Category: Mobile Marketing

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Verizon and YouTube further doom ad-supported TV

My wife and I love movies. So last night, after watching the Bobby Darin biopic on DVD, Beyond The Sea, my wife was faced with a choice. I had gone to bed, and she could watch television or YouTube.

She chose the latter, because she figured she could view kinescopes of Bobby Darin, to judge how accurately Kevin Spacey depicted the 1950’s crooner. She was right, and YouTube once again rewarded her the way television cannot.

This afternoon we went to a matinee. Arriving early, we whiled away the time before the movie by watching Verizon’s V-Cast streaming video on my cell phone. In the darkened and quiet (pre-trailer) theater, we watched together more 3- to 5-minute eye candy. We chose segments of a favorite fake news program. Once again we were avoiding TV, and in fact circumvented the very ads that help to finance the basic cable programming coming out of my amazing LG 9800.

Bobby Darin on YouTubeThe only limitation to this harmonica-size idiot box is a dearth of interesting programming. But that may soon change.

Verizon and YouTube are reportedly in negotiations over the exclusive distribution of their content to their cell customers. This is exactly the magnitude of “pull” that domestic cell phone providers need to attract a critical mass of American cell phone users to this smallest of screens.

It seems inevitable that very shortly, far more people will be peering into their cell phones instead of at advertising-supported television. Watching the erosion of standard broadcast business models is almost as enthralling as finding on my computer, within minutes, a nearly 50-year-old video recording of Mack The Knife. And soon this idle fun may be portable.

And his teeth were … pearly white.

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With Google for Print it’s all about reach

Last year Google tested their ad auction concept in the print advertising space. Bill Wise in MediaPost had a theory for why this pilot wasn’t a huge success. In a word: “scarcity.”

Google AdWords succeeds because there are only so many people searching for a term on any given day, and therefore only so many ad impressions than can run in front of this audience. It’s a finite supply of ads, and one that is perishable from one day to the next. Auctions are a perfect way for Google to optimize ad prices.

But printed publications are different. If a newspaper or magazine sells more ads, they can print more pages to accommodate those ads. (Do you remember how fat Business 2.0 was in the heady months before the Dot Com Bust?)

Google failed last year, but they aren’t giving up. They’ve just announced a deal that will include placement of select Google AdWords participants in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune and many more. Later in this test they plan to expand into weekly news magazines.

It fascinates me that they are looking at getting involved in the very medium whose circulations they are helping to shrink. In the last six months the average circulation figures of daily newspapers have fallen another 2.8 percent, according to Dan Mitchell of the NY Times. True, he tries to put a positive spin on this news, citing a statistic that if you factor in online versions of the publications, readership is actually up significantly. But that actually helps to make my point: Why isn’t Google satisfied with running their ads on the fastest growing portion of the news business?

I can only think it’s reach. And I don’t mean just readers. I’m thinking portability.

Until this county develops a taste for news delivered to a cell phone or PDA, ink on paper is still the most reliable way to follow Americans into the many nooks and crannies of their day.

I’m only half joking when I speculate that Google may have realized that their AdWords were doing wonderfully in the American office and den, but were failing miserably in the bathroom.

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The odds are stacked against this podcast advertising pioneer

I admire what Podbridge is attempting to do. They seem to have taken the lead in monetizing podcasts. I doubt they will succeed, though, unless other conditions change and change fast. Podbridge has created a podcasting advertising network, one that promises to match audio ads to podcasts that you download via iTunes (and, eventually, elsewhere).

Ads would be fed to you randomly along with podcast content. The ads, which would be dynamically stitched onto the podcasts, are served up based on your age, gender and location (such as ZIP code). Nice idea, but …

My skepticism has to do with whether people will volunteer this information (age, gender, location) to receive something that they are currently accustomed to receiving for free, and mostly free of ads.

Much more logical (but logistically challenging) is to follow the ad model that Podbridge claims to be mimicking — that of magazine advertising.

In this alternative, each major podcast producer would receive ad insertions and interweave those ads with their content. This wouldn’t provide the flexibility and customization of regional-, age- and gender-based targeting, but it would talk to people based on their enthusiasms. For instance, DVD rental ads would be placed on podcasts such as Filmspotting (as they are now, for PeerFlix).

These ads could still include Pay-Per-Call ads supported by Ingenio, as Podbridge is currently planning. It’s a brilliant use of this phone-based ad concept, which was first introduced and tested in limited Yahoo sponsored listings.

