Archive for the ‘Mobile and advertising trends’ Category

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It’s nice to see the direct mailer guys switching to our side.

It seems like a no-brainer to anyone who has even studied a day of marketing in their life:  If you can directly target a specific individual at a specific time, you are light years ahead of what is currently being done in advertising with direct mailers.

Direct mailers have been around for many years and I am sure the first man (whoever he may have been) to discover the power of sending communication about a brand or a product to a person’s sacred place of residence directly didn’t realize the impact of the discovery for so many years to come.  And why wouldn’t it be great to send your brand to someones house?

Here is why:  That may have worked in those days when dad owned the house and mom owned the kitchen and mom probably received the mail.  Who receives the mail today?  Dad goes to work, mom goes to work, kids come home sometimes but they definitely don’t check the mail and if they did they would dismiss anything in the mail box because their phone would probably vibrate with a text message in their pocket at that exact moment.

So who are we sending our messages and communications to?  We don’t know, but the direct mail guys wont tell you that.  They will give you some fancy statistics about “between 25-56″ and income level of “30,000-80,000″ and you are supposed to make serious business decisions on those kind of statistics.

We are past those days and we are slowly coming to this realization.  Why would I send a direct mail piece if I can target who I send to and when they may recieve it.  I am talking about mobile marketing and communication with customers on the go.  Michael Becker, vice president of mobile strategy at iLoop stated -“Consider this – the mobile phone number is a unique, personal, identifier,” he said. “One is not simply sending a direct marketing message to someone’s house, email account or place of business when practicing direct mobile marketing. Rather, one, when employing direct mobile marketing practices, is engaging an individual directly, literally, wherever the individual may be in the world” .  iLoop, a mobile company has joined forces with direct mailer Harte-Hanks to offer their clients the advantages of communication via the mobile channel.

We (Plastic The Mobile Agency) like to say that you are solving three very important questions when you pursue mobile initiatives- The Where, The When and The Who….

Posted on April 25th 2009 in Mobile and advertising trends | No Comments »

MMS -Not yet main stream in Canada

An interesting article on Mobile Marketer about a BMW campaign in Germany really caught my attention today.

I read about many different mobile initiatives around the world and this one specifically caught my attention for one specific quote ” We did much more fancy things but we figured out that the more fancy an application is, the less traffic we get,” said Mark Mielau, head of digital media at BMW Germany.  The reason I find this particularly interesting is that in Germany and with the BMW campaign, going back-to-the-basics of mobile is going with an campaign that users MMS and asks the users to interact with multimedia via their mobile phone.  As basic as this may seem to many throughout the world, MMS and multimedia on mobile phones is a new area to Canadians.  Adoption is still low and many mobile users do not yet know how to send or receive MMS communication.

A campaign such as the one by BMW in Germany may not have the desired results in Canada due to the late adoption of MMS.   For us here, going back-to-the-basics is using SMS and texting campaigns.  This can be highly lucrative for marketers if targeted appropriately.  Further, marketers have the ability to build mobile SMS communities so that future loyalty and communication could be routed to customers via their mobile phones.  The use of SMS is more readily understood and adopted than more “Fancy” campaigns using web and mobile applications at the current time.  Mobile web and applications and more “Fancy” mobile initiatives are not off the radar however and in fact they are on the horizon…..it’s just a matter of time before mobile users adopt these technologies and take full advantage of what the new mobile world has to offer.

Posted on April 7th 2009 in Mobile and advertising trends | No Comments »

Palm Pre Mojo SDK Out Now - App store details delayed

Palm Pre has yet to release more information on their verison of the app store and the pricing model behind releasing Palm apps.

However, today they opened up to developers a preview of their Mojo SDK which can be accessed here. If you’ve got some time (approximately an hour) watch this O’Reilly Webcast with Mitch Allen, Palm’s Software CTO, about developing applications with their development kit. Also, they’ve got the first chapter of their webOS available for free. Enjoy.

Posted on April 1st 2009 in Mobile Awards, Mobile and advertising trends, SMS, Uncategorized, Wireless Event, iPhone | No Comments »

Sports embrace mobile, sometimes before other industries

MLB’s New York Yankees have expanded their reach to their consumers and is not running ad-supported SMS alerts.  Users can get news and scores and be updated about their favourite teams on their mobile phones and advertisers get to be right  there to reap the benefits.

Michael Spirito, vice president of business development & digital.  has quoted that “SMS alerts are something that we started doing as a way to provide enhanced value to our customers so that our viewers can get up-to-date scores and news from the Yes Network,”  “It’s an opportunity to extend our brand into the mobile universe, and we’ve seen it grow in popularity over time.

Although this is truly mobile, users need to first sign up online to both opt-in and also select their desired categories.   More and more we are seeing brands and companies bridging web and mobile to get a fully integrated campaign.
What is even more impressive is that as soon as updates are seen on the website, there is a great effort to get them onto SMS and to the subscribers.

Its speaks great deals when we see companies making great efforts to mobilize their contents. It speaks about the future of the mobile industry.

Plastic Mobile Agency is  based out of Toronto, Ontario and we offer brands and companies assistance in developing mobile strategies that suit their target goals.

Posted on March 28th 2009 in Mobile Innovation, Mobile Marketing News, Mobile and advertising trends, Mobile technology | No Comments »

Can we finally define engagement?

Watching the television has somehow become a thing of the past for me.  I don’t have cable television and I am not usually interested in watching anything on TV unless its the talk of the town.

For instance, the Oscars.  I watch the oscars mainly because the rest of the North American world does and I will not be able to keep conversations for at least a week thereafter.  So I watched it this year…but on the internet on some not very legal site.  That is not the interesting part however.  Before I found the live broadcasted show, I ran into an interesting website that was based around the oscars and all people did was post twitter like comments about the oscars.  It was great for me because I hadn’t found the live televised site yet and I was hearing all about the winners, the clothing, the jokes and even the facial expressions.  The part that blew me away was that I even received comments about the ads that were being served.  In some cases, in a given time frame there was more then one ad since the web has no national boundaries and I was likely listening to an American and a Canadian ad being served.

I normally don’t find myself so interested in a particular forum but this was LIVE and it was exactly about the topic I was searching for.   It kept me occupied for at least the better part of an hour and I was so amused that people were in front of her television sets, fully engaged in what they were watching and they felt the need to share.   That was the first moment where I felt that advertising is about to change and in a big way.   We have been hearing all about it, in all the new media events and all the upcoming advertising trends…but this was the first time I truly saw it.

So what is advertising become and what is this change I speak about?  Well for one thing, the meaning of engagement can once and for all be defined.  Those people on that forum were truly engaged with the ads.  In fact so engaged, they felt the need to share it with others.  This is were we are headed and the growth of the mobile smartphone industry is going to take us there even faster.  Twitter-like applications will allow people to share their views about everything and ads will be there and will be ready to be discussed.  Only one challenge comes to mind and its not a  new one but with these trends the challenge is even greater.  The ability for the ads to be heard and to be discussed.  Advertisers will be more pressed to incorporate topics that will draw interest and discussions.  As difficult as this may seem, those that get the formula write will see numbers unparalleled.   Without national boundaries and without the limitations of time and space, an advertisers market becomes none other than the entire world.

Posted on March 2nd 2009 in Mobile and advertising trends | No Comments »