ApolloBravo’s Mobile + Social Blog

Mobile Marketing Watch: Remarkable but true, the growth of mobile marketing in Africa and Asia have outpaced the growth (and, mostly, acceptance) of mobile marketing in the United Kingdom.

But according to a recent report from the European Interactive Advertising Association, an accelerating number of UK marketers are now “including the mobile platform in their advertising initiatives.”

The new found interest, in seems, spans a broad landscape of industries that are becoming involved with mobile advertising (including the automotive and financial services sector).

Jack Marshall of ClickZ speculated that “the fact UK mobile users receive a handset upgrade when renewing their service plans may increase usage of smartphones, which in turn could eventually help to push mobile marketing to a tipping point.”

For now, the numbers don’t lie. UK firms running mobile banner ad campaigns rose by 45% in March if this year compared with six months previously. Read More

The British are Coming… to Mobile Marketing! : Mobile Marketing Watch – The Pulse Of The Mobile Marketing Community.

May 28, 2009 Jim Beam uses mobile to introduce new Red Stag bourbon
Mobile Marketer

Kid Rock’s lovin the cherry bourbon

Beam Global Spirits & Wine Inc. is using mobile as part of a multichannel effort to promote its new cherry-infused bourbon called Red Stag by Jim Beam.

The mobile aspect of the campaign consists of a text-to-win sweepstakes called “Call of the Wild.” Consumers are asked to text keyword RS and their email address to short code 73637. Consumers who opt in to the sweepstakes via text will receive an email invitation to join The Herd, a database of names for future marketing messages from Red Stag.

“Red Stag is not your father’s bourbon,” said Brian Gallagher, manager of sponsorship marketing for Beam Global, Deerfield, IL. “It provides a fresh, contemporary taste that appeals to both longtime Jim Beam fans and new consumers who may not have previously considered the bourbon category.

“We are aiming to extend and deepen the brand’s relevance to males of legal purchase age with contemporary executions and calls-to-action,” he said. “The mobile and interactive focus of this campaign – entering the “Call of the Wild” sweepstakes through mobile text messages – is a way to talk to these consumers in their language and in their environments.”

Red Stag by Jim Beam uses an artisanal infusion process to combine four-year-old Jim Bean Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey with natural black cherry flavors.

The Call of the Wild sweepstakes will grant one winner and three friends an all-access weekend to see Kid Rock perform live in Las Vegas, among other prizes. The sweepstakes runs from July 6 to Aug. 31. Consumers can also enter the sweepstakes at http://www.jimbeam.com, as well as on Facebook through the Red Stag and Jim Beam fan pages.

“The sweepstakes is open to and unites all Jim Beam and Kid Rock fans of legal purchase age,” Mr. Gallagher said. “A different breed of Bourbon and a different breed of rock star – there’s no better match.”

Red Stag will also be the headline sponsor of Kid Rock’s 2009 Rock ‘N’ Rebels Tour, which will hit 25 cities nationwide this summer.

Fifty cents from every ticket sold for the concert tour will be donated to Operation Homefront, a nonprofit that provides assistance to U.S. military veterans returning home to their families.

Through the support of Operation Homefront, Kid Rock and Red Stag will help fund emergency aid, moving assistance and care packages in local chapters throughout the country. Read more http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/news/messaging/3349.html

By Justin Smith

More brands are engaging with Facebook’s 150 million users through Facebook advertising solutions and the Facebook Platform, patterns of best practices are emerging for brands in different verticals.  Last week, Inside Facebook spoke with Dave Eisenberg, VP of Marketing at Bonobos, about the ways the specialty pants retailer is reaching new customers on Facebook.

Today, we turn our attention to the restaurant industry and Papa John’s Pizza. Inside Facebook recently sat down with Bob Ford, Papa John’s Director of Online Marketing, about the ways the pizza restaurant chain is reaching customers on Facebook.

Thanks for your time Bob. Why did Papa John’s decide to get involved on Facebook?

