon, Konica, Minolta and Nikon, all out of Japan. Today only two of them continue making cameras, Canon and Nikon - which both quickly shifted their focus from consumer snapshot cameras to premium professional and semi-pro camera systems. Minolta and Konica have quit the camera business altogether. This is the decade of the biggest growth of consumer camera use ever, where the annual market for new digital camera purchases grew by more than 10 fold. It was the golden age of cameras, yet two of the big 4 failed to survive this enormous opportunity.

Same is true of the various other cameras-oriented industries like Kodak and Polaroid. The world's most sold camera brand is Nokia. The world's most sold branded camera optics are not Nikon or Canon branded lenses, they are Carl Zeiss optics, on many premium Nokia cameraphones. Of the total population on the planet, out of any person who has ever used any type of camera, for 9 out of 10 such users, the only type of camera they have ever used, is on some cameraphone. It may be difficult for older readers in the Western industrialized countries who see the long lines of cameras and accessories sold at the electronics stores, yet the numbers are perfectly clear.

So lessons. The cameraphone did not kill the stand-alone camera. It just took 90% of the market. For the mobile industry that was far more than 'enough'. The big phone makers like Nokia, Samsung, SonyEricsson and LG are not in the business of creating professional cameras. They can happily leave the small 'pro market' to the specialists like Nikon and Canon. But as the mass market vanished, the mass market business also shifted. Kodak, Minolta, Polaroid, Konica and so many other major camera industry players had to abandon the camera related business and shift to something else like professional imaging or scientific instrumentation or photocopiers or whatever, or else go bankrupt - like Polaroid has done, twice already.

If they had aggressively pursued the mobile market, either through a premium cameraphone or a specialist role in the ecosystem or in partnership - any of the big giants of cameras could have a major role in the mobile industry today. Look at Apple, a computer maker, who decided to do its music player (iPod) on a phone as the original featurephone iPhone 2G, and then decided to make it a full 'pocket computer' by the second release of the iPhone 3G as a real smartphone in 2008. They only sell 2% of the world's total mobile phone handset market today, but its such a huge market, that it powers the majority of Apple's revenues and the majority of Apple's profits.

That is what Lenovo wants now, as they launched their LePhone and sold 100,000 units in the first quarter. Its not as good as Apple did in 2007 but Lenovo is at least taking a stab at this market, rather than how the cameramakers hid their heads in the sand and tried to avoid the truth.

I counted that in 2006 there were 7 of the Fortune Global 500 biggest companies on the plant, who made a smartphone. These were essentially the big phone makers like Nokia, Motorola, etc. At the start of 2010, there were 23 companies that had either launched or were launching a smartphone, out of the Fortune Global 500. That made the smartphone space one of the most competitive of any industries on the planet, with probably more global giant rivals than any other industry ever in the same space. (At least when it comes to banking, most banks tend to operate regionally or nationally, with only a few global banking brands).

Note this growth was not that smaller 'newcomers' making smartphones had 'grown' into the Global 500. It meant that previous global giants of other industries had decided to enter the mobile space, like computer makers such as Apple and Dell, like internet giants like Google and Yahoo, like mobile operators/carriers like Vodafone and Hutchison, and softwre maker giant Microsoft etc. Obviously the year has not been kind in the over-competitive smartphones bloodbath (Google and Microsoft very visibly quit the smartphone handset business already, but both are increasing their software and services focus on mobile, so they have not abandoned the opportunity in digital convergence).

WHAT DOES CONVERGENCE ENABLE

Remember that converence gives us new opportunities of better experiences and as an industry, vast new opportunities. When you take a bookstore and put it online like Amazon, yes you can have some 'distribution' and 'warehousing' benefits and you can sell a larger catalog of book titles than the bricks-and-mortar bookstore down the street. But what of the reviews. What of my shopping history. What of others who liked that book. And personalized recommendations. Such abilities are impossible in traditional bookstores. In a small 'mom and pop' bookstore, if you were a loyal customer, you could perhaps gain the familiarity with the bookstore owner, to be able to get some recommendations. But that is rare and would take years of competence to develop by the bookstore owners, and still would not be nearly as powerful as the Amazon recommendation engine, in pinpointing exactly what kind of books I may like.

Look at Google. Before search engines, it was not practical to try to find 'all available information' on a given topic, unless you lived next door to a major library like the US Library of Congress and were a wiz at using the library's card catalog system - and then spend hours digging through book indexes and tables of content. It would still not be as thorough as any Google search today, and it would take years to learn the skills and days of research in the library. Yet a child of 6 can do the same within a fraction of a second on Google today.

The digital convergence enables fantastic new services and abilites we never could have imagined. Take airline seats today. What travel agent could have specialized in Hong Kong to Sao Paulo travel for me today. What price ticket would I have gotten, on what airline combination, and what miserable layaways on the travel connections? Yet we can go to Expedia or Travelocity or Opodo whatever travel site you want to use, and get to see dozens of flight options - and their prices - and their routes - and the actual aircraft used. Then we have seat guru, which will tell me what in-flight electricity options are on that class of seat on that specific aircraft type on that particular airline. A paper based traditional travel agent would never ever have that capacity, except perhaps for the few 'domestic' airlines that serve their home town. But I see that instantly for all airlines. We get vastly superior services for consumers when we seek opportunties out of digital services. And this is all before we start to enable my flight itself with mobile check-in, or the hotel does a mobile phone enabled locks to my hotel room etc.

WILL DISRUPT MORE THAN ENABLE

But it also often means cannibalization of the legacy services and their eco-systems. So take music. At the end of the previous decade, the majority of music sales was through the sale of music CDs. Artists would compile 'albums' of about 15 songs, sold at a price far greater than the one hit that currently made the artist popular on the charts. A huge support system was in the recording industry to produce the sound of the music, to produce the CDs, to ship them to music retail stores, and to use the radio stations, music video TV stations like MTV, and promotional concert tours to help promote the album sales.

Then came the internet, Napster, social networking, MySpace and YouTube. Almost all music became available on the net for free. The market changed drastically. The big music store chains started to fail and go out of business. The CD market shrunk sales year after year. But music didn't end. The market adjusted in two ways. The internet and digital enabled new ways for fans to discover their music and artists (MySpace, YouTube, social networking). Artists could still sell tickets at concerts, so they shifted more of their income from selling albums to concerts. And new digital formats emerged like the ringing tone and ringback tones, which now deliver a third of the total global consumer spending on music worldwide. The music industry was slow to get into this opportunity and there were many problems along the way - witness Crazy Frog. But consumers have not abandoned music. They still spend about 30 Billion dollars on it annually, only the traditional music publishing industry is getting an ever smaller slice of that.

So some skills are changed. The digital convergence brought powerful authoring and editing tools to any musician on their PC (and eventually increasingly also on their smartphone). That diminished - but did not eliminate - the role of the traditional music studio for creating music. Digital convergence changed music creation - the sampling of instruments popularized by the early 'synthesizer' music of the 1970s and 1980s has made it easier for an artist to 'master' multiple instruments. The mechanics of expert handling of a guitar or violin or piano is no longer as critical for the creation of music. It did not end the need for 'real musicians' ie playing at symphony orchestras etc, but it helped popularize music creation, by the masses, for the masses. Digital editing of sound has enabled errors in sound quality to be 'fixed' - ie some boy bands and girl bands may have members who don't have good singing voices (perhaps are better dancers or just pretty on stage ) that can be increasingly 'fixed' electronically. Again, that does not end the need for pure excellence in real singing - witness UK singing sensation Susan Boyle

What the digital convergence did, most of all, it dis-intermediated some players, and re-intermediated others. The 'talent scout' at recording companies (The Big Labels) is a job that is disappearing. That is nothing new, once there was a huge need of typing skills at major offices, typing pools, before the word processor and email made most of their typing work redundant. There was once a need for staffs of receptionists to answer phones, but voice mail took most of those jobs. Etc etc etc

We still have a need for real music and real musicians and real creative arists. The digital convergence may be making the difference between the average musician and superstar even greater - a Madonna or Rolling Stones can command astronomical fees, but the average starting rock band probably earns about the same per 'gig' per night, adjusted for inflation, as rock bands did in the time of the Beatles and Elvis 50 years ago.

HOW BIG WILL IT BE

I think we have enough evidence from early digital convergence to make some preliminary hypotheses.  We can assume that the legacy businesses, that do not embrace the digital convergence, to survive as a premium professional services industry but eventually fail the mass market. Thus they cannot sustain the number of players they have today. But that likely digital convergence will not kill most industries. These will be tiny niche industries, but can be profitable and sell to very passionate specialist customers, and those who specialize within the remaining industry but manage to capture the premium end of that market, can make a nice living in it. These would by definition become very stagnant mature markets sustaining only a few players.

A new converged economic opportunity emerges within the digital convergence which will not be as big, as the separate industries would be separately. So the cannibalization will eat into the size of the 'total pie' of the industries prior to convergence. But balanced against that shrinking of one pie, is the simultaneous growth of the total pie. So far up to now, the converged opportunity has always ended up far bigger than the initial industries that got into it.

When the battle for the pocket started a decade ago, the total value of all pocketable digital gadgets was about 100 Billion dollars in very rough terms. By the time the mobile phone had beaten the major rivals, PDAs, stand-alone cameras and musicphones, by 2006, the total pocketable gadget market had doubled to more than 200 Billion dollars in value, of which mobile had about three quarters. But most of what makes a modern mobile phone valuable to consumers is not the PDA or camera or music abilities of it. There are far more abilies and functions and services that game as additional growth areas, like mobile internet or MMS picture messaging or mobile payments and banking, etc. Our phone today is far more than 'just' a PDA-camera-music-phone.

The same happened in fixed-mobile convergence. The mobile did cannibalize some of the fixed telecoms revenues (and Skype probably took more of the fixed telecoms revenues than mobile) but today, the resulting combined telecoms industry is far bigger, about twice in size. Yet the opportunities did not come from just fixed telecoms services like local and long distance calls and voicemail, or those enabled on mobile. The mobile opportunity developed new abilities beyond convergence, starting from SMS and ringing tones more than a decade ago to augmented reality today.

THE BIG PRIZE 5 TRILLION DOLLARS

So that is what we are fighting for. The value of the different industries today headed for major cannibalization by mobile, where the majority of their business will end in mobile - is worth 5 Trillion dollars. Mobile alone is worth a bit more than one fifth of that, so there is far more from 'outsiders' to 'contribute' to this journey, than for the legacy mobile giants to do

It will be a big battle for this decade and for the banking and credit cards, that will last well into the next decade, but the convergence is inevitable. And do remember, this is not just about smartphone apps, or even about smartphones. Its about 'mobile' as the industry which is the ultimate convergence point and end-state for all digital convergence. That is what we are monitoring here on the Communities Dominate blog..

PS - if you'd like to read more, I have a few thoughts on the lessons of digital convergence up to now here, after the link

Whats Latest in Mobile Advertising, from MMA Global Event in New York City

I had the honor and privilege to present to the MMA Global event in New York City where I gave the first keynote of day 2. I was asked to present magical mobile marketing examples from around the world, featuring both sides of the Digital Divide (more about my presentation in chronological order here below).

As luck would have it, my flight arrived very early and I was able to join Day 1 nearly from the beginning. And I stayed for the full 2 days of the event, and made meticulous notes of all presentations. I was stunned to find at the end, that I had made more notes of this event - which indicates innovations and relevant updates - than any other event in mobile that I have ever attended before in my over 260 public speakerships in over 40 countries on all six inhabited continents. Noting that those include the biggest telecoms event of North America - the CTIA, the biggest telecoms event of Asia, CommunicAsia, the biggest telecoms event of Latin America, Andicom, and the biggest telecoms event in the world (and of Europe obviously) - the Mobile World Congress - this 2 day New York event arranged by the MMA was something quite exceptional. I promised to blog about what I had found noteworthy.

I also want to mention two very fascinating observations. First, that as mobile advertising is quite old as a concept - I chaired the world's first mobile advertising conference (held in London by the WAA the Wireless Advertising Association, which later merged to form part of the MMA) almost ten years ago - we've seen mobile advertising and marketing experience a slow growth through most of this decade. Certainly its innovations and revenues and market successes have been in the shadow of ringing tones and videogames and news and social networking until very recently. Mobile advertising for most of the past decade has not been particularly innovative. That has now changed radically, no doubt most of all propelled by the USA-driven global advertising industry, which was awoken only after 2007 when the iPhone hit the pockets of every self-respecting ad man and mad man (and -woman).

