But apart from my presentations - you may enjoy 'Around the World in 80 Slides' about the status of mobile marketing outside of the USA (the slideshare presentation has had over 6,000 views, wow, in just over one week!). Lets talk about what else happened at the MMA Forum. Here is my update of the latest thinking from many of the best marketing and advertising minds of Madison Avenue, and how they now see mAd as in Mobile Advertising, and the more broad term, Mobile Marketing, in the context of other modern marketing tools and methods. The mAd industry is maturing nicely. I was very VERY impressed with what all is being discovered, discussed and disseminated.
This blog is a collection of my notes from the MMA Forum. As the event ran mostly on three threads, I could not obviously attend all presentations, so please take this not as a comprehensive review but rather a sampling of what we learned. And in no particular order, lets see what brands were saying what about mobile.
MACY'S DEPARTMENT STORE
Jennifer Kasper, the VP of Digital at Macy's, yes the world's largest department store, gave a keynote to the MMA Forum. She said that if Disney can turn from an entertainment company into a retailer, why can't Macy's turn from a retailer into an entertainment company. And she pointed out that in New York City, the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade is truly an institution, one that is covered nationally on TV. Jennifer made a wonderful observation about mobile phones in the stores: before we consumers were being yelled at for using our phones in the stores, now we are being encouraged to use them. And as to mobile marketing, how about this innovation - we all know that TV shows can be interactive via SMS, like American Idol and Eurovision etc, what about TV ads? Macy's has introduced TV ads that invite TV viewers to respond live, and even make purchases straight off the live TV advertisement.
ANNHEUSER-BUSCH INBEV
We had the privilege of hearing Winston Wang give a keynote too. And boy, was that packed with all the right things to say, and just about everything you ever wanted to know about mobile when used in marketing. Winston was like a rapid-fire quote machine. My notes about his keynote ran 20 separate items and honestly, I could write a long blog just about what all he said, and the insights his comments reveal and contain. Also, as already wrote on Twitter when Winston was speaking, I could use a Winston Wang beer quotation at the end of just about every slide I show about mobile marketing, haha, they were all totally the right message and totally up-to-date and so comprehensive they truly covered the whole moblie marketing spectrum. But let me try to summarize it to a few of the best lines and examples.
To start with, a lovely beer quote: Physical social is beer, digital social is mobile; innovation opportunity lies in the middle. Winston also said everyone's attention is going to mobile. Mobile will connect marketing and sales. Mobile is measurable like nothing else before. Mobile amplifies events. Mobile is not just B2C, its C2C (Tomi comment: Cool !!! truly in the spirit of Communities Dominate Brands the book and the origins of this blog). And get this, Winston ended his presentation advising the audience to use 'Tomi Ahonen's 9 unique aspects of mobile' to create winning mobile concepts. Thanks Winston! The beers are on me!
But I'm not done with Winston Wang. Those were selected pearls of his many quotes. What is Annheuser-Busch Inbev, the world's largest beer brewery doing in mobile? Well, as Winston is their Director of Innovation, you can guess its plenty, across all their brands. Like Stella Artois, which has an advergame about pouring the beer correctly (using the sensors of the smartphone). This game is also a virtual tutor/mentor to train the proper speed to pour Stella Artois (which is obviously VERY slow and STEADY to ge the right head on the beer). They have an AR app to find the nearest bars and pubs that serve Stella Artois.
Or how about the Bud Light Sports Fan beer app. It is designed for second screen use (ie simultaneously while watching a live sports game on the TV ie first screen, you pull up the Bud Light Sports Fan on your smartphone or tablet for your second screen experience as you watch the live game). The app poses relevant questions about the live game for fans to react to, giving away prizes for the best answer or best guess. Some questions ask for predictions of game results and game events for that live game. Other questions are trivia about that sport and the teams involved etc. Very engaging.
HOME DEPOT
Yet another brilliant presentation was by Trish Mueller the Chief Marketing Officer of Home Depot, the world's largest tool (and garden furniture) retailer. She gave tons of examples and said that whereas a real bricks-and-mortar superstore of Home Depot can only stock 35,000 items to sell, the mobile phone has an 'endless aisle' and they currently stock 400,000 items for sale on the phone screen. Home Depot has found that more searches already come from mobile phones than traditional PC based internet.
