7th Mass Media

Visa says future of Visa Card is Mobile

And on those same themes as Ford earlier this spring, I saw an official Visa Europe video at the Mobile Marketing Forum of Slovakia in Bratislava on 10 May, where Visa said very clearly in the video - and printed it on the screen to be perfectly clear, that "The Visa Card of the future is a Visa Mobile card." The video ended with Visa's official view about money and the future: "The future of payments is mobile." Yes its a 7th mass media indeed. And mobile is... the magical money-making machine!

Ford says all Ford ads will have mobile in it from now

I have been very overwhelmed and this blog has suffered because of it. But I do want to continue as I can, to seek those special '7th Mass Media' stories that this blog was designed to collect. We have tons of them.

So first, in February Ford announced that all future mobile campaigns will now include mobile. All ad campaigns will have mobile. This is the first major global advertising brand to say so, and clearly mobile is shifting from the periphery of a tiny slice of 'digital advertising' onto center stage. The Ford story broke on Mobile Marketing Watch on February 11. 

Tesco Shopping Guide on Mobile.. almost reads our minds! Magical

This is perfect use of the 7th mass media. Tesco's the biggest UK supermarket chain, has released a shopping assistant application. It starts out very innocently. It helps you organize your shopping list. And every shopper carries the phone in the pocket, it is a good shopping aide. But then it gets magical. You tell it which Tesco store you intend to shop in - or you ask the network to pick this store, where you are at the moment (which the network can identify easily from rough positioning of 'radio triangulation' without needing a GPS unit on the phone - and then the magic happens. The Tesco shopping assistant will re-arrange your shopping list items, by the order of the items in the aisles in the store, ensuring you the shortest path through the store to your own shopping.

Magical!

Its like the phone reads my mind and helps make my life easier. Who doesn't want this? It won't prevent you from still looking at other aisles if you feel like wandering in the store, but you can get through the store the fastest, using this method.

And now the clever bit. Tesco's has already asked you permission to market to you. And it has your profile, it knows what you buy and don't buy. It won't show you any ads you don't want. But it can now offer you targeted ads and coupons, based on exactly what you like (and its near rivals). So, Tesco's knows that Tomi Ahonen is a Pepsi guy. Then that Tomi Ahonen is nearing Tesco's store number 124. Why not ask Coca Cola to serve Tomi an ad for 2 for 1 purchase of Coke. But as Pepsi knows Tomi doesn't buy diet stuff, it knows also to tell Coke to serve Tomi an ad for real coke, not any rubbish diet coke that he wouldn't even buy from Pepsi. Brilliant. And Tesco's won't release my name to Coke, no spam from Coke, Tesco's owns this relationship and will nurture it. They won't let a milk brand or beer brand or orange juice brand serve me ads, based on my Pepsi purchase pattern..  I love it! Its my fave story of mobile marketing currently.

Window Dressing and Undressing! SMS interactive retail windows at Duffy's Manhattan

I have been talking about mobile in retail a lot recently (and in my 'famously censored' presentation to the Mint Directors in Canberra too, I had retail examples of mobile money and mobile wallets).

And I have been asking retailers to invent and deploy interactivity in window displays, driven by the fact that every economically viable passer-by has a mobile phone in their pocket when viewing the window display - and all phones today on all networks can do SMS text messaging.

I was thinking small - put in a little automated DVD player window display (one of those portable airplane use DVD players with a 7 inch screen, and on it, to run in endless loop a little interactive promotion to send in an SMS to get a chance to win an item (or service) that the store sells, win a watch if its a jewelry store etc. And make sure its normal price SMS, not premium SMS pricing so its not perceived as any kind of scam..

I was thinking small. Good thing I'm not in advertising. Here is what they do New York style, with window displays and SMS haha..

Daffy's clothing store on Manhattan ran a special evening live window display, with window dressing, so to speak. Two live models, a man and a woman, were in the window display with a set of clothes, and the live audience outside would send in SMS text messages to the models, telling them what to put on next (and in the process, the models undress and re-dress continuously). The comments sent in were also displayed on a large screen display - and obviously the passers-by also sent personal messages to the sexy models.

 


Cool! Sexy! Exciting! Interactive! I utterly totally love the concept. Here is a screen shot of the video

Go see the video. This proves your window display can become interactive via SMS (thanks Daffy's for validating my idea) and wow did they make it far better than I could ever have imagined. Bravo! This should be sent in to every mobile marketing and advertising awards contest and my best wishes, it should win awards. Story was covered at Textually.

And didn't I promise you guys that once the New York advertising creativity wakes up to mobile, it will be huge haha..