Secondly, one would be forgiven to assume, that a mobile advertising and marketing event held in the USA today, would be filled with iPhone Apps hysteria (the iSyndrome, as our friend Martin Wilson calls the mistaken notion that building an iPhone app translates into a mobile strategy haha...) and location based advertising hype. And that the American audience would not be offered a view into the true mass market reaches of SMS, MMS and WAP. Yes, one might think that. But this was an event arranged by the MMA, the Mobile Marketing Association. They are professionals. They know their stuff. And yes,  SMS, MMS and WAP were regularly mentioned, and even more reassuringly, many speakers emphasized the point, that while advertising clients (the 'brands') often requested iPhone apps in first meetings, the reality is today for MMA members, that even in the USA, they run mostly SMS, MMS and WAP solutions for most mobile advertising and marketing uses, and apps are - as they should be - a minor element for the premium smartphone segment where they can add value. And as to location based ads, there was very little mention of this other overhyped proposition.

I missed the first keynote of by Soledad O'Brien of CNN, and I walked in almost at the end of the second presentation by Mike Steib of Google. I don't have any notes from his presentation. But after that, I was there the rest of the event. Lets go in chronological order the most interesting items that I made notes of.  (I am not going to mention every item I observed.)

ESPN

The US sports broadcasting network ESPN had Sr VP of ESPN Mobile, John Zehr present. He told us about 'Citizen Scoring' ie as ESPN sends a TV crew to televise about 2,500 live games per year, there are another half a million live junior, amateur and youth league games of some sort. These don't get formal scores into the digital record of their sports. So ESPN has set up a platform to allow fans or supporters of these games and leagues and teams, to post the official records of these games. Thus when a future professional superstar emerges, we'll have a digital record of that star's junior career all the way to first public games etc... Clever, and very 'Communities Dominate' kind of thinking over at ESPN. John called it 'structured user-generated content'.

John also told us that Dunkin Donuts has run a campaign (similar to the Lays potato chips campaign in India) where customers of DD were asked to submit ideas for a new donut flavor. The suggestions were submitted via SMS of course.

MMA NORTH AMERICA

Jack Philbin who is co-chair of MMA North America, told the Track 2 audience that the Chicago Blackhawks mobile fan club (that I have discussed before) went from 25,000 fans to 75,000 fans in one year - and this was before the Hawks won its Stanley Cup, so today that number is likely even bigger - by the way, congrats to Finnish goalie Antti Niemi for becoming the first Finnish ice hockey goalie to get his name on the Stanley Cup, and the 8th Finnish hockey player across all time.

SYBASE 365

Sybase365 is the mobile arm of the database IT giant Sybase, that was just bought by SAP a few weeks ago. Cameron Franks the Sr Director at Sybase 365 presented in Track 2. He told of a really cool innovation by Rite Aid the pharmacy in the USA. They have regular plastic electronic card based loyalty cards like most major retail chains. But they have now allowed their loyalty card holders to register a cellphone number as the alternate loyalty card, and can use the phone numbers as their loyalty card, so they don't need to carry the plastic card in their wallets anymore (and have the loyalty card always with them obviously through the phone). This in itself is of course great utility to custmomers, but now Rite Aid can also send targeted messages via SMS such as offers and reminders if a prescription is running out, etc.

Cameron also told us of a Blockbusters UK video rental store campaign stats, that over 1 million rentals related coupons have been delivered (discounts, free drinks offers etc) and 100,000 of those have been redeemed ie conversion rate of 10%. Cameron pointed out that with paper coupons, all any company can do, is to validate the paper coupon itself (that it is not fraudulent) but with mobile coupons, of course the coupon itself can be validated, but so too can the customer using the coupon, be validated. Very powerful improvement over paper.

WEATHER CHANNEL

The Weather Channel has for many years had more total web usage in the USA coming from mobile users, than PC users. But now Cameron Clayton, the VP Mobile, gave us unique audience numbers which I think were very revealing. On TV, the Weather Channel gets a unique audience monthly of 119 million. On the PC, they get 42 million. On mobile they get 22 million. And on the iPad they have 520,000. Cameron also made a funny statement, that the Weather Channel is America's largest locatoin-based ad platform (obviously all weather forecasts they show is local ie typically TV will show weather for any city). He also said that their mobile use had 'struggled' until the iPhone came along, which 'changed everything' (haha, sounds like my original blog here before it launched, forecasting iPhone's future impact haha)

MTV

After lunch we had Salomon Masch the Director Mobile & Emerging Media for MTV. He said that while MTV has tons of video format content for mobile, 90% of all mobile advertising on MTV is WAP banner ads. He also told us that they have now adapted (MTV property) Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart - a 30 minute daily news parody show - into a daily 60 second mobile summary version. (I want that on my phone haha...)

ANHEUSER BUSCH

The US brewer of Budweiser beer, Anheuser Busch, had Todd Masinelli, the Sr Manager Digital, tell us about the Text Cruise to Beers contest, which is now in its 3rd year. Their Bud Light (light beer) brand has a text-to-win contest where they fill two cruise ships of contest winners on a monster party which ends on a private island with a surprise superstar rock band delivering a private rock concert. All the beer you ever wanted to drink on the cruise of course. Only way to get in, is if you text and win. They have a multi-platform campaign in all types of media, both nationally and locally where legally allowed, to drive Bud Light drinkers to try their luck in texting to win. The campaign runs from May 1 to December with continuous reminders and opportunities to reconnect with the brand along the way, while awaiting the announcement of the winners.

RG/A

The award-winning NY based global digital agency, RG/A (which I mention often in my books) had my friend Richard Ting, their VP & Executive Creative Director Mobile and Emerging Platforms, on a panel (I wish we'd have had a full presentation from Richard, his presentations are always worth their weight in gold). On the panel he responded to one question telling the audience that 2 years ago, RG/A had globally only 5 dedicated mobile specialists. Today their mobile competence has grown to 85 people. That to me is prefect evidence of how much increased attention the advertising and creative agencies are now focusing on mobile, and obviously reason why so much innovation is now happening in mobile advertising and marketing. Richard also said in another reply, that their clients often now know to ask for mobile, but don't know how to do mobile.

ISOBAR

Gene Keenan the VP of Mobile Strategy at Isobar, told of how they set up Adidas's campaign around the London Marathon. They offered all supporters of the runners, the chance to monitor the performance on mobile, plus to send personalized messages to digital billboards at given intervals at the marathon (ie any runner would see messages directed at them, correctly on time, when they approached the billboard). The total traffic yieded one half million SMS text messages during the London Marathon.

MMA BATTLE OF REGIONS

Then the event had a fantastic way to end Day 1, with a 'battle of the regions' where the Managing Directors of 3 regions of the MMA went head-to-head in a debate of whose region was best in mobile advertising and marketing. Michael Becker represented North America, Paul Berney Europe and Africa, and Rohit Dadwal Asia-Pacific. The audience (they had over 700 signed up to the event by the way, MMA's biggest event ever) voted using SMS. Each of the speakers had prepared short fact filled presentations for their regions, and we voted out one to give a final between two, and then saw more presentations for those, to then pick the winner (Paul won it). There were many really great stats and case examples that these 3 MMA veterans showed us, including several that are familiar to regular readers of this blog. I will only pick a few of my personal faves here.

In Turkey, Lipton Tea ran a campaign on ringback tones. Had 250,000 signed up. Grew Lipton sales by 47% (wow! Ringback tone advertising is VERY promising and Turkey has been an innovator in this space for a while now. Still, I was VERY impressed)

In the UK, the Ariel detergent brand had a campaign which hit 400,000 housewives using SMS and achieved a 20% response rate which generated footfall to the stores.

A TV ad (I think it was in the UK) for Wiskas cat food using SMS achieved 100,000 ads delivered and drove Wiskas sales up 30%

In South Africa, a florist chain named Sasko Flowers, ran an SMS campaign that resulted in 20% response rate.

That 'mosquito noises' campaign by Fanta that I have shown religiously for the past year as magical and fun, out of the UK, was revealed to have generated 600,000 downloads (cool, so there are about 1.2 million parents and several million teachers, who never hear those sounds while the kids play with their phones haha).

Our regular readers know intimately the award-winning BMW winter tyres MMS campaign with 30% conversion rate. I was happy to see it mentioned too, although I didn't learn anyting particular from that one haha..

The AXE virtual Wake-up girls, another of my faves right now, out of Japan, generated an increase of sales of AXE deodorant for young men, of 300%.

Out of India comes the 'Condom' ringing tone campaign, aiming to reduce Indian men's reluctance to use condoms, educate about contraception and AIDS awareness. The very funny campaign won CNN's award as best educational mobile campaign of the year, and drove condom awareness up 10% in India.

In Kenya its now possible to post savings to a funeral insurance account, via SMS.

And once again amazing milestone from Estonia - Estonia became the first country this year to allow citizens to post their tax return via SMS (don't we wish that was available in every country immediately? Ultracool) - Correction. A reader, Arild from Norway pointed ou t that Norway has offered this facility since 2003, so Estonia is no the world's first to do this.

The Puma F1 multiplayer racing game from China that I have often talked about has now usage stats - it achieved 200,000 downloads of the advergame, resulted in 300% increase in Puma sales in China, generated bonus interactions with the brand through ringing tones nad wall papers, and was so successful it forced rival Nike to react also on mobile in China.

TOMI T AHONEN - MY KEYNOTE

My keynote started Day 2. I gave 9 service examples across the digital divide, using my 8 Unique Abilities of Mobile as the framework for the case studies. As I have a tendency to do, I started first with some statistics such as that in India 33% of all messaging received by consumers is machine-originated, ie is media content, advertising, alerts or other marketing messages. I showed the stat that in Africa the average user looks at his or her mobile phone 82 times per day. And that in China of all paid newspaper circulations, paid mobile daily news updates on MMS and SMS have cannibalized 39% of the total paid readership.

I then used my line 'mobile is as different from the internet, as TV is from radio' and illustrated that when radio gave way to TV, all radio content was also replicated to TV, after which TV invented new formats you can't do on radio - like music videos - and that today TV revenues tower over those of radio. And that mobile will be exactly the same, it has already cannibalized all internet content in some way or another, it has already invented formats that are not viable on the web - like ringing tones - and that already today mobile data is bigger by revenues than total internet revenues.

Then I used the 8 Unique Benefits of mobile to showcase mobile advertising excellence, switching between the least advanced markets and the most advanced markets across the digital divide. For unique ability 1, personal, I mentioned the Australia stat that one in three spouces will spy on their partner's phone - and mostly do this while we are in the shower. My service example came from South Africa, the free Call Me service I have often talked about.

The second unique benefit of mobile is permanently connected. I quoted the UK stat that more than half sleep with the phone ringer left on, so SMS will literally reach us even in our sleep. My service example was the Guinness Sevens Rugby tournament app from Hong Kong, which includes game scores etc, includes tourist maps and of course bars serving Guinness, and that magical ability of the simple tourist translator, where the phone user clicks on an English phrase, and the phone speaks it in Cantonese - from take me to my hotel to may I have a Guinness to 'whats a pretty girl like you doing in a bar like this' haha... I also added my recent finding that this app increased Guinness beer sales by 25%

The third unique benefit is always carried. I quoted Finnair mobile check in stats that over half of fliers on short haul business routes now use the service. Then gave the example from Poland of the Knorr soups MMS based cooking guides, prepared by Poland's top TV chef.

Unique benefit number 4 is mobile payments as we know. I listed Kenya's latest number - that now their mobile banking accounts exceed traditional banking accounts (the first country to pass 50%). And as my service example, used the power of mobile to bring digital interactivity to non-interactive media, in the Coco Presso billboards campaign using NFC in Japan (where instant discount coupons can be redeemed at vending machines which are located literally next to the billboard advertising)

For unique benefit 5, creative impulse, I quoted that stunning UK youth stat, that 10% of british young adults think its ok to send SMS text messages while having sex (and for those who didn't know, obviously these young adults can all send SMS text messages single-handed and blind, so the phone may be behind the pillow for example haha). And my service example came from India with the Lay's potato chips campaign where India consumers were invited to submit ideas for new flavors. The four finalists are currently in test market after there were more than a million SMS text messaging based suggestions. The winner will get among other things, 1% revenue share of every bag of chips that new flavor will sell.

For unique benefit six, most accurate audience measurement, I quoted the AMF stats we know well here, mobile most accurate. My first example was Japan's Otetsudai networks (help wanted ads location-based service with full e-commerce etc). Then I showed the same concept can also thrive in simple tech markets, using Babajob from India where a similar service was deployed on SMS, WAP and IVR, and the addresses were manually entered by the prospective job seekers rather than automatically using the location data.

For the 7th unique benefit social context of consumption, I quoted the slightly older Jupiter stats that two thirds will try something recommended by a friend while also two thirds will forward something that they like. I used the Puma F1 race as my example - this was the only service example that I used of my nine, which had been mentioned by someone else during the two days. But I pointed out that when Rohit Dadwal of the MMA had shown the Puma F1 game, he talked of its user numbers. In my keynote, I focused on the viral aspects (social context) of the game which was also very clever.

