Mobile Marketing Issue 12

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ISSUE 12 • DECEMBER 2012

News | Views | Analysis

BREAKING RECORDS 7digital CEO & co-founder Ben Drury on taking music to the mobile industry

AWARDS SPECIAL

Celebrating the mobile industry’s stellar year

THE 4TH ELEMENT What the dawn of 4G in the UK means for mobile marketing

Text turns 20 After 20 years of SMS, we chart its history and its future

PLUS: Influence Marketing • MAN CITY on mobile • EXPERT OPINION & ADVICE


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DECEMBER 2012 Welcome to the final issue of Mobile Marketing for 2012, and as is customary for our December issue, this is an Awards special, with 13 pages (starting on p.21) devoted to showcasing the very best that the mobile marketing business has to offer. This has been a stellar Awards program, with a record number of entries, and more global brands involved than last year. Most importantly, we’ve seen some truly great work, evidenced by figures that show just how effective the winning entries were in meeting their objectives. If our Awards are worth getting excited about, then surely so too is the launch of 4G services in the UK, initially through Everything Everywhere’s EE brand. Early reports suggest that the promised download speeds are achievable, if not always achieved, and we can’t wait to see how brands and their mobile teams plan to harness the power of 4G in their mobile marketing activities. You can read all about this brave new dawn for mobile on p.6. So much for the new, what of the old? After 20 years on the scene, SMS shows no signs of going anywhere, and while some brands are dismissive of its appeal in these days of apps and Augmented Reality, many others understand that it still has immense power as a way of reaching consumers. Starting on p.12, we look back at the history of SMS and ask what sort of future it might have. Also in this issue, Rob Thurner from the Mobile Training Academy tries to make sense of the murky world of mobile payments (p.36), Helen Keegan offers an insight into the judging process for our Awards (p.50), and Russell Buckley delves into the world of influence marketing (p.19). If you’re reading this hot off the press, think of the issue as an early Christmas cracker. In any case, we wish you an exciting and prosperous new year – and look forward to seeing many of you at Mobile World Congress in February. If 2012 in mobile is anything to go by, 2013 should be a corker. David Murphy Editorial director

CONTENTS

CONTENTS COVER STORY

BUSINESS MODELS

16 7digital changes the record Ben Drury, CEO and co-founder at digital music platform 7digital, explores the relationship between music and mobile

thought leadership

5 Viewpoint Manchester City FC head of digital Russell Stopford on mobile tactics at the Premiership champions

19 Russell Buckley on… … how influence marketing is the new frontier for forward-thinking brands

50 Off-deck Helen Keegan’s formula for success at the Effective Mobile Marketing Awards

34 iPresent and correct We meet Compsoft – the firm behind sales presentation app iPresent

41 Infobip – heads in the cloud Infobip CEO Silvio Kutic explains his firm’s mobile engagement platform

42 Tapping TV on mobile Harnessing the potential of mobile TV ads, with Tafi Media’s Dmitry Filippov

47 Upwardly mobile Mobile recruitment specialist Propel advises on the issue of staff retention

BEST PRACTICE

REAL WORLD

6 LTE there be light Super-fast 4G internet has finally hit UK shores – we investigate what it means for mobile advertising and marketing

12 Text turns 20 From humble beginnings, it’s fair to say the SMS has caught on. We chart text’s history and look at its future

21 Celebrating excellence In mobile marketing All the winners from Mobile Marketing’s prestigious awards ceremony revealed

36 Making payments Rob Thurner, lead trainer at the Mobile Training Academy, explores the mobile payments landscape

44 Trend setting The usability experts at SimpleUsability assess trends in mobile fashion retail

ISSUE 12 • DECEMBER 2012

News | Views | ANAlysis

BREAKING RECORDS 7digital CEO & co-founder Ben Drury on taking music to the mobile industry

AWARDS SPECIAL

Celebrating the mobile industry’s stellar year

THE 4TH ELEMENT What the dawn of 4G in the UK means for mobile marketing

TExT TurNs 20 After 20 years of SMS, we chart its history and its future

Subscribe today and guarantee your copy If you want to be sure of receiving your copy of the print edition of Mobile Marketing four times a year, you can subscribe today to go on our controlled circulation list. It costs just £30 (UK); or £40 (rest of the world). To take out a subscription, just send an email to: subscriptions@mobilemarketingmagazine.com and we’ll respond telling you what you need to do.