We’ve obviously been tracking social networks for a number of years now, but we’ve been looking for opportunity that is right for our brand, and Facebook’s engagement ads made sense to me and to Papa John’s. Facebook has actually initially reached out to us three years ago, but this is the first one we felt like we were ready to try.

Before we built our Facebook Page, there were other Papa John’s Facebook Pages out there.  They had a limited number of fans, but when you looked and saw something that was put up by someone who was literally just a fan, it became intriguing to us. So we dedicated the time to put together our Facebook Page, working closely with Facebook to design it in a way that the audience is looking for.

Who was your campaign targeted at and how did it work?

Facebook is very different today in terms of who their audience is even compared to just a couple years ago. We were really looking for a way to feature some of our new features like mobile ordering, and the 15-24 audience is a great fit for that.

We did two projects with Facebook.  First, in November of last year, we did our engagement ad where we drove people to become a fan of our Facebook Page. Fans were notified on three different dates via an Update from the Papa John’s Page, and were then directed to the Papa John’s site to receive their promotional code for the pizza.

We added 125,000 fans within a day, that number has grown to over 200,000 today.  We’re very pleased with how many fans we’ve gained, and we’re examining ways we can promote it more. We look at our Facebook page almost as an extension of our website, and we have more campaigns coming up soon in the next 6 moths.

See the full article

Facbookconnect.com

ApolloBravo is now offering a custom iPhone, iPod Touch – based streaming audio player application.

Radio stations that want a presence on iPods and iPhones need this application, just a one step download from your station’s home page. It can also be delivered via SMS for stations on our mobile Snd2Phone platform.

The station branded application currently supports MP3 and AAC streams and will display embedded meta data with album art, artist and song title. Multiple stream sources are supported, along with support for varying levels of audio quality. The app also provides a mini web-browser, allowing browsing of station’s web page while still listening to the audio stream.

Apple’s App store has more than 15,000 apps and has recorded more than 500 million downloads since its launch last summer. “They are becoming the 800-pound guerrilla in the room. No one can catch them, not even Google,” said Yankee Group Analyst Josh Martin. “The product is finished and finalized and the other manufacturers still have to figure it out…If you want to make money today, you need an app for the iPhone.”

ApolloBravo will include player customization, Apple Store approvals, iStream marketing consultation, SMS download link delivery and station website integration. Please contact us for a price quote.

For more information, please contact Brad Beckstrom.
ApolloBravo 703-835-9688 Extension 801
www.apollobravo.com

Focus on the mobile user, and all else will follow

by Vic Gundotra, Vice President of Engineering for Google’s mobile and developer products. (Prior to Google, he spent 15 years at Microsoft, most recently as their GM of Platform Evangelism.

Today the mobile industry finds itself in a unique position to do right by its users:

Worldwide phone penetration continues to climb at a break-neck pace, with over 4 billion mobile subscribers at last count.¹ (In comparison, the PC industry is forecasted to see its sharpest unit decline in history.²) Prevailing economic conditions will accelerate this trend, as users consolidate pricey communication services into cost-effective, all-in-one mobile devices.³ And for the first time ever, half of all new connections to the internet will come from a phone in 2009.⁴

Google’s mobile traffic reflects these milestones — having quintupled since 2007⁵ — and it underscores users’ appetite for mobile data services. But as a community of operators, device manufacturers and software providers, we continue to get in their way. In short, and as a general rule, we make it too costly, too unfamiliar, and too difficult to do anything beyond voice calls.

In reply I offer up three suggestions: simpler data plans, better web browsers, and a smoother on-device experience. And in each case I’ll use Google traffic numbers as a proxy for total internet usage and user happiness.

Disclaimer: As a Google employee using internal data to carry the weight of this article, I owe it to the reader to lay bare my economic incentives: the company I work for has a financial interest in the broad and sweeping adoption of the Internet-as-we-know-it. Indeed, more internet users leads to increased web usage, which often leads to more Google searches and downstream ad clicks. I use Google data because it’s what I know best, and because it reinforces my industry-facing remarks, but make no mistake: I’m fundamentally interested in what’s good for the mobile internet. It just so happens that this is also good for Google. With that said, I hope you’ll find value in the words and data that follow.