This alternate business model also allows for the strength of product placement, something that started with the early days of radio and television, and has found a new life as a way for advertisers to get their products in front of viewers who use DVRs to blaze past television progamming’s commercials.

True, this lack of scalability makes it a less-profitable business model, since podcasts are typically today such a Long Tail phenomenon.

But the dearth of consumers willing to opt-in to receive ads makes the Podbridge concept fatally flawed in my opinion. At least until there is a critical mass of premium content podcasters who will only distribute their product with Podbridge-provided advertising. That day is a long way off.

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Another mobile marketing paradigm shift: Beaming Zune songs

A couple of days ago Microsoft officially entered the portable media player marketplace. I’m surprised and impressed with their entry. Microsoft has launched the Zune, an iPod-like device with an innovation that marketing technology professionals should watch closely.

The feature that I find so exciting is its ability to do something that Palm users would refer to as “beaming.” What’s that? Here’s a scenario, overheard from the floor of some idealized trade show, where beaming could occur, maybe:

“Good to meet you, Mr. Jones. Say! I see you have a Palm organizer as well. Why don’t we point them at each other and beam each other our business cards?”

This was always far better in theory than in practice. It required these two people to both possess all of these things:

  1. A Palm-based device
  2. A properly configured “business card” entry in their Contacts list
  3. An infrared or Bluetooth port that’s switched on
  4. The habit of exchanging electronic cards in this manner
  5. And let’s not forget a thick skin for public ridicule, since you’ve now told the world that you’re a geek

As for the all-important #4, I’m willing to go out on a limb and say no one has ever developed such a habit anywhere outside of the fevered dreams Palm executives.

And it’s not technology holding us back. It’s a shift in paradigm and a habit that is best fostered when you’re far away from business associates.

So beaming is mostly dead. But Microsoft, of all companies, may help it become downright hip. They may be on the verge of training us to use a new marketing medium by making exchanging songs a social experience.

Bear with me a moment: What if your organizer was also your phone, and it also played music files, and instead of capturing a salesperson’s contact information on a tradeshow floor, you were getting far more valuable information. The information would include this person’s name and other facts, but it would also contain, say, a brief audio narrative about the product you’re viewing on the tradeshow floor, or some lavishly produced piece of audio branding. Perhaps it would even give you an offer that would drive you back to a web site when you return to the office.

If the place you’re in is an art gallery or pre-auction exhibit, this locally-shared podcast would describe the items up for sale or bid. It could even provide narratives on the people across the table from you, who you’re about to meet at a singles “speed-dating” event. The applications for “local-casts” are many and promising. And because we’ll already be listening to our portable device for our musical entertainment during our commute or workout at the gym, there will be no stigma associated with this new type of Bluetooth beaming.

This would require a paradigm shift. But it’s not as big or remote as you might think. And for those who say this won’t work because the Zune is not a cell phone, I only need to remind you that Bill Gates and others in Microsoft are themselves predicting that we will someday be listening to our downloaded music on our phones. At the product launch, Microsoft executives were telling reporters that a Zune phone is already part of the company’s plans for the product line.

As James L. McQuivey, a Boston University technology expert put it, “The fun has just begun.” So have the business possibilities.

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Mobile marketing of tomorrow is beyond anything you can imagine

Here’s another long post, but I suspect you’ll find it worth the ride. It will paint a picture of what mobile marketing will be like, much sooner than you may think. Actually, it will paint a picture of what person-to-person retail (as opposed to digital retail) will be like, because mobile devices will merely be the means that will take us to this fascinating future.

If you’re a new reader, I need to explain why I write this thing. I strive not to be part of the echo chamber that is current public discourse. By echo chamber, I mean the repetition of the same hot concept or idea until it starts to sound credible. Many occupational blogs (as opposed to recreational blogs), merely convey the industry “news” of the day. Sometimes that’s worthwhile. But other times, the repetition contributes to a pattern of half-baked ideas taking on more significance than they deserve.

My hope is to make sense of what’s happening or about to happen in marketing technology — and occasionally to pass along a juicy tip or two that you can use right now. Rishad Tobaccowala, chief innovation officer of Publicis, put it well. He’s with one of the world’s biggest advertising groups. Tobaccowala was quoted in The Economist as saying, “All of us have been classically trained, and now we’re in a jazz age.”

We’re all riffing, my friend, and I’m hoping this blog will help keep the improvisation going.