PlUs: InflUEnCE MArKEtInG • MAn CItY On MOBIlE • EXPErt OPInIOn & ADVICE

Editorial director: David Murphy – david.murphy@mobilemarketingmagazine.com +44 (0) 7976 927062 Commercial director: John Owen – john.owen@mobilemarketingmagazine.com +44 (0) 7769 674824 Business development manager: Richard Partridge – richard.partridge@mobilemarketingmagazine.com Event sales director: Shelley Dowsett – shelley.dowsett@mobilemarketingmagazine.com Sales executive: Lisa Slavin – lisa.slavin@mobilemarketingmagazine.com Editor: Andy Penfold – andy.penfold@mobilemarketingmagazine.com Designer: Drew Geary – drew.geary@mobilemarketingmagazine.com Online editor: Alex Spencer – alex.spencer@mobilemarketingmagazine.com Reporter: Kirsty Styles – kirtsty.styles@mobilemarketingmagazine.com Contributors: Russell Buckley, George Cole, Lowri Davies, Tim Green, Helen Keegan Print: Advent Print Group info@advent-colour.co.uk Special thanks this issue to: Jo Murphy, Rowan Chambers, Rob Thurner For a paid subscription please email: subscriptions@mobilemarketingmagazine.com One Year Subscription Rates – UK: £30.00; ROW: £40.00 Mobile Marketing is published by Dot Media Ltd., 114-116 Curtain Road, London EC2A 3AH. www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com



DECEMBER 2012

thought leadership

VIEWPOINT Russell Stopford, Manchester City FC

The Premier League champions are harnessing the mobile web to engage fans around the world. Russell Stopford, Manchester City FC’s head of digital, explains The past few months have been busy in mobile for us at Manchester City, as we become increasingly active in this broad and deep sector of digital media. I have been keen to promote this activity because of the pace at which the world is ‘going mobile’; and because of the number of requests from fans relating to getting more of our content via their most personal digital device – their phone.

Optimised mobile site Moving rapidly, we’ve worked in parallel to define a robust mobile and tablet strategy and a mobile specific multichannel plan which includes the recently-launched optimised website. Now, our fans can go to mcfc. co.uk wherever they are in the world (very nearly), with whichever handset and browser they choose to use, to find our multi-award winning-website in a mode tailored to that particular device. It’s a small yet complex next step for the club following our (also award-winning) iPhone app, but it’s a step that’s very much in the right direction, as it now means we can reach a very high percentage of our global mobile audience. So what next? Our growing fanbase in MENA has seen us become one of the leading providers of digital sports content in the region,

‘It’s actually innovating how we innovate in order to not just keep up, but set the pace’

leading the way in social, video, and the web. We need to reap the benefits, taking the same code base used in our mobile site, reconfigured for our Arabic audience. Again we’re tailoring the experience to the fans, which means a flexible approach to delivering these assets. For us, responsive design is not just about different screen sizes and browser capabilities. And saying “it’s in HTML 5” is not the answer to creating a service that works when reading stories right to left, or using completely different characters and language scripts. Pictures are pretty universal, thankfully, in terms of territory and language localisation.

Keeping up Considering that all of this head-scratching complexity is just within the world of the web seen from a distinctly smart-ish phone perspective, then it can seem utterly perplexing for the average club, team, company or brand to figure out how to approach a global mobile strategy. There are the competing app stores for iOS and Android to factor

in, with their different versions and backwards compatibility; regional differences in user behaviours and adoption rates; variations in media business model and the inconsistencies in the consumers’ propensity to purchase via mobile across the globe. The industry develops at a seemingly ever-increasing rate and keeping up can be a challenge.