For the 8th unique benefit, Augmented Reality, I quoted the stats on mobile virtual goods being worth 2B dollars this year, and mentioned Layar of course as the archetypal AR service. But for my AR service example, I showed the Adidas T-shirt campaign from Singapore, and illustrated to the audience how we've now moved from observational 'third person' AR to participatory 'first person' AR.

After the presentation (there was a sound glitch which caused me to run a bit over) there was the autographed book give-away of one copy of my latest hardcover book,Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media, and a rare print edition copy of Tomi Ahonen Pearls Vol 1: Mobile Advertising (it is only sold in ebook format). We ran an audience quiz of first, which country has the highest per-capita rate of mobile phones (UAE is the first country to pass 200% rate) and then where was TV-interactivity invented (the UK).

Of my presentation, based on Twitter commentary, the items that most struck the New York audience were the China 39% migration of newspapers to paid MMS/SMS news alerts, the 10% UK texting while having sex stat (of course haha) and that in India 33% of SMS is media content and/or advertising. Also the Q&A contest stat of UAE having 200% penetration rate got a lot of Twitter mentions. And I want to particularly thank Jeff Hasen, the CMO of Hip Cricket, who tweeted each of the 8 Unique abilities of mobile in its own Tweet with nice brief summary of that point and related facts.

ELECTRONIC ARTS

Returning to my notes, then we had Elizabeth Harz the Sr VP for Electronic Arts (better known simply as EA the world's biggest videogaming company). She told us that EA Games has already 50 games with a 'Lite' version, where the full capability total gaming experience is given for free on a game version that has only a few levels - those who want to play the full game will need to then buy the upgrade to the rest of the levels, or other such business models.

ALCATEL - LUCENT

Then my friend Thomas Labarthe the VP of Mobile Advertising for networking equipment makers Alcatel-Lucent, was kind enough to state that their mobile advertising platform was developed based on my book Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media (thank you so much Thomas!). He further kindly attributed to me my thought that in mobile we are witnessing the third evolution of mobile advertising, the first was copying existing formats from legacy media, the second is the current interactive advertising, and the new, mostly still emerging wave, is engagement marketing.

Thomas talked of the need to have clear opt in, to be transparent to end users, and to have clear and simple opt-out options. He said something also very perceptive as we ponder 'who owns the customer' haha, Thomas said 'the customer owns the customer.'

BLYK

Then we broke into streams again. I was in Stream 2, where our dear friend Antti Ohrling, the co-founder of Blyk was on a panel. (I would compain bitterly of this injustice, as Antti has forgotten more about mobile advertising than the rest of us have learned. Yes, normally Antti Ohrling should be doing a keynote of course. Except that Antti was actually used to run a workshop before the conference, so those who wanted, had received a lot of Antti's insights.) Antti told the room that in mobile the need for privacy increases 10-fold. He said traditional media had been living in a static model of segmentation, but in mobile we have dynamic segmentation ie our behavior can easily change in very short cycles, - it is possible for one person to exhibit alternate behavior several times per day, being a business professional, then a parent etc in the same day. Antti also told of a banking case in the UK without naming the actual bank, obviously, who had used Blyk to target youth first time bank accounts. When they ran their first campaign, the response was so enormous, that the bank's calling centre crashed..

COCA COLA

Then Coke's Tara Scarlett, Sr Manager CRM, told us that the consumer today has 3 times more choice in convenience store branded items than just 30 years ago. We are now facing hyperchoice. She also told of the Coke SMS campaign of Twist, Text and Win. It was supported across multiple platforms and media, but the purpose was to drive sales of Coca Cola bottles, where under the bottle top, there was an SMS code to win prizes.

CDC

The Centers for Disease Control had sent Holli Seitz, the Presidential Management Fellow to tell us about their pilot project in mobile which they now are expanding. I particularly noted the stats that even on such a sensitive issue as the government asking for personal data related to our health, 70% of their registered users, were willing to take a 3 question survey on the phone, asking for their age, their sex and their zip code. (obviously data which is very relevant to diseases..)

KODAK

Finally we had the CMO of Kodak, and bestselling author Jeffrey Hayzlett give a most dynamic and energetic and funny and emotional final keynote, based loosely around his book, The Mirror Test. Jeffrey said that photographs were the kind of property that regular consumers will run into a burning building to save. He also mentioned - very Communities Dominate haha - that the value of pictures increases when they are shared.

Ok, that was the best highlights of the MMA Global conference in New York. If they release a video of my presentation, I will blog about it and add the link also here of course. Thank you MMA for a truly wonderful event with a fantastic lineup of excellent speakers. I had a wonderful time.

For Your Eyes Only - the three levels of customer behavior based data

I had a lot of good discussion based on last week's blog story about our digital leash. I discussed how classic 20th century marketing research data concepts like 'demographic' data is becoming useless when compared with far more powerful 21st century behavior based data, collected from digital channels. And I argued that mobile is by far the most powerful of those digital means, in capturing behavior based data.

DEMOGRAPHICS VS BEHAVIOR

To be clear, demographics were a great data collection purpose in the last century when marketing was crude, the targeting very weak and we used mass media broadcasting 'propaganda' to try to reach our target demographic audiences. That was the best we could do in an analog age of print, cinema, radio & TV. WIth digital media (starting with the 6th mass medium of the internet) we go early steps into capturing actual behavior based data, and with this, suddenly the ability to do far more powerful targting. I explained this two weeks ago in my Amazon book recommendation 'advertising' blog. TV or radio or newspapers can never ever hope to get the accuracy and power of what Amazon does routinely in making recommendations to us. The ads are so powerful, almost nobody thinks of Amazon book recommendations as 'ads' and nobody would want to skip them or avoid them. In fact we hope to see that in all aspects of our commercial life - why can't we have recommendations for x or y like we have for Amazon in books..

Demographics makes assumptions on our demographic data - and massive errors that come from this generalization and stereotyping. But Amazon is based on actual consumption (of us, and then mapped against the patterns of millions of Amazon consumers across the planet). Before we could measure individual use, it made sense to try to 'group' customers based on some mechanics like demograpics (and in business, by industry classification codes, what is essentially demographics for B2B use) and then psychographics - barely more than the same. Demographics would look at a 42 year old married mother two kids and make the assumption that she's interested in 'mother' and 'home' types of things, not interested in 'youth' things like partying and going out at night. Now, while her demographic profile honestly can be 'married' and she may technically be so - what if she's going through a divorce (which won't take effect for many months) and is suddenly experiencing the dating scene, looking for a new boy friend. She's behaving like a teenager or young single adult. If we use demographics, we make massive mistakes. If we measure behavior, we get the reality.|

MOBILE BRINGS THREE LEVELS 

On digital media, like the internet (and this includes of course any 'real internet' 6th mass medium consumption on smartphones ie the 7th mass media platform of mobile telecoms) - we can get to the first level of consumer behavior data - what we consume. On the internet this consumption info is almost always only limited to individual merchants (ie Amazon can't tell me what I like on the BBC for example, the Guardian can't give me recommendations on Disney etc). But like we see on Amazon, the recommendation engine is a huge leap forward in customer insights. Amazon would not (should not) bother to collect demographic data on its customers, because behavior is so much more poweful and actionable and accurate data. Obviously any mobile data service consumption as at least as good as data, as any internet consumption would be. On mobile it can be 'apps' like fashionable now on smartphones, or it can be the 'real internet' or it can be the 'mobile internet' (which is not the same as the 'real internet' on a phone) or it can be other digital services and solutions and content from multimedia content delivered via MMS messages to basic news headlines via SMS to music such as ringing tones, various ads etc.

CONSUMPTION DATA IS BASIC LEVEL

The first level (basic level if you will) of consumer behavior data in digital is the 'Consumption'. For most in marketing, this is at first glance 'the ultimate' data, isn't it. Thats the 'holy grail' isn't it. If we know Tomi consumes Pepsi and not Coke, this is VERY powerful marketing data, isn't it. Are you Mr Ahonen now suggesting something 'beyond' this, something... even better?. 

Yes I am. Looking at consumption, is like primitive humans looking at the sky and thinking the world ends after the clouds and the stars and sun and moon are the limit of the universe, that revolve around us (as it seemed from that vantage point). Obviously we now know there are stars beyond what the eye an see, and many of what look like stars, are in fact galaxies consisting of billions of further stars, countless of which have their own planets and moons etc... Yes, that is the degree of sophistication we are talking about. To focus on consumption is the earliest 'cave man' level of this marketing insight haha..

COMMUNICATION DATA RELATED TO CONSUMPTION IS FAR MORE POWERFUL

The second level of Customer Behavior market researh data comes with Communication. Previously with any communication technology and media consumption technology, there was no way to connect the two. We had our letters and postcards, our telegrams and (fixed landline) telephones. None of these delivered media content (to any significant degree to mass market consumers). And we had our books, magazines, newspapers, cinema, radio, recordings and TV. None of those had a communciation channel.

That changed with the 6th mass medium of the internet, which started life not as a media channel, but as a communication channel (originally with email). The internet was communication first, and media later. And now that the internet has figured out a way to combine the two - we get 'social media' ie Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc - and we suddenly get 'inherent' ways to combine communication with media consumption. What do I mean? I mean that when we combine consumption with communication, we get recommendations, we send links to interesting media pages - embedded into our emails. And we offer comment threads in media pages.

If you think 'social media' or 'digital communities' or 'user-generated content' or 'web 2.0" is 'big' so far - we have barely scratched the surface! Five years ago YouTube and Facebook were nowhere. Twitter is essentially a two year-old phenomenon. CNN's i-Report is 3 years old, etc. We have barely started on this journey of the 'convergence' of consumption and communication.

So to customer data. What do gain from the communication 'dimension' to our consumption? We gain all that we associate with 'viral' marketing. We can find out who is talking about our brand, good or bad. Who sends links to our site, who is generating buzz about us. It does not 'preclude' or 'invalidate' the consumption data, but the 'communication' is far more powerful for anyone in marketing research. One person bought our brand, did not talk about it. Ok. Another bought our brand and talked about it. Better. A third person never bought our brand but likes it and talks about it - wow. This kind of real customer insight can NEVER be captured in 'consumption' data - because this customer has not (yet) bought our product but clearly loves it (or hates it..)

Where can we do this, capture, this, utilize this? This is 'cutting edge' market research data, and for the most part we can find it in separate discussion channels like Twitter. Facebook, blogs etc. So while both exist on the internet - we buy a book on Amazon, we then mention it on Twitter. Mostly the two are 'co-existing' on the internet but not part of the same consumption or communciation. It can be - we can perhaps gather it to our own branded website, perhaps a 'fan club' etc. We have paid services on social networking sites like the massively multiplayer farming games that are the big rage on Facebook for exmaple. Any smart brand in digital, and those consultants and experts and agencies advising the brands - will want this 'dialog' with the consumers. It is central to 'engagement marketing' which moves the advertising/market communications beyond the mass market 'propaganda' preaching of the past century.

But also understand, that the 6th mass medium internet is incapable as a platform to deliver this type of insights across all services and all consumers. We can have the dialog and capture it, but only like Amazon and Facebook, we can do it within one brand or one channel like Twitter or YouTube at a time. Not across all users and all services. On mobile we have for the first time the opportunity to capture all consumption and communciation data, potentially (when currently collected by the operator/carrier, subject to permissions etc..).

THIRD DIMENSION IS CONTEXT

This is part of what hit me when we discussed my blog from last week. We are now witnessing the birth of yet a deeper level of insight. Understand the power of this. Amazon recommendation engine is inherently more powerful than TV or radio ads in selling books (or DVDs, CDs etc). Consumption data is more powerful than demographics or psychographics. Then we have communication of consumption - far more powerful, because now we see true influence (potentially, when well data-mined and with good data). Now we have something even more powerful. Again I am not suggesting to abandon consumption data or communication data (but I am saying throw away demographic data, obviously, as obsolete, not just useless, but counter-productive data!)

The third dimension is the 'Context' of consumption. That was at the heart of the examples I talked about last week. When we will gain the ability to collect accurately the 'social context' of our consumption - and various other 'context' elements such as time, location, proximity - we get FAR more powerful tools. Please don't mis-undestand me. I do not mean 'location-based advertsing - which is a very very bad and discredited idea. I mean like in my blog, what of the patterns of where I am, in relation to others. How I move. But also time, proximity, and yes, communication and consumption.

Here is a perfect example, valid today. Your mission is to find real - loyal - viewers of American Idol. Find actual contact info for as many of them as is humanly and technically possible today, with any means that exist.