Soon every hotel door? Holiday Inn to let customer smartphones operate as key to lock. Magical!

I keep telling my audiences to seek to deploy the magical in mobile. It is the ultimate magical device, and in a perfect world the phone seems to read our minds and to operate telepathically for us. Here is a great example. Holiday Inn hotels in America are experimenting with a system to allow hotel customers to use their smartphones as their electronic keys to the hotel room.

Actually the technical solution is to me a bit overkill techie using some clever acoustics, run by a smartphone app. But right off the bat, the good thing is that Holiday Inn is doing this across multiple smartphone platforms, so they do RIM Blackberry, Apple iPhone and Google Androids at least. I would expect if they don't have them yet, they'll soon also do Symbian and Java versions.

Now, the clever bit. This is magical. One, we don't go back home if we forget our wallet or our keys. We do return if we forget our phone. It is the only device we insist on having with us at all times. How many times have frequent travellers left a hotel room with the key forgotten into the room? Then consider, how many times have you left a hotel room forgetting your phone - it just doesn't happen. So to have the electronic key enabled on our phone is better than forcing us to carry some piece of electronic plastic and remember that in the right clothing when we rush into the hotel room to switch clothes from the business meeting to our casual evening etc...

Secondly, it of course is connected to the hotel's electronic security system. At the least, it is exactly as secure as any other electronic key, but it can be made to be far more secure on the phone - if for example the system is set for asking a password - say there is a conference room area with some very sensitive systems that only selected execs may visit - then adding a password is easy to do on a phone based app - but if a plastic key based door and lock is used, anyone who steals the plastic key can gain access. Even stealing my phone won't give you the access if there is a user password added to this particular room etc.

And we have the freedom of doing this across multiple phones of course, so parents and kids can all have their phones enabled (assuming in this technical case, that they are smartphones of course).

The beauty is that we are moving away from the unnecessary gadgets - like keys. A totally unnecessary relic of past centuries. Now with electronic locks, why isn't every electronic lock connected to phones. I think far simpler solutions can be used such as IVR - just register the phone number with the locking system - and the hotel manages this obviously and makes it secure - then when the one phone registered to that room makes a call to our IVR system, we open the door. We don't even have to 'answer' the call, we can just detect the phone number and authorize the lock to be opened. Simple, easy. Its being used at many parking garages for example to handle garage door opening without having a paid human sitting there all day managing the garage door haha (as I write in my books).

Yes, this is magical. Great innovation from America and from the tourist industry. Wow. Love it. Its 100% a '7th mass media' type of a solution. Congrats to Holiday Inn hotels.

Rolex used picture-recognition in print ads, not QR codes, clever

Rolex ran an ad campaign to drive visitors to its mobile website. The magazine print ads used a technology by Pongr that recognizes images - so the reader of the magazine need only take a pictue of the magazine ad, and send that to Pongr who use image-recognition to see what ad it was relating to. Pretty clever, although I think in the near term, QR Codes will still be the main way to do magazine interactivity with mobile. The Rolex campaign was covered in Mobile Markter.

Mastercard shows how to do mobile: first SMS then do the app - on Blackberry

This is EXACTLY how a US based consumer oriented company should do its mobile service. Mastercard announced a smartphone app (and a location-based app at that). I was just getting ready to do one of my rants, when I read to the end of the article, and started to smile. This was done the right way. First do the SMS version (done). Now Mastercard can deliver ATM/Cash Machine locations to any user via SMS querie. If you are an international traveller - and many times it is, they get 4 million total queries per year using web, SMS and voice calls - the data charge could be a nasty penalty on some smartphone apps with location positioning haha...

So yes, first do SMS for mobile. THEN do the smartphone app. And more smartness from Mastercard. There are more Blackberry users in the USA (and in the world) than iPhones, so they launched their ATM-finder on Blackberry. This is smart. This is 'text book' on how a consumer oriented service should be deployed on mobile. And yes, a cash machine locator is one of those few services that has a relatively valid 'location-based' need, for heavy travellers only, obviously. Most of consumers do not move about weekly or daily or even monthly and know fully well where the nearest cash machine is close to their home, their work and their main shopping locations haha..

Red Cross raised 37 million dollars so far for Haiti via SMS

A quick note.. It is powerful, isn't it. SMS has already raised 37 million dollars for Haiti. My friend Kim Dushinski reported it at her blog today. The 7th mass medium. One of the 8 unique abilities is the the in-built ability to handle money. Wonderful.