Focused on innovation At City, we’re focused on innovation for the delivery of optimum experiences and services for the fans – I guess few leading sports brands would choose to argue with that. In the digital realm, it isn’t innovation for innovation’s sake. It’s actually innovating how we innovate in order to not just keep up, but set the pace and be smarter about how we deliver these experiences across all of these digital devices that people use. Mobile is one concentric circle in a shared digital matrix and the complexity multiplies when delivering to all the other channels – social, broadcast, connected TV, games, print, and online. When you consider how current football consumption via mobile is a mere fraction of overall digital and media viewing, and yet will be the dominant secondary channel after TV by 2014, then it makes a great deal of sense, in our view, to be making these small steps today. MM

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DECEMBER 2012

LTE THERE BE Light 4G, aka LTE (Long Term Evolution), is now live in the UK, promising data speeds five times faster than 3G. Can it make mobile advertising go faster too? Tim Green reports‌

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DECEMBER 2012

The telco boss steps up to the podium and excitedly informs the audience of a revolution in mobile connectivity. “This is the turning point for mobile internet,” he says. “It happens now. Users will finally be able to access the internet for a tenth of the cost of (doing so from) a PC.” But this is not September 2012, and it’s not Olaf Swantee, CEO at EE, unveiling the UK’s first LTE/4G network. No, this is April 2000 and it’s BT

Cellnet managing director Peter Erskine, announcing the launch of WAP – a launch that would be followed by one of the most embarrassing and misleading ad campaigns of all time. Readers with long memories will cringe as they recall invitations to ‘Surf the BT Cellnet’ on 2G networks and tiny mono screens. And you might remember similarly breathless hype around the launch of 3G by Vodafone in 2005. Though UMTS improved things a little, a ‘3G’ symbol flashing on the corner of your smartphone is still enough to illicit groans of frustration when trying to access the most basic of mobile-optimised web pages. The point is that the operators have promised super fast mobile broadband before, and consistently failed to deliver. It’s still possible, in London in 2012, to pay richly for data access and yet be unable to reliably check emails.

Why should 4G be any different? Well, this time the experience is demonstrably better, as many live trials have shown. EE is pitching 4G as five times faster than 3G and should have 16 major UK cities covered by the end of 2012 (see EE 4G factfile, p8). Of course, for the next few months, EE and its 25m customers will have the market to themselves. But by May 2013, Vodafone, O2 and 3 UK will be able to launch their own 4G services – and in the meantime, they are racing to install the latest versions of 3G, which they argue are just as fast. It’s in the interest of all these operators to proclaim the transformation that LTE will bring for mobile comms for UK consumers and businesses. After all, they have serious investment to recoup. Jason Rees, director of new business at EE, has no doubts about the long-term impact of 4G, which he believes will revolve around the personalisation of communications.

REAL WORLD

‘4G will transform video on mobile and make pre-roll video advertising a viable market at last’ Mark Slade, CEO, 4th Screen

He says: “I think consumers are starting to see payments and advertising on a phone as hygiene factors. They’re now looking for mobile services that deliver more value and more personalisation – and that’s where 4G can make a difference. “4G opens up the mobile to video streaming and other rich experiences, and to merging these experiences with data based on browsing behaviour, geolocation, preferences and so on. When you bring all this together with messaging channels like SMS and MMS, you’re creating more than just ‘dumb push’, and moving into a genuinely personalised medium.” Rees believes it’s too early to give live examples of these kinds of services, but it’s clear that EE is doing more than just

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DECEMBER 2012

EE 4G factfile Everything you need to know about Everything Everywhere’s 4G launch

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cities 4G Service will be available in UK by Christmas: London, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Derby, Glasgow, Hull, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Sheffield, and Southampton

2,000 98 10,000

Number of square miles 4g coverage will expand BY every month

per cent of the population due to be covered by the end of 2014

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staff members EE has trained to be experts in 4G via 700 newly branded EE stores

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providing similar functionality in store so that retailers can provide immersive information about their products. EE’s excitement is shared, to a degree, by the mobile advertising community. This is hardly surprising, given the rising consumer interest in rich media ads and the higher clickthrough rates they deliver for brands.