You could set up a Facebook page. It won't get anywhere near all loyal viewers. You'd be lucky to get 10%. You could measure those who voted for American Idol - yes this is far better, perhaps a third of the audience. You could try various 'traditional' market research tools, interviews, the Nielsen ratings system etc. Nowhere near the chance to find the total audience. No way. And trying to all 'every household' in market research surveys would be astronomically expensive. You'd end up with only thousands of respondents and then like in decades gone past, you'd have to make statistical estimates on this 'sample' data. No, I mean real actual viewers of American Idol, just like Amazon has actual buyers of my books..

ONLY MOBILE GETS CONTEXTUAL DATA

But what if you took actual SMS text messaging traffic generated during the broadcasts of the show? 78% of the owners of mobile phones worldwide are active users of SMS text messaging. Even in America its past 2/3 of the cellphone ownership. And 91% of mobile phone owners keep the phone within arm's reach 24 hours a day, so we have our phone always with us, when we watch TV. Many - not all but many - who watch a given TV show will like to share that experience with close friends. This is a growing global trend. And when do we discuss our fave show - it used to be we called our friends after the show. Now its more and more likely we send SMS text messages to our friends during the show. Any kind of TV, whether its a soap opera or the big game of tonight or something on Letterman or the news. The sending of SMS during TV shows is even more so with reality TV shows that feature TV voting, like American Idol. If we measured from the phone networks, every consumer who has a texting 'pattern' to send (and receive) within a given 'circle of friends' (ie a digital community) messages during the TV show, we find a distinct group. When we extend this to see who then communicates with others, and do this nationally, we'll find millions who are part of this group.

I am not suggesting this will get us 'all' viewers of any TV show. I am suggesting it gets us the biggest actual personal identification of an audience. In the case of reality TV, roughly speaking we'd probably find half the total audience this way. FAR FAR FAR more than by any other means available.

Note that we did not need to 'read' the text messages for 'content' (like say Gmail does). We didn't need individual members of our audience capture, to 'consume' the content (ie vote on the show). We 'caught them' based on their context of consumption - who they shared with, when mapped against time and communication. We didn't need location information. Now we get easily over half of the actual total viewers in any country, who truly are loyal passionate fans of the Idols show. Whether you voted for the show or not...

Undrestand how powerful this is. On Amazon, you have to be online to be 'captured'. We get you from watching TV my way. On Amazon you have to consume 'their' content - buy a book or look at a book page. On mobile we capture - television viewers. Yes, we can capture also mobile content consumers (who used a phone for Twitter or Facebook or YouTube or downloads a ringing tone or goes to the Weather channel's mollie page). Amazon and the internet cannot get us audiences on other media - only mobile can do that! We can use mobile to capture an audience on TV (and if done cleverly, audiences on radio, the cinema, newsappers, magazines etc)

This is super-power 'bleeding edge' marketing research. This is the 'future' of marketing insights. This is where the big money and big commercial opportunities will be made this decade. Here is the real power where we need to deploy and develop in data mining. NOT to seek demographic data. That is pointless. Its as useless, obsolete info, as is the study into the efficiency of carrier pidgeons as communications tools today haha..

WINDOW IS NOT OPEN FOREVER

Now, the data today resides only in mobile phone networks (we can't get this data from fixed landline networks because the fixed landline phone is not personal - the whole family uses it - or more likely than not, the whole family today all refuse to answer the ringing of the home landline phone as they know the call is not for them personally haha). Same is true of the internet, because of firewalls, shared computers, deleted cookies etc, the sixth medium internet cannot deliver the personal data of consumption, communication and context - on a national level obviously - as we only can get from mobile phone 7th mass medium consumption.

So, today - 2010 - the handset maker (Nokia, Samsung, Apple, Blackberry) does not have this ability. The internet brands (Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook) do not have this ability. The media houses (BBC, CNN, Sisney etc) do not have this ability. The banks and credit cards and loyalty card schemes do not have this. The only entity that can gather the full picture of Consumption. Communication and Context today - is the mobile operator, and in advanced markets like Scandinavia and the Baltics, Japan, Singapore etc, the operators/carriers already are deploying the technology to do this deep level of data mining. But they have almost no tools or skills or abilities to monetize this opportunity. Why? Well, a big part of that is because mobile is so far ahead of the curve that most top-trained 'Ph D' level brand name marketing professionals and gurus still talk about the supposed value of demographics and psychographics and have not been brought up to the speed of how much more we can get out of mobile.

WILL EVOLVE AND IMPROVE FAST

But marketing is a global competence and adapting and growing fast. The giants like Google and Apple and Nokia want to get into this space. The big mobile operators like Vodafone, China Mobile, Telefonica etc are slow to capitalize on it but are trying to. And the various ad agencies from the Ogilvys and Saatchis and McCanns are hungrily studying this space. Today that data collection is at the mobile operator exclusively, through essentially its billing system, but that will not last. There are too many 'outsiders' who are seeking alternate ways to this info. The smartphone revolution is a big step into that direction. Soon we will get at least part of the data off the phone, bypassing the operator billing data. 

So one, this is a blog to wake up the marketing, advertising, media, social networking and market research companies, to understand how much more data we'll be able to get to, when we abandon obsolete demographics, start with Consumption, and add Communication and Context.

But secondly, this is a warning blog to the operators/carriers. Don't fall asleep on this issue. You have to move NOW - because this ability is not going to remain exclusively yours. The market 'window of opportunity' will not remain open forever. It will close. You have to set up your ability to educate the marketing industries in your markets, provide accurate, actionable info into your customer base, and help grow this market - which will be measured in hundreds of billions by the end of the decade - or else you will be bypassed. 

I have more bubbling in my head about this topic - I will also develop a few concrete examples for our readers to make more concrete these examples. This may be a bit too 'theoretical' as a blog for now, but I want to get this thought out there, to add to the discussion from last week. Stay tuned, and please do leave comments if this triggers thoughts.

Voluntarily onto the Digital Leash - role of data in mobile future

The Economist had a great special report last week about data and it had me thinking. Yes the world is changing enormously as all sorts of companies compile ever more accurate data on us as consumers (and as patients, as voters as students etc). The companies (and government, schools, hospitals) can potentially deliver better services and products for us with this data. And they are increasingly collecting it through automated means, often via the web.

THE DATA COLLECTION IS PRETTY PATHETIC ACTUALLY

The Economist article had great examples of how the various industries today are taking advantage of vast data amounts being collected on their users. And it was all good stuff, I strongly recommend reading the article. But I was left thinking, that while the Economist did often mention mobile, it did miss the big story. It is a bit like going to the local high scool winter sports contest, and reporting on that level of ice hockey as if it was the world's best, while there are Winter Olympics going on, and broadcast on TV at the same time...

So, first to be clear, it is a very good thing that companies and other organizations like governments, hospitals, schools etc, do collect data and then mine them to get 'business intelligence' to better understand their customers. That is all good and prudent. And we can have truly magnificent 'improved' services for us, based on that data being collected, as I showed last week with the commentary of Amazon, and how its recommendation engine has made advertising seem like valuable content to us.

But if individual companies or organizations try to collect data on us, it will be a poor picture of very modest value and usability. Like many examples in the Economist article, saying how a museum had been able to target its advertising more accurately based on 'demographic' data. This is better than nothing, just like high school level ice hockey - under coaching and with facilites and organized competition - is better than totally volunteer street level hockey. But it is nowhere near Olympic level hockey.

SUPERPOWER DATA

So now lets compare. Lets say we take a chip and a memory device and perhaps a connection, and build an automated data collection system. Lets say we want to track usage info on the car. So we have a family with a BMW and we then see that the car is driven most days on pretty much the same route in the morning and evening. In mornings its via a detour to the employment place of the husband (the detour means he drops off the kids at school) and some days it comes back the same way via the school, but on other days comes home directly, and occasionally makes other routes to get back home (ie goes shopping etc). Some days the car does totally different patterns but we have no way of knowing who drove it. We get to know how fast the car is driven, how it is accelerated and how the breaks are applied, how much fuel is kept in the tank (always nearly full or often nearly empty) and how often it is driven etc. Very much valuable data, potentially. And its all good. And there are tons of 'experts' in data mining who can think of clever uses for this data.

Now. So far so good. But do we know who is there with us? No. We may make a guess that its the man in the family, the father, who bought the car, and perhaps we can find out that he is employed at the nearby factory as a manager and we assume its the man driving the car daily (but could be that both he and his wirfe work at the factory, and he's not even IN the car, that he drives a Jeep for example, that he bought this BMW for his wife...) What of the car used in the evening on a Friday. Do we know if it was the father or the mother or perhaps driving-age eldest child who used the car? If we have some sensors on how the car is driven, it won't capture who is driving it. Perhaps we can have electric seats with family settings and find that the shorter person drives is occasionally and the taller person drives it most of the time.. Of do we want our cars to ask us to 'identify' ourselves before we get to move it? Personalized car keys - messed up the moment the husband says 'honey, I can't find my keys' and the loving wife gives him her keys.

Now compare to the phone. We don't share our phones, but we take them literally everywhere. If we knew the phone numbers of each family member (and for American readers, yes its normal for 7-year-old first-grader kids to have their own cellphones, you will shortly see that in the USA as well)  -we'd have perfect knowledge of the drivers and passengers (if any) and the driving patterns. The cellular network can collect this level of data automatically with no further data from us. We don't need to call anyone, we don't need to send messages and we don't need to ask for GPS location data. We get at least 'city-block' level accuracy of all mobile phones turned on in any cellular network, just from the network data (if the operator/carrier decides to track that data and collect it - they all do it for calls and messages, they can very easily do it for the phone's behavior as well)

The owner of the phone - BMW buyer, the husband in this family - has his phone registered with BMW. We know if it is the father who drives every morning to the office or perhaps its the wife every morning (daddy might have a Harley haha).  We'd know if its one or two kids in the car with daddy (or mommy) every day. We'd know if both parents are in the car. We'd know which person was driving the car in the evening on Friday.

First, from the pattern of daddy's phone, we'd find out who lives with him. It does not matter if the adult woman who also drives the car occasionally - is legally married to him or perhaps just a long-term live-in girl-friend (or even if its two guys and thus its his 'partner') . If we monitor those who use that car, and their sleeping patterns for a month, we know exactly if the 'partner' lives with the man, or if the partner is only occasionally visiting the home and lives in another place. We'll know how many phone-owning kids live in the household and/or any grandparent age people in the household (with phones).

Next, we can easily follow all those and see how they move, to determine if they own a car (or perhaps, a motorcycle, wtih a little bit of extra analysis, determining how the vehicle moves in traffic, to determine whether its a car or motorbike)

And back to our BMW owner. Compared to the BMW own analytics built-into the car, with mobile, we'd still know how fast the car was driven - but very relevantly, we'd see when there is a single phone of a driving-age person in the car which family member has which driving pattern. Who drives as fast as the traffic - stays in the lane - or who is the crazy driver who is constantly overtaking others in traffic and potentially causing dangerous situations. (from the network we would get every car driver's phone and its movement speed - its very easy to spot which phone is clearly moving on the same route but faster than the traffic - ie either on the bus lane - illegal - or weaving in traffic - very dangerous).

Now lets take it a bit further. What of the passenger's seat. Unless we install a 'sensor' to every seat, we won't know how many people are in the car at any time. But with phones we know. Lets say the husband is unfaithful - has a mistress. So he drives his wife to her work, then goes to his office - but some lunches, he goes out secretly and meets with his girlfriend. And every so often SHE is sitting in the car. While in any surveys of how many people are in the car, the husband would never admit to having a secret lover, the phone behavior would prove this conclusively. Is the passenger's seat used? How important is say extra air bags to the passenger seat in the next purchase. If the father lives alone and has no girlfriend, odds are he won't want to spend more money on extra airbags to the passenger seat. If there is an important woman in his life, he probably would. What should BMW try to sell him? If we know how the car is used, how many people in it, how it is driven, etc, that is actionable info, not how old I am or whether I'm married or what postal code my house is in etc.. Demographics become quaint at this point, when we have real behavior-based and social context-aware data.

Note this is all info the network already collects today, automatically, every network, everywhere. The networks do not yet offer this info in any way, it is not monetized. But think of BMW, how much more info they'd get if they were to catalog the phone numbers of their owners, and then be given permission to track those phones by their movement patterns.

TOMI THATS INVASION OF PRIVACY

Sound like invasion of privacy? Sure it does. But first - remember the cookies on your PC. Nobody ever asked us to approve these spy-bots that we all now are infested with. Secondly, technically, every mobile phone network has had this capability for almost two decades already. Thirdly, they already do use this - with 'lawful intercept' ie when fulfilling a given country's legal system, the police request the data and the operators/carriers provide it. Usually this requires a 'court order' type of legal document for the police to gain this access. But the 'snooping' is totally technically valid today and done around the world for such uses.