Let me steer us back from that digression. I mentioned The Economist, which you must understand is not just a magazine about economics. Although, to use a famous Seinfeld quote, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” On the contrary. Living, breathing economics is much like living, breathing history. By that I mean the following:

  • Economics bears no resemblance to what most of us were exposed to in school
  • Economics is extremely helpful in making sense of this furiously changing world

A case in point is the mundane and exciting observations of economist Tim Harford. In his recent book, The Undercover Economist, he sets us straight about Starbucks. We think they are larger and more powerful than they are because they have a location on every corner of major cities — or so it seems. He uses the example of how you cannot pass into or out of Washington D.C.’s Metro Station without encountering at least one Starbucks.

Yet that is proof not of the seductive draw of their products, but of the weak gravitational pull that they exert. By contrast, Mr. Harford points out that there is only one Washington D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles. If you have a problem with your driver’s license, you must go there and suffer. And people do. They must.

That’s power. That’s scarcity! Conversely, Starbucks knows that the majority of coffee drinkers are quite fickle about where they buy their coffee. It just so happens that Starbucks is big enough to buy up those scarce good locations so that they consistently arrive in our faces when we round the next corner.

The scarcity is not in the lattes and cappuccinos, but in the prime locations from which they are proffered. This is why, he asserts, Starbucks is not nearly as wealthy, in relative terms, as the merchants of those selling opportunities — namely, the landlords who rent to Starbucks and the property owners and brokers who sell to Starbucks. A validation of this theory can be found in a recent New York Times article about the proliferation of bank branches and the property boomlet that this industry expansion has ignited.

Banks, too, know that they are selling a near-commodity. And so it goes: the tyranny of location, location, location.

Imagine if these industry leaders could say, “To hell with these physical locations. We’re stuck in place while our customers travel around the city. That’s just dumb!” Or more likely, what if this declaration was from non-leaders in their industries? After all, the leaders in gourmet coffees and financial services have much invested in their physical brand. It stands to reason that it is the upstart competitors who will stage the more nimble attacks, just as small bands of guerrilla-fighting American Revolution soldiers sprung out of the bushes to fight and ultimately defeat the legions of lockstep Redcoats.

But how will this assault be staged? I’m suggesting that there will someday be a mobile army of coffee merchants and bank branches. These establishments on wheels will find their customers around the next corner because they will see them coming from ever-changing maps of movements and probabilities.

Why maintain a brand address, after all, when you’ve trained your customers to expect you to show up exactly where and when they need you? Of course, this data will come from the only possession other than our wallets that we dare not leave home without (and soon enough those two will merge into one!). I’m speaking of course of the cell phone.

Already, privacy-protected surveillance is being done on a city-wide scale. You can read of several such studies on the following MIT web site, but I’m going to quote from one such study, about a “realtime” Rome, Italy:

In the visualizations of Real Time Rome we synthesize data from various real-time networks to understand patterns of daily life in Rome. We interpolate the aggregate mobility of people according to their mobile phone usage and visualize it synchronously with the flux of public transit, pedestrians, and vehicular traffic.

By overlaying mobility information on geographic and socio-economic references of Rome we unveil the relationships between fixed and fluid urban elements. These real-time maps help us understand how neighborhoods are used in the course of a day, how the distribution of buses and taxis correlates with densities of people, how goods and services are distributed in the city, or how different social groups, such as tourists and residents, inhabit the city. With the resulting visualizations users can interpret and react to the shifting urban environment.

How cool is that?

When I first saw these maps, which surge and pulse with life, I thought they were interesting but were like many technologies — a solution in search of a problem. Now I think I’ve found the problem: Taking power from the owners and renters of real estate and putting them in the hands of retailers. And in doing so, making life for their customers easier and more pleasant.

I’d love to go on and address the objections that I’m sure you have about privacy, and the ability to move branch locations through congested urban streets. Those answers will have to wait (unless you’d care to ask me in the Comments area — in which case I’ll be much obliged). But for now, I’ll leave you with this thought:

If a retailer …

  • Analyzed aggregate cell phone data about your movements as well as everyone else’s who want the same services as you, and …
  • Anticipated through statistical means where to locate itself to fulfill those needs, and …
  • Alerted you through that same cell phone where they are in real time (e.g., “We’re two blocks away — care for your favorite beverage?”) …

Would you choose instead to go out of your way, back to those place-bound merchants you visit now?

I suspect that this consumer choice is quickly on its way.