Getting rich This much was clear from recent Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) stats, which show that UK mobile ad revenue hit £181m for the first half of 2012. Within that, display banners and text ads contributed £41m, of which 20 per cent was rich media. Like for like in 2011, rich media was 18 per cent of a display market worth just £22.5m. And this market is only going

to boom. Indeed, adsmobi and MobileSquared predict that the UK mobile advertising market will be worth around $1bn (£629m) by the end of 2016, with rich media a feature of all campaigns. The company believes mobile video advertising across EMEA will be worth close to $4bn. Mark Slade, CEO of premium ad network 4th Screen, reckons video will be the flagwaver for what rich media can do. “4G will transform video on mobile and make pre-roll video advertising a viable market at last,” he says. “I’ve no doubt that this will really drive all kinds of mobile advertising because consumers understand it – and it’s where the money is.” While video may be an obvious medium for highbandwidth advertising, there’s much more to rich media than re-purposed movie trailers.


DECEMBER 2012

Specialist rich media advertising firms such as Medialets are already delivering complex products that incorporate video, audio and interactive elements, while blurring the boundaries between what is advertising and what is content. One of its best-known campaigns was an HTML5 ad with Ralph Lauren that ran on the The New York Times iPad app. The ad was actually a multi-page, full-screen magazine, with a ‘catalogue’

of products and interactive elements, including videos. It also had a shopping cart built directly in, so users could purchase direct from it, without leaving the ad format.

Full experience Medialets has just launched a UK campaign for Autotrader based on the same format. It’s a campaign for Autotrader’s Ignition iPad app that lets users browse, read and purchase the product entirely ‘inside’ an ad. At present, Medialets’ plat-

EE takes 4G to the movies Launch of EE Film highlights what 4G can do

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n order to highlight what 4G can do, Everything Everywhere created EE Film. The network has some previous in movies (it owns Orange and therefore Orange Wednesdays), so it has re-vamped the two-for-one cinema promotion to put ticketing, listings, trailers, and film downloads or streaming in one place. The Film Store offers a choice of more than 700 films that EE customers can watch on mobile or PC, with ‘pause and play’ functionality. EE is offering a free film a week to watch until February 2013.

form detects whether a user is on wi-fi or 3G and adjusts the ad accordingly. Not surprisingly, wi-fi users get a richer experience. But 4G could change that. James O’Connor, Medialets’ commercial director EMEA, says: “At the moment public wi-fi is the only way for users to really get the full experience while ‘on the go’ – although we do have clever tech that caches the content so you can view some of it even when offline. But I think 4G will remove the gap between home and outdoors, and that could give rise to some interesting new ideas.” Amy Vale, VP of global research and strategic comms for ad network Mojiva, is looking forward to concepts that engage with the utility of the phone. “I think the challenge for publishers and advertisers is how to develop content that wraps around functions like alarm clock and contacts. 4G can play a part in that by serving up richer designs and a deeper UI.” The question is: how soon will such a brave new future take to materialise? The consensus among those questioned by Mobile Marketing Magazine

REAL WORLD

‘Ultimately, mobile advertising will be driven by brands, and they need rich media because direct response can’t really communicate their messages’ James Hilton, CEO, M&C Saatchi

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DECEMBER 2012

500MB seems like a lot when consumers are being sold the promise of ultra-fast rich media experiences. 500MB is equivalent to just two hours of streaming video. This has not gone unnoticed by industry experts. Rosalind Craven, senior analyst (consumer mobile) at IDC says: “EE tells us that its average data subscriber consumes just 200MB per month and that 500MB is therefore perfectly sufficient. But you have to assume that some consumers will be put off, given that the whole idea of 4G is to consume more data.” The obvious take-out here is that EE’s 4G will be early adopterfriendly and a business play in

its formative years. If so, it will merely be mimicking the curve of every other tech innovation. And in time, competition will make tariffs more competitive. This is how Jon Mew, the IAB’s director of mobile and operations, sees it. “I don’t see 4G making too much of an impact in the short term,” he says. “I think we have to wait for tariffs to improve and people’s contracts to expire. It’s going to take a couple of years for 4G to make a proper impact. And the truth is that most brands are not yet engaging with mobile on any meaningful level, never mind 4G and rich media. Too many of them don’t even have a mobileoptimised site.”