But lets think Amazon - we 'love' the recommendations that Amazon makes for us. Why could not BMW be able to provide better services for us in exchange for this user info? Jonathan MacDonald teaches us that we need to be open about our intentions. But it could turn the whole marketing budget equation upside-down. How much do car makers waste money in advertising every year. BIllions of dollars. Most of it, by far most of it, goes to serving ads to people who would never be buying their car. Most will not buy a new car, period. of those who would, most would not consider that brand. Of those who would consider, often the ad itself is unsuited for that given person. Why do I see ads for Honda or Volkswagen or Ford or Cadillac? I am an Audi guy. I might perhaps perhaps perhaps might consider a BMW or Mercedes or Porsche or Saab. I would never ever in a million years buy a Honda or VW or Ford or Cadillac. If the car makers could know what kind of car (and in my case, Audi - would be a Quattro four-wheel drive model, only) a given customer is interested in, they'd save tons and tons and tons on their ad budget. They could throw 90% of it away at least.

Nwo lets go back to my BMW example. We want him to give permission to track his phone. Why not offer a 'roadside assistance' VIP package to buyers of new cars, that is based not on some OnStar type of service, but as a mobile phone data service. Imagine how much MORE powerful the data now becomes. I not only track how 'my' BMW vehicle is moved - and can quickly map out his family etc - btu get this - I will see automatically when my 'BMW owner' is moving 'at car speeds' - in another car! Imagine if American Express could get this data about Visa and Mastercard. When is an Amex card holder using a rival card? But yes, with mobile, we'd easily get this. We do the plug-in hands-free package (free) in the car, so the BMW owner will always plug his phone to his car and re-charge the battery and use it when driving the BMW. And then we monitor both the car connection and the registered phone. If the car moves but has another phone 'driving' it, we'll know. And again, we can track from the network if this is the same person with two phones - then those 2 phones go everywhere together all day - or if its 2 people - the phones split apart during the day when the wife and husband separate at some points..

Is there that 'other car' in this same household? (could be the wife's car) or perhaps its just a friendly neighbor who gives a ride sometimes and the two neigbors 'car pool'. If we know the phone number of the BMW owner - we can within a month's of data of phone behavior clearly establish who are the other phones who live in the same household (how many kids and is there a wife also or perhaps the husband has divorced her wife and lives alone with the kids).

Ok, now lets say there is another car. Wouldn't it be awesome to know WHAT BRAND the other car is? Again, not absolutely certain, but if that other car goes twice per year to a registered dealership of say Audi, we know the wife has an Audi while the husband drives the Beemer..  Can you imagine how much more valuable this type of info is that 'what age is he' or 'she' or 'is he married' etc. Demographics become totally useless as data, meaningless as being so inaccurate, when we get mobile phone based behavior data.

WE ARE NOT THERE YET

We are only starting on this journey. But regular readers of our blog know that Alan's second book Social Media Marketing (See here in the margin to the right of this blog) deals with this area. Our friend Tony Fish has written the definitive book on My Digital Footprint which outlines the differences between the meaningless digital identity and the incredibly valuable digital footprint.

Most mobile operators are still clueless as to how powerful this data is. They are not even capable of segmenting their OWN customers to this level of detail, far less to sell you any data on them. But advanced operators from Scandinavia to Japan and Singapore are already on this path, far far along the way. And don't think 'privacy' is any protection. We lost the battle with cookies years ago. The mobile operators, and various industries (like car makers in this example) will get our permission - easily.

Yes, it has to be permission-based if you want to market directly to me - totally yes. And every brand should NOW be seeking that permission, when the consumers are still pretty ignorant and don't understand the full value of the digital footprint. (and when we are not bombarded by many mobile ads every day) But yes, even if the consumer did not give permission, the operators can totally legimately sell the data if it is 'aggregated' ie that our names are not included. But take the above example. BMW would probably be quite interested to know how many of those BMW owners, who own 2 cars, have an Audi as the other car (as would Audi). Note that as long as the mobile operator does not reveal my name in this example, they are fully allowed to sell BMW the 'statistical data' that tells that for example 7% of BMW owners have an Audi in the household but only 2% have a Jaguar (or whatever the data may be). This can be easily done to city and township level with no infringment to any privacy laws...

And more than that, to know of the family with both an Audi and BMW, which car is used in the weekends when the husband and wife go out together, etc... Imagine the power of that info! If you are Audi and you know that of families with both an Audi and BMW, 76% use the BMW as their preferred vehicle. Wow, that would be valuable info. No sensor in the car you sold, will ever tell you that, but mobile networks will collect that data easily, already today...  With just a little bit of analytics and logic and consumer insights, this is child's play to generate and then to monetize. Like Alan Moore says, this is why mobile phone user data is the 'new black gold of the 21st century'.

NOW THINK FUTURE OF MARKETING

Now, lets think the future. What if the car makers all know this and did this? And then they'd build clever marketing plans around it. So, for example - BMW fanatic fan number one - we get the owner of the BMW who loves the Beemer so much, he decides to become an advocate. He signs up to BMW's enthusaists mobile service and gets tools to spread the word. One is to send invitations for other phone owners to sign up to the BMW fan club. The new fan gets some 'BMW loyalty points' for signing up (and then further points potentially for staying loyal - which eventually of course would translate into modest discounts to the next purchase of a BMW). But our fanatic - he'd also get points for every fan who he has invited to join - who then joins and remains in the club for say several months...

Then there is the 'design the ultimate BMW' contest - have the fans each design a virtual car of their ultimate BMW. It could have two classes, one in his own model range, and another of any BMW platform car. Limit the designers to those who own a registered BMW car, so we won't get non-owners messing up BMW's model lineup haha. Then, if you owned a 3 series, you could design the ultimate 3 Series (by any BMW official accessories and options) and make another entry in what for you would be the ultimate car if price was no object, say the 7 series for example. Make this a contest, have any registered BMW fans (ven those who don't own a car) be allowed to rate the cars, for each category give out the year's best car design to the designer..   Saves tons of money on market research because obviously the top rated car models would be also shipped to the dealerships in their model ranges.. It could even have a custom name after the designer. Imagine that, my car would ship in thousands of units globally, each having on its model description in the back of the car "BMW 3 Series - T Ahonen Special Edition" or something like that. And imagine how passionately those who would receive this honor, would then become in advocating their model to anyone haha..

Now - how valuable is this data to BMW. Tens of thousands, soon hundreds of thousands, then millions of fans would design their Ultimate Driving Machine. When this registered BMW owner next comes to test-drive the new model, the dealership will know if he prefers the comfortable seats or the sports driving package etc. And best of all - at some point, the dealer will have a model in his shop which will be very close to - perhaps even identical - to the 'dream model' that this fanatic has desired (remember for one winning model design, there are hundreds of thousands of BMW owners who designed their own dream cars that did not win). Why not send the surprise MMS message to that BMW owner, with the picture - saying, "your dream BMW exists today, would you like to come and test-drive it - and keep your dream car for a day?" How likely is it that this BMW owner will buy THAT very car? Especially if the dealer makes a special offer of it, taking into account the current car, its depreciation etc...

TEST DRIVE MY CAR

Then, another class of fanatic - the 'test drive' friend. Why not award loyalty points every time to one owner of a BMW, when he or she 'loans' the car to any friend. The only requirements are, that the friend then register their phone with BMW's fan club - at least for the duration of the test drive - and no owner gets more points for lending the car to the same person again. But yes, why do this? Number 1, BMW knows people like the way the car drives. Its likely if the 'fanatical' BMW owner picks candidates, these will appreciate the car. Secondly, BMW gathers phone numbers - and permissions to market to - prospective future buyers. Now, the person who offered the test drive, gets loyalty points if the candidate registered with BMW. Then the person who signed up, will get loyalty points for signing up. The test driver will get more points for driving that car (its possible he/she was already a member of the club). Then if the person who did the test drive comes to BMW to try any BMW car, he/she gets more points for test driving and obviously these points will turn into a discount on the final car. Meanwhile - our Fanatical BMW owner - he/she gets points for every person that tests his/her car ( and signs up to the BMW fan club) - but - he/she gets bonus points for any friend who then buys a BMW.

Third - remember we register the friend's phone - and we have the 'loaner' tell us how long the car was given to the test drive - so if the friend loans it for a weekend or an hour or 5 minutes, this is valuable info, why? Because we can go back in the phone data and see how the new registered phone moved for that day or hour or 5 minutes - we get a pattern of how the 'friend' was driving that BMW. It gives us good clues as to what kind of driver he/she is, and perhaps what kind of features the person will appreciate in the car they will eventually drive in our showroom! Awesome...

THEN YES, MONEY TO THE FANATIC

I would think that this should work out rather well in the 1%-5% rangesin loyalty points when converting to a cash discount on the next new BMW. The points would be actual 'BMW cash' redeemable at the BMW dealer - after the final price is set, and the points would come straight from BMW headquarters (out of their global advertising/marketing budget). Meaning that in a perfect case, if you were truly a great 'salesperson' and did all the steps, and you personally were credited with the sales of 20 of your friends to buy a new BMW - you'd get a free car yourself !

Sound crazy? No, this is just the recommendation model we already have with for example Amazon partners. The main problem is the collection of points and correct attribution of the rewards, but something like this will come to car sales sooner or later, and the model will be built around our mobile phones.

Think about it - if there really are 'fanatical' BMW fans who actually 'sell' the car to their relatives and friends - then shouldn't we correctly credit them with that work. Reward them? And there need be no total limit to how big a benefit they can get out of it. If they do the real sales work, that means less advertising and less sales effort at the dealer, easier money for BMW - of course some kind of 'commission' should go to the guy or gal who did the recommending. The bigger the reward potential would be, the more our fanatic would work to be our salesman/woman. Most would not sell 10 cars, but one might sell 20 or 30 or 50.. Then that person deserves a new BMW every six months haha, why not? He/she is doing real sales on our behalf, except that far more accurately, he/she knows his/her friends, who will really want the car, appreciate the car etc. (plus we dont' need to pay that fanatic a monthly base salary as we would our regular dealership salespeople, these would be on pure commission-basis sales haha).

But think - honestly - we've all been in that situation at one point or another, where we had a friend considering a car, and we advised to try a car we liked (and thought our friend or relative would also like). Or if not car, then mobile phone or personal computer or TV set or brand of eye shadow haha, whatever it is..

And it doesn't end there. How many times have I been recommending British Airways to my friends. I love the airline. I've been collecting friends to sign up to their frequent flier program etc. But do they know that, no. They do treat me well - by my actual flying pattern (because I am on their frequent flier plan and fly enough on them) but they have no idea how much more I am "selling" them and their services when I talk about them with fellow travellers from time to time. Now, if BA was really clever, they'd be sending me occasional 'gift bonus discount' coupons via mobile (as MMS haha) that any BA traveller could use to redeem. So these would be discount coupons not for Tomi Ahonen's use but that any other traveller could use. 5% off any flight.. Why not..  Send a new coupon valid for the next 3 months, say once every month. Not too many, but a few every so often. Any coupon could only be redeemed by one recepient once, so I could not set up a pattern where I send my monthly coupon to Alan and he sends his monthly coupon to me haha.. Any one person could only use one of these 5% discounts per year, or something like that..

Now, how often do I know of a friend heading here to Hong Kong (often from or via Britain). I'd be happy to send some BA discount coupons to them. Even if only a small part of those coupons were ever used, it would be often a 'change' in the flier's airline pattern - where they'd be sampling British Airways. Now, if BA was really really clever - they'd then track my coupons and the passengers who took them - and where they find the phone number is a new first-time BA flier, (ie not already an existing BA frequent flier haha) they could offer these passengers (on a one-time basis, as they knew the phone number) an upgrade on one leg of the journey, or if the class is full, offer a one-time invitation to the lounge, etc. Why not - this is a chance to capture customers away from rival airlines, in a totally new way. Because BA get the phone number, they can limit this and not give the trial more than once, but as BA's offer is not the discount brand, but a luxury premium brand, then they should try to get as many prospective travellers to trial their lounges and premium travel cabins as possible. So next time that customer will know to consider theri service haha.. And of course at the point of redeeming the coupon - make sure the person signs up to BA's frequent flier club with some gift bonus miles to start them off haha... (this would also reveal if that passenger already is a FF passenger but gave another phone number to get this offer..)