Flat is the new phat

Consider MetroPCS, a regional carrier in the United States with just over 5 million subscribers on their 2.5G CDMA network. Over the past year, their Google search volume grew over 2.5x more quickly than another global carrier with 10 times as many users, and a 3G network.⁶

Metro’s “secret” is a free month of web access at signup, with the option of flat-rate, unlimited data thereafter.⁷ As a result nearly half of Metro’s subscribers use the web on a regular basis. (It’s also worth mentioning that MetroPCS was recently recognized for excellence in customer satisfaction.⁸)

In contrast, many operators subject users to a labyrinthine set of data options, from pay-as-you-go to daily caps with significant overage charges. Now, can you imagine paying your at-home internet provider for every page load? Or needing to know the size of a website before visiting it? Or managing your monthly download quota across your entire household? It’s simply not practical, and it’s all the same internet, so why do we treat mobile users as second-class citizens? Case and point: my colleague’s January phone bill contained 27 pages of itemized data charges, spelled out in excruciating detail.⁹

Unless we declare flat the new phat — and soon — I fear Occam will do something terrible with his razor.

They want it all, they want it now

Users “get” the web, and they’ve known for over 10 years that the browser is the thing that takes you there. Likewise, more and more of today’s killer applications are the Amazons and Facebooks of the world, not software that you download to a local machine. So it should come as no surprise that mobile users want phones (and browsers) that put a fully-featured internet in their pocket.

For example: the availability of a modern web browser explains why iPhone and Android users — just 13% of the high-end market¹⁰ — represent nearly 50% of Google’s smartphone traffic worldwide.¹¹

Similarly, users of the T-Mobile G1 and its newer WebKit browser search Google 20 times more often than Nokia Series 60 users.¹²

Both data indicate that it’s about usage — not just units — and this trend will continue unabated with more efficient JavaScript engines, and more sophisticated HTML5-compliant browsers.

The simple truth is that mobile users have wanted fast and full web access all along. Consider two quick facts about Google search behavior: the “tail” of PC and iPhone queries is significantly longer than that of feature phone queries;

see the full article in tech crunch Follow the Mobile User.

Contact ApolloBravo about our SMS Platofrm with full mobile web link integration.

Finally a mobile shopping survey done by someone other than a mobile ad network. See the impressive results from this PriceGrabber survey

Though it may come as no surprise, mobile internet adoption and overall usage is still steadily increasing.  A survey conducted by PriceGrabber.com outlines some new trends in mobile Internet shopping and purchasing behaviors in its new “Consumer Behavior” report dubbed “Mobile Internet Shopping Trends.”

The online shopping portal conducted the survey in March which included 3,305 online consumers with mobile phones in the U.S.  The survey concluded that online consumers have made considerable progress in Web-enabled phone adoption and mobile Internet usage, especially in relation to shopping via mobile devices.

The survey proved that online shoppers are now increasingly becoming mobile Internet shoppers using their Web-enabled phones to maximum advantage.  Mobile devices help them purchase online, compare prices and also research product details and specifications.  Among them, 58 percent have purchased digital content for their phones, 51 percent have bought consumer electronics and 37 percent computers, besides similar numbers on books and clothing.

Interestingly enough, more than half of the online consumers polled (58 percent) owned a mobile phone with Internet connectivity.  Among the consumers with Web-enabled phones, 21 percent had a smartphone, 8 percent owned an iPhone and 29 percent owned some other type of Web-enabled phone.  As the market saturation grows steadily for Web-enabled devices and smartphones in particular, mobile Internet usage will obviously spike.  So to will mobile shopping services such as PriceGrabber which is no doubt positioning itself for a surge in mobile-based shopping, research and price comparisons.

Posted by justin on May 5, 2009 in In The News, Mobile Shopping, mobilemarketingwatch.com