The Home Depot shopping app has several brlliant ideas, including an on-screen measurement tool for measuring bolt sizes, to an Augmented Reality furniture virtual tester, using the cameraphone to place garden furniture into your yard or balcony, to see how it looks and fits. Their app includes the 'talk to the hand' option where shoppers can talk directly to Home Depot advisors rather than sending questions. The Home Depot app has been downloaded 3.5 million times
UPS
UPS the package delivery company has deployed a solution to let consumers decide where the final delivery of the package will take place. They want to deliver only once, to the best address. So if you will be home, thats fine. If you prefer the package delivered to your office, thats fine. If you're at the hospital today because your child is suddenly ill, have the package delivered to the hospital reception, etc... It saves UPS tons of money from not having to make unncessary delivery attempts.
STATS STATS STATS
And we heard a ton of new stats. Many were familiar to my readers and/or nicely quoted my stats, from the 'more mobile phones than toothbrushes' to the 150 times per day stat. But here were new stats for us to now quote in our presentations and articles about mobile marketing:
Time Inc: People check news on their phones 40x per day
MMA: 91% of mobile phone users have their phones 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (ie also sleep with the phones)
The Weather Channel: most mobile users of their service spend more than 1 hour per week on weather news
AT&T: 88% of US consumers watch the 2nd screen (mobile) while watching TV
MMA: 43% of Americans use mobile as their primary search tool
Nielsen: USA has 89 million mobile shoppers
Rovio: Angry Birds has passed 1.7 Billion cumulative downloads
Millenial Media: There are now more mobile phone connections than humans alive
Mondelez: Mobile increases impulse buys inside shops by 18%
MMA: 49% of US consumers have changed their purchase decision inside a store because of mobile
Google: 8 in 10 smartphone shoppers use their phone in the store to help them shop
3Seventy - Brands see a 25 dollar return for every 1 dollar spent on SMS
MMA: Mobile coupons get 10x better redemption rates than eCoupons
MORE MOBILE FIRST COMPANIES
We heard several more companies embracing 'Mobile first' for their digital strategy (ie design for the small screen first, before designing for the old-fashioned PC based legacy internet). Home Depot said they are a mobile first company. JP Morgan Chase bank said you have to have a mobile first strategy. Starbucks says nothing is more important than mobile. Rovio said Angry Birds would not have been possible had Rovio not been a mobile first company. (and its nice to see my thinking from my 2002 book m-Profits now embraced so widely by such a diverse range of giant companies, as the right way forward..)
QUOTES
There were so many good quotes that came from the event. Here is a sampling of my faves:
Geo-fencing is so 2012 - Saatchi's Media Director, Gabriel Chang
Phones have taken the place of the cigarette break - Google Head of Mobile and Social Tim Reis
Mobile is augmented humanity - Google Head of Mobile and Social Tim Reis
Shoppers who use mobile more, buy more - Google Head of Mobile and Social Tim Reis
We want to tell stories across multiple screens - Time Inc Advertising & Sales Manager Cyrus Beagle
There's a severe talent gap in the industry, it all changed in the past 5 years - MMA Managing Director Michael Becker
The science fiction of one-to-one marketing is now a reality - Flurry CEO Simon Khalaf
You can change behavior in malls: with mobile - Flurry CEO Simon Khalaf
Nobody likes banner ads - Rovio VP Advertising Michelle Tolbin
Smartphones are used like a digital swiss army knife - AT&T Digital Media Director Julia Plourde (and Tomi comment - exactly as I predicted in my 2002 book, m-Profits)
Nobody walked into this room carrying a TV set - AT&T Digital Media Director Julia Plourde
SMS AND MMS
This event heard the mantra that the best way to reach your whole audience is SMS text messaging. We had continuously SMS examples and stats (most very familiar to those who follow my writings) but this was very refreshing to me, as in the past there was plenty of the misguided view that one should do a smartphone app for example, rather than use SMS. Now it was a near-unanimous view by all speakers that anyone in the audience had to do SMS first.