Meanwhile as gradually some of those forwarded discount coupons are redeemed by my friends, BA could reward me for doing their PR - easiest by giving me air miles, say a quarter of the number of air miles that my friend bought with my discount coupon. If it was a short European flight in economy class, not a big thing, I 'earn' a couple of hundred miles. But if it was business class to Asia, this is BA's profit-making engine, business class - then yes, of course, very nice bonus thanks to Mr Ahonen, I earn several thousand miles as a thank-you. Plus for time there was a redeemed coupon that I had sent, I would get 2 bonus coupons to send to other friends, above and beyond my normal allotment..

And I'd love to do it (...with any airline haha, hint-hint..) 

This is again obvious what will happen in the long run as companies learn that mobile phones are the optimal engagement marketing platform, and they seek to develop good engagement marketing campaigns. And as they start to gather mobile data, and as the 'data mining experts' (haha, sorry, I have to laugh when they still mention demograpics in the 2010s decade, its that old and obsolete thinking..) start to get to grips with mobile phone based behavior data. 

A side note, did you pay attention that the data mining giant Sybase had just deployed a mobile solution with SAP the giant of Customer Relationship Management software (Sybase is also very big in mobile, messaging, SMS, MMS, mobile commerce etc, via their mobile division Sybase365). It was just announced this week. Some companies see the value of where this is going and can be very big in this space soon. If I was an airline or bank or retailer or hospital - or BMW or Audi haha - I'd make sure I'd call these guys - Sybase and SAP - now. They really do 'get it' haha, in this space and opportunity. Not like so many others mentioned in that Economist article, who still think 'demographic' data is the holy grail haha.

UPDATE

I have added a blog discussing the deeper insights, there are actually 3 levels of consumer insights, that only mobile can give us today. I show them in this blog 'For Your Eyes Only'

Amazon Lessons for a Digital World - most trusted brand in USA !

We love Amazon, not the least because Alan and I are both authors and Amazon helps sell our books in many markets and regions where the local bookseller might not know of us and our books.. But there is more to the book on Amazon than just its covers. And the latest finding by Millward Brown study of trust in brands in the USA, puts Amazon on top of all brands, ahead of Fedex, Downy, Huggies and Tide, etc. In case readers might not know what these other brands do, Fedex is the parcel delivery company, Downy is a fabric softener ie it is related to washing clothes, Huggies is a baby diaper, and Tide is a laundry detergent. Yet internet brand Amazon tops these long-term staples of the US market.

AMAZON EXCELLENCE

So what is it about Amazon? I don't claim to be an expert on e-commerce haha, but I think there are several things that set it apart, both against its bricks-and-mortar booksellers and against online retailers. First is range. Amazon seems to carry every book and if its a current book (still in print) odds are you'll find it at Amazon ahead of almost any other bookseller. Classic "Long Tail" offering so to speak. So if you like books (or DVDs, CDs, etc other stuff that Amazon now also sells) its probably one of your favorite booksellers to begin with.

But it gets better. We have the recommendations. Not just how many stars a book has, but actual reviews by real people who had bought the book. Very useful and its user-generated, so Amazon didn't have to do that, they just enabled a platform for user comments and reviews and ratings, and now we have a massive data resource on commentary of books. Regular buyers put very high degree of trust on these consumer-created reviews and ratings. (ya-ya-ya, "communities dominate" and all that, eh?)

Amazon has good prices. It started as a discount book retailer but soon moved to offering books at pretty much normal prices. They offer so much a better deal otherwise, they don't need to give big discounts to get business (another lesson there for companies headed to the digital space). They deliver to your home, and they even have added the 'search inside' feature which allows you to browse books for parts of the pages inside - and better yet, the search inside will also be indexed to Amazon's search overall. So for example if you search for "Tomi Ahonen" at Amazon you find not only my six hardcover books sold by Amazon, but you find many other books that mention Tomi Ahonen.

That all is wonderful and fine. I am sure all of that has contributed to Amazon's loyalty and trust. And that they tend to do very well with order-delivery, even to difficult destinations as here into Asia haha.

AMAZON MAGIC

What I think sets Amazon totally apart, and is something far more compelling, is their recommendation engine. You know, it will know what kind of books you've bought and what you've looked at recently, and based on that pattern, it will recommend books for you. And if you are at a title, it will suggest books that are similar to the book you were looking at. This is not user-generated content, this is an intelligent data-mining algorithm that digs through millions of purchases by millions of people and discovers patterns. So people who buy books about "3G" will also be drawn to books about "UMTS" or about "Wireless broadband". Amazon's search engine is not 'intelligent' enough to know that 3G is more-or-less the same as UMTS which is a close synonym to wireless broadband. But it finds the purchasing pattern. And it can make recommendations to buyers based on those patterns.

To me this feature, the recommendation engine and the discovery of similar book titles (or movie titles, music etc) is the most powerful part of Amazon, something that no bookstore owner can master across all book titles. And there is a real insight here, for our Communities Dominate blog.

AMAZON DOES ADVERTISING THAT WE LOVE

Note that Amazon's recommendation engine delivers advertising to us. It is advertising not driven by a book publisher brand, or by a given author, or by what a given 'real' bricks-and-mortar bookstore happens to have ordered too many of, and has overstock and piles into a big table to sell at half-price-off. No, Amazon uses its engine to just make recommendations to us. It advertises to us. Amazon really does not care whether you buy Harry Potter or an obscure 7th mass media book by some crazy Finnish ex Nokia dude. They want customers to discover good books and buy those - and come back and buy even more books.

But it is advertising. Did you ever stop to think about that? That Amazon's recommendation to you when you sign up today, is advertising aimed at you? That while we 'hate' advertising on TV and radio and newspapers, billboards, the cinema (and online and on mobile phones) - we LOVE the advertising on Amazon? We love it. We crave it. We want more of it (we actually click on those images of books on the bottom of the page, which suggest more ADS of books that are more like the one you were looking at). Advertising that we love? Advertising that we want more of? Imagine that?

This is a perfect example of what the future of advertising will be like. We hate ads that are not relevant (why does TV show me an ad about baby diapers, I don't have children). We love ads that are personalized. I love it that Amazon knows my interests are in mobile telecoms, in digital media, in James Bond, Ice Hockey and Formula One.

JUMP AHEAD ONE DECADE

Today this is the beginning. We understand Amazon, we (as in this case the advertising and media industries) don't yet fully understand how that might relate to other media and other marketing, advertising and sales. So it is not obvious how Nike or Levis or BMW might use this concept in their advertising on the web or on mobile (or digital TV or DVD etc). But advertising will evolve and improve. The key lesson is - that it is absolutely definitely possible to create radical new advertising concepts - that are loved by their recepients. Like Amazon's recommendations.

Soon we will have our 'digital footprint' driving the intelligence of not just our book purchases (and DVDs and music) but increasingly other areas in life as well. This is so powerful - imagine how much this is exciting to the ad industry, where the customers 'hated' their 'product' ie the ads. Customers hated TV ads so much, that they bought expensive TiVo devices just so they can 'skip' past the ads. So, advertisers know fully well that regular consumers hate, despise, their offering. But now magical new ad methods are being invented, Amazon recommendation engine being one of them. 

But Amazon does not track what I do outside their store. Imagine the power, if we had in one place the digital footprint of everything we do. In some way, Google is attempting to collect that for itself, through Google search and Gmail and maps and YouTube etc. But its still a clumsy work-around, and while the internet is indeed very wide-spread, its not ubiquitous. 

THE POWER OF DATA COLLECTED VIA MOBILE

The one gadget that is with us at every point of our lives is of course our phone. It is truly personal and it is with us when we consume other media (1 in every 7 minutes of media consumption with any mass media, features the mobile phone as part of the media experience according to Universal McCann in 2009). So its the American Idol voting type of behavior, and the fact that as the end-credits start to roll in the cinema, we already send SMS text messages to friends telling them if the movie was worth seeing. That kind of thing. The phone travels with us from our home to our work and our leisure time and back to our home again. It reveals very quickly who are our best friends and what kind of telecoms traffic patterns we generate with whom.

It goes actually far further. The phone is our personal diary collecting our messages and pictures we take along the day. It is our watch, our alarm; our calendar and reminder. Many use the maps and navigation of smartphones. The phone is soon emerging as a cash-replacement vehicle for small payments like public transportation and parking and lotteries and vending machines. The phone screen is replacing various ticketing and coupons from airline tickets and rock concert passes to loyalty card schemes and discount coupons. And now the phone is starting to become a remote control device, to control the locks to our homes and cars, to control the air conditioning and lights in our homes. A couple of years into the future and our home robots, our plants, our pets will send messages to our phones to tell what is going on at home (robtots) or when they need water (plants) or when they need to go out for a walk (dogs) etc. By the way, I am not kidding, all of these already exist as consumer-sold products and services in leading digital countries like Japan and South Korea. Soon shopping malls in your country will also feature shops that sell home robots like they have had in Seoul South Korea since 2007.

So yes, fast forward to the middle and end of this decade. Almost all of the relevant activity we do, will transit the phone in some way or another. Then lets go back to Amazon. Now think about the digital footprint. If all of our activity involves the phone - its with us in our car, its with us in our important job interview, its with us when we have our romantic dinner with our loved one, its with us when we go partying and yes, even when we sleep the phone is there in bed or on the bedside table with us. Its the last thing we see before we fall asleep and its the first thing we see when we wake up (as its our alarm clock too). The phone can actually wake us up from sleep with an incoming text message or phone call - its that powerful. Our iPod or PSP or netbook or Kindle won't be anywhere near that important to us.

So data.. Increasingly almost every activity we do, we will be using the phone for it - today's stats from the FCC report that even Americans are well catching up to global mobile stats. 28% of American mobile phone owners use the mobile internet (same level as the world average, 28%). Google has been telling us for five years now that the future of the internet is mobile, and Nokia just told us in January that the global majority of internet access is now from phones, not personal computers. As my consulting company has reported, 1.3B total mobile phone based 'browsing' users vs 1.2 billion PC based browsing users. The shift is already happening and we've passed the mid-point.

The FCC numbers tell us also that while only 66% of Americans use SMS text messaging (78% is global average) that number keeps growing. And then on the bright side, already 52% of Americans use picture messaging ie MMS (well ahead of the world average which is 37%). So already today globally 3 times more people send messages on a phone than use any kind of messaging, email, IM or otherwise on a personal computer; more people browse web and WAP pages on a phone than use the 'legacy PC based internet' on a phone - and MMS with 1.7 Billion users worldwide reaches already more mobile phones than the total installed base of television sets on the planet. That is where we are at, in February 2010.

WHEN iPHONE IS FORGOTTEN TOY TO PRE-TEENS

Then consider the modern smartphone. What is your favorite smartphone? An iPhone 3GS or Blackberry Bold or Nokia N900 or Google Nexus One or whatever is your superphone of choice. Then remember, the world average replacement rate for phones is 17 months (its more than twice as fast for phones as the 42 months for personal computers). So by mid 2011 your hot superphone of today, will have become a used hand-me-down phone given to your eldest teenager kid. And by 2014 it will be yet another old phone, forgotten and forlornwhere far more powerful superphones are in our pockets.

That smartphone, which was the absolute ultimate best phone of today, that you cherish using now, will be so obsolete, that you will hand it over to a 7 year old nephew or niece - essentially as a toy. By 2014 we will be giving used, old, forgotten smartphones with 3G speeds, WiFi, a 3 megapixel camera, DVD quality videorecording, a large color screen etc - as toys to our pre-teen aged kids. And these devices are as powerful as a new top-end laptop from a few years ago, or a supercomputer twenty years ago. Toys for our kids.

So, what happens - the power of the phone keeps getting far better and the price of the phone cheaper - due to Moore's Law. And now that Google tells us that everything is going mobile - that Google in fact do 'mobile first' - it does mean all digital 'stuff' is headed to the phone. It is no longer in doubt.

IF THE AMAZON ENGINE WAS ACTUALLY COLLECTING PHONE DATA

So, Amazon. Imagine if the Amazon recommendation engine was actually 'embedded' onto our phones. So it would know not just what we 'buy' using the phone - Tomi prefers Pepsi rather than Coca Cola for example - but the digital footprint really of what we do - Tomi watches James Bond clips on his phone and downloaded a Ferrari engine ringing tone and plays a Formula One videogame and catches up on the NHL and Olympic Ice hockey scores on his phone - plus he Twitters and blogs on his phone etc. The pattern of data is far more complete and compelling - Tomi's phone disappears from Hong Kong and appears in Slovenia or Brazil or Canada or Norway - we see his travel patterns etc...

The phone is the natural collector for the future data related to our digital footprint. All of it, not just our purchases. If my location was the local cinema and after the scheduled end of the new James Bond movie I sent several SMS text messages to friends who also have an interest in both movies, and James Bond - we get very compelling data about me - Tomi the movie-going James Bond fan - but even more so - the 'social context' of my consumption - who else do I consider to be a friend AND also a James Bond fan.