Hilton Hotel iPhone app - this is dumb, truly utterly dumb way to do customer service

We have just heard about the Hilton Hotels international chain new iPhone app as their way to give customers mobile phone based service. It has been downloaded 126,000 times and has satisfied users, whose fave use is... to order room service.

First - remember once again, that 'if the only tool you know is a hammer, every problem will look like a nail'. Second, this iPhone app needed planning and development and 'design' to fit the look-and-feel of Hilton and their branding etc. And what do they get for it. 0.7% - under one perent, zero-point-seven percent of all the phones on the planet are iPhones.

If the iPhone was the world's first mobile phone with interactivity, that would be fine. But it is not. In fact all 100% of mobile phones can do SMS - and you can create a service to allow travellers to order room service via SMS - at FAR LESSER cost than it took to design an iPhone app. And fully interactive, web-like experiences can be deployed on WAP - 95% of all phones in use on the planet support either WAP or a better browser. If the service is designed to run on WAP, the same service can easily be adapted to xTML ie design once and use that concept to deliver browser based Hilton services to 95% of all phones. Now, who stays in a Hilton Hotel? It won't be a super-poor African family that bought a 15 dollar phone. So yes, out of travellers to Hilton hotels - certainly 100% can do WAP.

And in many cases the same or equivalent result can be delivered via MMS - why not show the room service menu on MMS (MMS is interactive just like SMS) and do it at less development cost - and reach 80% of all phones on the planet, and at least 90% of the phones used by Hilton level hotel guests.

You say its impossible, WAP is crap, nobody uses MMS etc. Totally lies. The fact is - more people use browser based servies on phones than on PCs - don't take my word for it, Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said so earlier this year. Only 500 million phones are smartphones - so most of that browsing is done on WAP. And WAP can bring totally satisfied users - witness award-winning Flirtomatic. So you say thats flirting, how about travel? UK's Kizoom has been giving UK public transportation users up-to-the-minute travel details via WAP for a decade.

And now the kicker. Finnair launched SMS based mobile check-in in 2001. They expanded it to include WAP. Today, on Finnair's busy routes, more than half of their passengers use mobile check-in. Travel. Passengers. SMS and WAP. Totally satisfied repeat customers. If Hilton can find 126,000 people to download an iPhone app - they could easily have 10 million satisfied users of a well-designed travel-oriented service on SMS, WAP and/or MMS. And yes, to build an iPhone app, so that 0.7% can order room service - when 3.5 Billion people are active users of SMS - and text messaging can just as easily order room service  this is very bad strategy by Hilton.

Don't misunderstand me, apps can be good, apps can be great. But who in 'customer service' will select a platform that reaches under one percent of potential users, when rival platforms reach EVERY ONE ? And the development costs are equivalent (usually SMS and MMS cheaper than iPhone app actually). Not to mention, iPhone apps for international travellers - this is going to kill them in data roaming charges! Again the reason to go with SMS and MMS (they too have roaming charges but far far less) and WAP forces you to be very precise and limited in your design, again minimizing data transmission costs. I wonder how many of those 126K Hilton travellers will suddenly call up very angry when they do their first international trip and get the sticker shock of having used the Hilton app in a taxi for example. Its CRAZY...

Oh, and Sitaram Shastri ie @seetu commented on Twitter that also we can use IVR. YES ! every single phone can do voice IVR (ie interactive voice response)

So, if I was Marriott or Inter-Continental or Arcor or whoever runs hotels, I'd look into it, then check out some other travel-related innovations, and do a proper travel-oriented CUSTOMER focused service. Get competent WAP and SMS and MMS development support, and get all of my travellers to use the service. Put a little sign at the reigsration desk of the hotel - and another at the conscierge desk and one more in the room - and within two months I'd have 100 times more active users than Hilton has with its 'iPhone app'. This is what I mean, the obsession with iPhone apps right now - when the only tool you know is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. Very bad idea, Hilton Hotels. Why not do like Lufthansa did, they launched mass-market services first in 2001 on SMS, then on WAP and now today they release a premium apps oriented service. And even if you do that, idiots over there at Hilton - business travellers have Blackberries, not iPhiones, and the world has 10 times more Symbian based smartphones than iPhones. Wake up...

m-Tetris? 100M paid downloads to mobile vs 35M sold on Nintendo

Haha, yes its the 7th mass medium and yes its reach is simply awesome. Consider Tetris. The addictive PC game from the 1980s was released onto Nintendo Gameboy. It sold a total of 35 million copies. But for the past few years its been also as a mobile game. Sold.... 100 million copies. Magical money-making machine....  (Source PC World 22 Jan, 2010)