And many then also mentioned that the next thing to do after SMS, was MMS. Like Gary Schwartz the author said at the event, if you include purchase uption to a marketing SMS, your response rates shoot up 3-fold. But if you use MMS and include purchase option, compared to basic SMS informational/advertising/branding messages, MMS will get you a 6-fold increase in response rates. Like I say, MMS is the ultimate wet dream for anyone in marketing and advertising, its everything you ever wanted SMS to be, if you are in advertising, marketing or media. No, MMS is not the perfect picture-sharing method for consumer-to-consumer communications (although we can use it for that as well). But MMS is indeed the ultimate brand messaging tool for their marketing communications, and increasingly the MMA Forum speakers held this view too. Very nice to hear.
PIZZA BUTTON
Finally a truly brilliant idea from Dubai. Red Tomato Pizza has deployed a very simple fridge magnet, that includes a GSM chip and data connection to their pizza ordering system. Your fridge magnet looks like a pizza slice, and lets you configure your pizza exactly as you like it, pepperoni or tutti-di-mare or vegetable or extra cheese etc, and when you're ready? Just press the button. Your pizza is delivered in 30 minutes to your door. Just press the button. Gotta love it!
Thats my quick view to the best MMA event yet. If you see an MMA event near your neighborhood, come there and meet the industry leaders and learn about the best ideas in this, the most creative dimension of the best age of innovation, with the most powerful digital platform ever deployed: mobile. And if you want to see my Around the World in 80 Slides survey of mobile marketing outside of the USA, check out my slides of my MMA Forum presentation via Slideshare.
@Tomi: "Rovio: Angry Birds has passed 1.7 Billion cumulative downloads" - unbelievable...
To be honest it is nothing more but 'yet an other ballistic game' but they took it all.
They must know something... :-)
Posted by: zlutor | May 21, 2013 at 12:13 PM
mobile phone 'stores' are just big poker machines. Wild success is simply down to chance. Just another form of casino capitalism.
Whilst I can't argue with the numbers on the penetration of SMS, i find it pretty baffling personally. When I had a mobile phone my first 'marketing SMS' was such a shocking intrusion of a private space that it turned me off the sending (offending) vendor much more than it turned me on to them, and every subsequent message only reinforced that feeling.
Posted by: notzed | May 22, 2013 at 12:55 AM
Hi zlutor and notzed
Good point zlutor. Why is it that they 'must know something'? Rovio went through 51 attempts at a successful game in mobile before Angry Birds, yes 51 failures. They were 'this' close to bankruptcy when they launched Angry Birds and I don't think they would have had a 53rd attempt inside the team anymore. Then AB happened and now they're the most played videogame of all time haha..
notzed - I hear you. Like Brazilian advertising grand-old-man Adelson Xavier says, no other media comes between our mobile phone and our body, ie we dont' read the newspaper between the phone and ourselves. The TV doesn't get between our phone and us, etc. It is the most personal medium yet invented and being so personal, we find advertising abuses on mobile far more intrusive than on any other media - haha, we really don't love ads on ANY media.. But, it must be said, well-executed mobile marketing can be seen as valuable, useful, beneficial and even liked so much, that we ask for more. Don't laugh, this is starting to happen, the advertising industry is learning how to do it. Then it won't be as intrusive as it now seems too often. What I hope to do with this blog, like with my 12 books, is to teach how to do mobile well, not only how to earn money from satisfied returning customers, but how to deliver satisfaction and in the case of mobile advertising and marketing, how to have advertising transcend from being an intrusion to being perceived as valuable content. For that so far, the best tools are SMS and MMS. No longer just my words, now we have increasingly case examples from around the world, and even some measured consumer statistics saying that. But it has to be mobile messages delivered on an 'opt in' basis and targeted and personalized. I personally would love to see ads relating to for example my interests in Formula 1 racing or James Bond. My mother would hate to receive those same ads on either topic haha..
Thank you for the comments
Tomi Ahonen :-)
Posted by: Tomi T Ahonen | May 22, 2013 at 03:11 AM
Hey Tomi.
Fantastic to see you blogging again about 'not Nokia' and media..
SMS AND MMS:
SMS [in my opinion] is all we now need.
WHY?
Because and SMS can contain a link to take any / all interested customers straight to the Internet [the 'soon to be' 3rd ubiquitious 'thing' on all phones besides calling and texting]
Once marketers get their heads around the fact that their brand / product / company MUST have a true mobile website - the rest will be history
SMS -> Customer -> MobileInternet -> Engagement (Rich) -> commerce.
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