FUTURE OF BEST ADVERTISING IS MOBILE

Remember Amazon recommendation engine is advertising. Now think, if we collect accurately usage patterns based on the phone - we get a far wider reach of data points than Amazon can hope for. Or even what Google could hope for from our internet Google-branded activities like Gmail, search, maps etc. And then what if the advertiser first gets my permission (we have to have opt-in in engagement marketing obviously) and then - my digital footprint is intelligently analyzed to offer me recommendations. So now, what if British Airways sees that their frequent flier Tomi Ahonen is also a James Bond fan and lives in Hong Kong but regularly flies between Hong Kong and London. Well, when the next 007 feature is released, BA could offer me a slightly discounted seat on the flight to London for the first week of James Bond's next premier. Even offer the movie tickets for free (consider the cost of movie tickets vs cost of intercontinental air travel) and tell me they show a James Bond movie marathon on the flight. Normally the BA website would never find out that their frequent flier Ahonen is also a Bond fan.

If we get targeted, relevant, valuable, useful, personalized offers (advertising) that are well done, we will love them. Not just 'tolerate' them, we will love them. Just like we love Amazon's recommendations. Our friend, author and blogger Jonathan Macdonald tells time and again, that when he was with Blyk, that was the finding - that teenagers and young adults who received the radically new 'engagement marketing' based MMS and SMS advertising though Blyk's system, they loved it and the single biggest complaint that Blyk got - was that the audience wanted MORE of the ads. It is not illogical, think of Amazon. If we get permission, then do truly relevant, targeted and useful ads, our audience will not even think of it as advertising, they will think of it as valuable information and will love it.

Amazon is proving it to us today. You can become a most-trusted brand even as you serve ads to your clients. And advertising can be so good, that consumers will love it and look forward to it and seek more of it. Now, when that data is no longer held by only one merchant, but collected from our phone - we do get to what Alan Moore's been writing about in his latest book with Ajit Jaokar and others Social Media Marketing, that social marketing intelligence is the new black gold of the 21st century. And where can we best collect that black gold? Via the phone of course. Which may explain a bit more why Google is going 'mobile first' and they bought the mobile ad giant Admob; why Apple bought Quattro and earlier Nokia had already bought Enpocket.

This is an exciting year for mobile advertising but we are only starting to grasp the true potential. Remember Amazon's recommendation engine. If we use that kind of insights for mobile (and web) and especially in engagment marketing, we will get satisfied consumers who will love our ads. Great lesson taught to us by Amazon.

Now please allow me a quick plug - if you want to see 50 examples of world-class mobile advertising cases from 19 countries - all real, all excellent, pioneering, innovative and including many of the best award-winning campaigns using 'engagement marketing' - check out my eBook Tomi Ahonen Pearls Vol 1: Mobile Advertising. It only costs 9.99 Euros and there are free sample pages and cases at the eBook ordering site. see Tomi's Pearls Vol 1

TWO FOLLOW UP POSTINGS

I have added two blog postings expanding the thinking. I first show how we are moving beyond demographics and what becomes possible when we voluntarily accept the 'digital leash' via the mobile phone. Then I went further into that topic, showing there are 3 levels of consumer behavior insights we get from mobile.

What does it mean to you, when Google says 'Mobile First' ?

So the biggest mobile industry event of the year, Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is now over. We heard a lot about the mobile industry and its latest smartphones and amazing numbers of users, services, apps, revenues etc. One of the astonishing statements to come out of Barcelona was Google's CEO Eric Schmidt, who said that from now on, Google will follow a 'Mobile First' strategy. They mean, that for any new innovation or service or app or product they develop - mind you this is the biggest internet company on the planet - as well as the most profitable internet company - they will launch all new introductions to mobile first - yes, mobile version before a 'legacy PC internet' version. (Sounds like Google is placing the 7th mass medium - mobile - ahead of the 6th mass medium ie the internet).

Ok, regular readers of this blog or my books or followers of my twitter feed know, that this is nothing new for Google, and is not actually as radical as it sounds - that in Japan for many years already, the biggest internet companies have put 'mobile first' and for example all internet pages are formated and designed by default for mobile internet use, and the PC based internet version is an optional extra. So actually, it is not as radical for those who are well indoctrinated with the 7th mass media channel.

But for many of our random readers, this is still bewildering. Google, the internet giant, says it will prefer to design anything for mobile first? This is like the transition in music, when there were suddenly artists in the 1990s who launched their album 'on CD first' before launching it for vinyl or c-cassette. Same for movies, in this past decade ofthe 2000s, we reached a point where movies suddenly were available on DVD first, before the VHS cassette version (did you notice how quickly video stores abandoned VHS shelves completely. It seemed to happen in a matter of months haha)

Are we truly at that kind of massive transition point? What is Google telling us and how does that impact your business, project, team, budget - or even your personal career? Lets examine this.

BACKGROUND

First lets understand how strange this is. Apple was born of a garage industry, became world's bestselling PC maker with its Apple II, and then after IBM joined the PC races, Apple totally transformed the PC industry with the iconic Macintosh. Today every PC can trace its operating system principles to that first Mac. And Apple went on to become the fastest-growing company ever, to reach the Fortune 500. Many other household names in personal computers appeared from that age, such as Dell and Microsoft; and the PC industry made Bill Gates the richest man on the planet.

The Apple record rise would stand until the next super-wave of technology came along a decade later, called the internet. The internet created new global giant household names like Amazon, eBay and Google. Google broke Apple's record as the fastest-ever company to climb into the Fortune 500. Google is still growing revenues dramatically on its core internet business. Yet, for five years now, the CEO of Google has been saying 'mobile' and for the past three years, saying 'mobile, mobile, mobile'. He was quoted in 2005 in the Financial Times telling the world, that Google felt the internet would migrate to mobile phones.

Understand the context. This was not Nokia or Vodafone or Ericsson bragging about their "own" industry, "mobile telecoms". No. This was the world's largest internet company - at a time when the internet was in great growth and expanding worldwide and every analyst including Google itself, said that the internet would continue to grow into the fore-seeable future. Mobile was a 'rival' industry when viewed from the internet industry. Yet Google's CEO said that a transition was coming, and the internet would go to our phones. It is rare indeed for a CEO to have that kind of vision, while his own company dominates a dramatically growing global industry, to see a total change coming that will completely transform their own business.

Now, in 2010. its not like he's alone now. We see Apple joined the choir in 2007. When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone in January 2007, the company also named its corporate name from Apple Computer, to just Apple. They did not do this when they launched the iPod in 2001. They did this in 2007 when they launched their first mobile phone. Today just three years later the iPhone related mobile business of Apple delivers roughly speaking a quarter of Apple's total business. And just now Apple COO Tim Cook said that Apple is not a computer company, it is primarily "a mobile company."

Microsoft is already in mobile. Dell joined recently. Acer is about to join. Cisco, HP, Intel etc all have some interests in mobile. So Google is not alone. But I want to come back to the world record growth rates. If you could pick an industry to be in, in the 1980s and 1990s, that industry was the personal computer industry. The next global hit giant industry was the internet during the 1990s and this past decade of the 2000s. Now in 2010 the newest tech industry to generate giant global business is mobile. Did you notice what Forbes picked last year, as the fastest-growing company right now. Fastest growing company across any industry, on the planet? Their pick was RIM the makers of the Blackberry.

NOW, MOBILE FIRST AND YOU

So, Google CEO Eric Schmidt says that Google will now prioritize in every project, to do the mobile version first. Why is this, when the majoirty of Google's customers and the majority of Google's revenues (out of advertisements) come from the internet - and the internet is still growing very strongly.

Its because Google are a very smart company and they know the numbers. Mobile has already overaken the internet in total users. And in total revenues. And in total profits. Not just overtaking the internet, mobile has passed the PC industry, and passed the fixed landline phone industry. Get this, the mobile industry alone, is about as big as the global worldwide PC/IT industry, plus the internet industry, and the landline phone business - all rolled into one! In 2008 mobile became one of only a handful of industries on the planet that generates a Trillion dollars of revenues annually. Thats almost three times what the televsision industry earns. More than twice what the advertising industry makes in a year. About twice the size of the total worldwide print industry (before the economic crash) ie all newspapers, all books and all magazines. Trillion dollar sized industries are things like cars, the food industry, construction, and armaments. And mobile telecoms.

Google saw this. They saw that mobile is over four times bigger than the total worldwide internet business, including all content fees, all advertising fees, and all connecition fees like dial-up and broadband fees - put together. Mobile is four times bigger than all those. Mobile is a giant. But not just a giant. The computer industry started in 1942 so we're looking at an industry which is 58 years old. The internet formed its first four connections in 1969, so the internet is 41 years of age. But the first commercial cellular telecoms network went live in Japan in 1979, so mobile telecoms is only 31 years old. Yet its grown to be far bigger than those two other technology darlings. Mobile is in fact, the fastest-growing Trillion-dollar industry in the economic history of mankind. That is why Google, Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Dell etc are all interested to get in. The fastest-growing Trillion-dollar industry ever. It hit the Trillion-dollar level of annual revenues in only 29 years, a record which is likely to last through this century at least.

Last year when the global economy crashed and hundreds of giants of the world economy went bankrupt, the mobile industry grew paying customers by 15%, grew revenues by 7% and most of the major players of the mobile industry reported profits. Some of the specific areas of mobile truly exploded last year such as mobile advertising, which grew by 85% from 2008. So now it starts to make sense, why Google (it is the biggest ad platform on the internet by far) and all these other companies are focusing on mobile. The global print industries lost revenues, as did TV, as did radio, as did advertising, as did the personal computer industry. But mobile grew, very strongly.

INTERNET CHANGED EVERYTHING... NOT !

We've all heard the mantra:"The internet changed everything." But did it? The guy working in construction as a laborer, laying bricks or nailing roof tiles, he does not need the internet to do his daily job. Yes, maybe the foreman or the archtect needs a computer, but the workers? Not really. How about the lumberjack up in Canada or in Brazil, using a chain saw to cut down giant trees? Does not need the internet to cut trees. What of the farm worker who comes in to help collect the crops. I don't mean the farmer, who needs to know about weather, I mean the guy in the field, operating the tractor or perhaps picking tomatos or oranges by hand. His life did not change because of the internet. Or the fisherman. He does not have an internet connection in his little wooden fishing boat that he inherited from his father.

Yes, the internet did change very many industries - and totally destroyed some, like travel agencies (remember those?) or music stores or the encyclopedia business. Our life has been changed more by the PC based 'legacy' internet than by any other technology since the introduction of electricity, that is ture. Looking at the past 50 years, clearly the internet has been the most influential change to economic activity on the planet.

But it did not change 'everything'. The internet changed more industries than any other innovation since electricity, but still did not change everything. The internet was able is remarkably short time to devastate some industries and is currently in the process of dismantling many others - like music, TV, movies, news, videogaming etc. And the internet enabled a totally new type of consumer behavior - 'social networking' which again impacts everything from how people find jobs to selecting brands and goods, to deciding elections and government. Social networking was not possible before the internet and it alone is now changing the world in a new way.

MOBILE WILL CHANGE WORLD FAR MORE THAN INTERNET COULD

So, you think the internet changed 'everything' or perhaps only 'very much'? Now lets compare to mobile. Every internet-connected personal computer and internet service can deliver digital interactive services. The three most-used apps or services on the internet are messaging, search and social networking (not necessarily in that order). There are 1.2 Billion personal computers in the world, total in use (some PC based internet users will share computers, such as a family PC shared by the kids, or PCs shared at internet cafe's etc). But yes, 1.2 Billion total. The world has 3.9 billion total mobile phones in use. And every one of the mobile phones in use can do messaging (with SMS) - in fact SMS has 3.6 Billion total active users worldwide - yes, three times as many people use messaging on a mobile phone, than all internet-connected personal computers on the planet... If email changed your career and life and you cannot imagine work without messaging on a PC, mobile forms of messaging are touching three times as many people already. Mobile is far far bigger than messaging on the legacy PC based internet. Google knows this, they have their email platform, Gmail.

What of search and social networking? Both exist on mobile, and you don't need a 'smartphone' to have a great search experience or do wonderful social networking on a phone. For search and social networking, all you need is a 'basic browser' - that is, WAP browser - and you now can deliver search and social networking to 95% of all mobile phones on the planet. Thats 3.7 Billion phones - still three times as many as the total installed base of all personal computers. Not all of them are used for search - but for example 40% of mobile phone owners in India have used Google search (on WAP obviously) and half of phone owners in Japan use mobile search. Social networking on mobile is a smaller total population but is the fastest-growing segment of the mobile customer population. And each of these, mobile messaging, mobile search, and mobile social networking - make revenues on mobile (and make profits on mobile).

So the mobile versions or equivalent variants of internet services, reach a wider audience than the most popular services on the internet, and make money doing so. Of course the mobile versions will be far greater in users, revenues and profits than their internet siblings. If you thought the internet was important - then mobile this decade will become far more important. You understand now why the biggest internet company says 'Mobile First'?

MONEY, YOU CAN'T DO MONEY ON THE INTERNET

"Tomi here you are wrong. We CAN do money on the internet, use Paypal or a credit card." No, that is not true. While you perhaps can use your credit card or Paypal on the internet, that is not everybody. It is not possible to do money transfers 'natively' on the internet. You have to get a separate stand-alone account (like Paypal or a credit card) and only those who have a separate payment system, can do payments on the internet. That is not 'native' to the internet - its just a version of using your credit card on a phone call to the merchant, like an airline booking service for example. The landline does not do 'payments natively', you have to give a credit card. And if you give your credit card details, thats using another payment system. Paypal has about 10% of all internet users as active clients. And nowhere near half of all internet users have a credit card. Most teenagers do not qualify for credit cards for example in most countries, for banking legal reasons.

To understand how this is TOTALLY different, consider payments on mobile. On ANY mobile network anywhere on the planet - if the operator/carrier decides to deploy this feature, you can make payments on one click - with NO separate payment system. All 100% of mobile customers immediately are able to handle the payment, on one click. Take ringing tones - you can have ringing tones paid for on your mobile account, even if you have no credit card, no paypal, no bank acount even. You don't need to have a 'post-paid' or 'monthly contract' account, the payments can be deducted from your 'prepaid' balance on your phone account. Pure magic. Your phone becomes a wallet and a payment system. Every single phone in the network. That is why over half of Helsinki's public transport single fee payments are paid for by mobile. Why 49% of Kenya's banking accounts are mobile banking accounts. And why Estonia parking fees can only be paid by mobile - yes 100% of parking fees paid by mobile in that country. Mobile is literally replacing cash in our pockets.

This trend is in its very early beginning stages. Most banking and credit card companies are late to this game. The national banking regulations are still evolving to handle mobile phone accounts and what to do about things like instant loans (like they have in Scandinavia, very popular, get an instantly approved loan and its sent to your phone, and you can withdraw the money in cash at the nearest cash machine/ATM if you want..). But think of how much broader this is now than all of the impacts of the internet. Kids. Who do not qualify for credit cars, but can do mobile payments - and then can also use their own phone to RECEIVE payments, such as if they do small errands, or act as tutors and mentors for example, etc - receive payments directly onto your phone account (and don't think its only small payments, in South Africa and the Philippines etc its quite normal to get your full paycheck paid to your mobile account).

Why mobile first? Our whole global economy is enabled and driven by the concept of money. If you are a magazine publisher or TV broadcaster or hollywood movie studio - you cannot 'create' money in your medium and deliver cash-equivalents to your audiences. In some cases, like newspapers, you can give 'coupons' but these are not 'your' money that applies universally, no, they are money allocated by that supermarket chain or that given advertising brand, and the discount coupon only works for one product or brand or store. No, the newspaper cannot issue 'universal cash' that could be used anywhere. Only mobile can...  We have many mobile virtual worlds that have created their own virtual currencies, from South Korea's Cyworld to UK's Flirtomatic. All three Japanese mobile social networking services, Mixi, MobageTown and Gree - offer virtual money. Habbo Hotel out of Finland - invented the way to collect payments via mobile to a purely internet-based virtual world (and they make tons of money and are profitable of course, doing this while their customers are under 15 year olds who do not have much disposable income).

The trend of cash and money migrating to mobile is an inevitable universal trend. It is mostly slow-moving and we won't abandon our plastic credit cards and our traditional cash and banking accounts for years to come, very likely at the end of this decade mobile payments are still a minority player in the global money environment - but an ever increasing minority player. Mobile money is in its infancy but it is an unstoppable trend for many reasons. The mobile phone is already considered more important to normal consumers than the wallet. Mobile phones are far more powerful than plastic credit cards - have more security than a plastic card, and far more importantly - any mobile phone can act alone, independently of a 'terminal' as the payment system. So for example using SMS, any phone alone can authorize the payment. You can't do that on a credit card - the credit card always needs either the connected 'card reader' device, or else the merchant has to accept the card and do the paperwork to process it (taking a risk in the process that the card may be stolen). Mobile is far more powerful as a payment system. And the same goes for the payments recepient - the merchant can accept payments iwithout any expensive connected credit-card 'terminal' - as every merchant will have a mobile phone. You don't need an expensive complex smartphone to use the phone as a merchant terminal - by using SMS, any phone on the planet, the simplest 15 dollar Nokia 'Africa phone' can accept SMS based payments. And it can verify the account status etc without expensive landline connections with monthly telecoms connectivity fees etc, that most merchant credit card verification systems require.

You see what the mean with 'mobile first'? Inceasingly this decade we will see mobile payments and mobile commerce and mobile banking evolution. Its a long haul path, but along the way, tons of millionaires will be made out of companies who understand the trend, and enable especially the 'unbanked' to become m-banked. Like now nearly half of all who do banking in Kenya. This is part of why Google says 'Mobile First'

MOBILE VOICE

But even bigger than mobile money can become, even bigger than mobile messaging or search or social networking - there is the biggest giant technology that is most-used on the planet, and that is telecoms voice call services - but not on the fixed landline anymore - that is now on mobile. There are 4.6 Billion mobile phone accounts on the planet. It will be 5 billion paid and active mobile phone accounts by the end of this year 2010 and within a couple of years there will be more mobile phone accounts than the total population of 6.8 billion people in the world. The trend is clear, unstoppable.

And what of those fixed landline phones? The fixed landline telecoms business hit its peak and is now in gradual decline (has been for several years already) and there are only 1.15 Billion total fixed landline phone accounts anymore active on the planet. Mobile is literally four times bigger than fixed landline (plus is bigger in revenues and profits). If you think Skype stole the cake in voice calls - no it didn't. Skype accounts amount to about half in size of fixed landlines - ie mobile is 8 times bigger than Skype by total accounts (And hundreds of times bigger in revenues and profits)

Why is voice important - because the internet can only reach those people who know how to read and write. And the planet has 800 million people still who are illiterate. The internet cannot reach those people, but mobile can. An illiterate fisherman can still use his mobile phone to call merchants and negotiate a better price for his catch today. The internet is useless to the illiterate fisherman.  Mobile voice services can deliver totally new types of 'mobile radio' services - broadcast 'premium voice' services as paid voice services to deliver news, sports scores and live broadcasts, even music and entertainment. Why not use FM radio for that? Because in many parts of the Emerging World the economics of FM radio cannot deliver the reach to poor villages far from the big metropolitan areas. In India alone there are 200 million people living in villages which are beyond FM radio coverage (obviously also beyond TV coverage and have no newpapers or magazines sold in those small villages) but in villages that do have cellular telecoms coverage! In India such 'mobile radio' services like cricket scores and live games, and Bollywood music hits etc - earn as much money as the total FM radio industry of India. When the phone is not the 7th mass medium, but is the 'only' and certainly the 'first' mass medium, it has a completely disproportionate effect on society. Understand what I mean - for those who have never had ANY media or tech, when they get their first phone, it will be a far bigger change in their lives, than when we upgrade our latest smartphone or sign up to higher speed broadband..

In many parts of the Emerging World the population will go directly from 'no internet' to 'mobile internet' (which means primarly WAP not 'real xTHM type of web') like we see from Sri Lanka to Nigeria. Amd even bigger digital interactive media services will be delivered on MMS Multimedia Messaging services. Don't think of MMS as picture messaging between people - MMS is the world's second-most used digital platform with 1.7 billion active users (second only to SMS, ahead of TV, the internet and personal computers). And MMS is used to deliver news, videos, games, entertainment, advertising etc.

And mobile is the only viable digital platform to deliver services for those 82% of the population of the planet unfortunate to be born into the Emerging World. Smartphones and netbooks will never be a mass market viable economic opportunity in those markets - certainly not economically viable mass market propositions for this decade. But mobile is viable today! Using basic services built on SMS, MMS, WAP and voice - including e-learning/m-learning services, like we see the 400,000 people who have signed up to the mobile phone based English language courses in Bangladesh. The simple lessons and excercizes run daily on the phone, cost less than the local price of a cup of tea, but if a low-income laborer can speak some English, they may get jobs that pay twice as much. Imagine how much your life improves if you find a job that pays twice as much? Imagine the power of self-improvement that m-learning can bring to poorer parts of the world.

YOUR TAKE-AWAYS

So, Google says 'mobile first'. Mobile is far bigger in reach than personal computers or the internet. The three most popular services of the internet are already on mobile and reach a far bigger audience than they do on the internet arleady today. Mobile is newer, is growing faster, and is making far more money (and profits) than the legacy PC based internet.

Mobile is also bigger than any other mass media channel by reach - far bigger than TV or newspapers or cinema or radios even. Mobile is the fastest-growing Trillion-dollar industry of the economic history of mankind and is the only technology in the pocket of every single person on the planet who is considered 'economically viable' ie a potential target customer for any service or product that is sold on the planet. If they can afford to buy a daily newspaper or a bottle of Coca Cola or a cup of tea - even if they don't do so, but if they have enough daily disposable income just to afford that level - they will have a mobile phone. Globally. Only mobile.

They say 'the internet changed everything' but it did not really touch everyone everywhere. Yet everything we can do on the internet today, we can also do on mobile today on smartphones and on mid-price 'feature phones' which practically all have at least an HTML type of browser and reasonably fast "2.5G" data connection. But today more people use browsing services (including WAP) on a mobile phone than do on a personal computer - so already today, the 'mobile internet' can reach a larger audience than the lgacy PC based internet. Already today, if 'the internet changed everything;' - then just on the 'browser-based services' mobile is bigger, and will 'change more of everything'

But beyond the internet services, we have SMS and MMS. So we reach more people and can do far more (simple) interactive services to them with SMS and quite advancede video, sound, picture and longer text communciations via MMS. And these will enable a vast array of new, amazing and popular mobile-only services. Like say airline check in, which can be done on mobile, and today half of Finnair's passengers on its businest routes use mobile phone based check-in (mostly using SMS). Mobile is inherently bigger than the internet.

Then we have money, something that is not inherent to the internet, but is built-into every single mobile phone account on the planet. Money will be a far bigger engine of growth for the mobile services opportunity than what was possible on the internet. How much greater can new services be, like we saw eBay and Amazon appear on the internet. Amazon and eBay needed Paypal and credit cards. On mobile we can take payments without any other registrations and payments-providers. 

And we go far beyond even literacy, as mobile has voice services and basic voice IVR services can deliver digital services to even those who cannot read a message on their phone screen, and type simple responses on a keboard (or know which button to hit on a screen of a web page). Fishermen carry mobile phones, farm temporary laborers carry mobile phones. Loggers in the foreestry indsutry carry mobile phones. Illiterate people and teenagers and grandparents carry mobile phones.

The mobile industry is the fastest-ever new industry to grow to reach a Trillion dollars in value. While the global economy crashed in the past 12 months, mobile grew new paying customers, grew revenues and grew profits. This is by far the best economic opportunity for any business in any industry anywhere on the planet. You, whatever your business, team, project or personal career may be - need to adjust to use mobile in it. Digital industries will of course migrate to mobile but its not just digital industries. Its not even just the media industries. Its any industries. If an airline can gain out of mobile or the parking authority of the city or illiterate fishermen can gain from it, even basic education can gain from it - every business, every project and every enterprise can benefit from mobile. This is the biggest economic opportunity of this decade, and of our lifetimes. Do not miss it.

MORE INFO

As is our custom here at Communities Dominate blog (did you notice we have no advertising on this blog) we provide more info sources. We have free sources for basic info and paid resources for deeper info. If you want to read the basics of this industry including all the numbers, please read my blog "The Big Picture to Mobile Industry"

If you want the facts in your pocket or your PC to have 84 charts and tables of all the major facts and numbers of the fastest-growing Trillion-dollar industry of all time, I have released the 2010 edition of my Almanac - at only 9.99 Euros, this is a perfect resource for you. See free sample pages and tables at this page Tomi Ahonen Almanac 2010. 

And obviously, if your team needs a deeper briefing or workshop or seminar about mobile, I am the most prolific author (9 books on mobile, have written over a million words on mobile business and services) and I have already been seen by public audiences exceeding cumulatively over 100,000 people on all six inhabited continents, plus countless private audiences at numerous Global 500 companies. If you want a workshop or seminar or briefing, I am most happy to support you, send me an email to tomi (at) tomiahonen (dot) com and lets find a suitable time.