4G: the tariffs Allowances start with the light data usage entry plan, offering 500MB (£36/pm) and extending up to 8GB (£56/pm) for the heavier data user Contract* SIM ONLY 500MB data £36 £21 1GB £41 £26 3GB £46 £31 5GB £51 £36 8GB £56 £41

Launch Devices Samsung Galaxy S III LTE Nokia Lumia 920 Huawei Ascend P1 LTE Huawei E589

iphone 5 Nokia Lumia 820 The HTC One XL

* 24 Month contracts; handset included. Unlimited calls and texts

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James Hilton, CEO of M&C Saatchi Mobile, agrees. But he also believes – longer term – that the market is moving inexorably towards ubiquitous, rich mobile experiences. He says: “Ultimately mobile advertising will be driven by brands, and they need rich media because direct response can’t really communicate their messages. After all, online was transformed when broadband bandwidth arrived, and the same will inevitably happen to mobile. “I think we’ve seen amazing innovation in devices the last five years, but now that’s coming to an end. The next two years will be all about what’s in the device – and that’s where 4G will

‘I think the challenge for publishers and advertisers is how to develop content that wraps around functions like alarm clock and contacts. 4G can play a part in that by serving up richer designs and a deeper UI’ Amy Vale, VP of global research and strategic comms, Mojiva



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DECEMBER 2012

20 years of sms In two short decades, SMS has changed the way we communicate, and offered brands an effective way to engage with consumers via mobile. George Cole charts the history – and the future – of the humble ‘txt’…

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www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com


DECEMBER 2012

In December 1992, during his company’s Christmas party, Vodafone engineer Neil Papworth sent the world’s first text message. Intended as a way for staff to communicate with each other, his simple “Happy Christmas” message to his boss started the text revolution – changing the way all of us communicate for the foreseeable future. At the time, no one could imagine what a phenomenon texting would become. Last year, around 8 trillion text messages were sent globally, generating around $115bn (£71bn) in revenue. But in a world of email,

‘In all cultures, simplicity matters, and SMS has this feature, which means it has a lot of stickiness’

multimedia messaging service (MMS), instant messaging, and mobile applications, is there still a healthy future for SMS?

Engineer’s tool The first phase of the development of SMS was as an engineer’s tool, which used spare GSM capacity for sending alpha-numeric messages, composed of a maximum of 160 characters. Around 1995, operators began offering SMS as a premium business service, although text messages could only be sent to other handsets on the same network (Vodafone, for example, called its SMS service ‘Telenote’). Around 1998, network operators dropped their proprietary text services and made it possible to send and receive texts across different networks. This new interoperability, coupled with the relatively low cost of texting, resulted in fast take up – in 1999, 1bn texts were sent in the UK; 10 years later, the figure would reach 97bn, according to data from the Mobile Data Association (MDA). Around 2002, the introduction of shortcodes and wholesale billing saw an explosion in consumer services and operator revenue as a wide range of premium content (including ringtones, screensavers and

REAL WORLD

games) were delivered via SMS. Other developments, such as text bundles, bigger screens and colour displays, all helped to drive the SMS market. Mike Short, vice president of Telefónica Europe and past chair of the MDA, explains the enduring popularity of SMS: “Unlike other forms of messaging – like MMS and instant messaging – texting works on just about every handset.” Jorgen Nilsson, chief executive at mobile messaging company Acision, agrees. “In all cultures, simplicity matters, and SMS has this feature, which means it has a lot of stickiness,” he tells Mobile Marketing. “Even smartphone owners are using SMS even more than ever.” But it’s not just about simplicity. Almost as a fluke, texting captured the consumer imagination – it’s fun. People are hungry to send and receive them – which is great for communicating with friends, and great for marketers, too. Rob Townsend, marketing director of SMS marketing company Textlocal, says: “The SMS readership rate is around 98 per cent and around 99 per cent of text messages are read within five minutes of being received. That makes SMS a great mobile marketing tool.”

Jorgen Nilsson, chief excutive, Acision

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marketing has proved popular because “there’s no barrier to entry and it offers a good ROI”. Around 80 per cent of his company’s clients are SMEs, although Textlocal has a growing number of blue-chip clients such as Shell, Toyota, Google and Lloyds TSB.

Rich media

SMS remains part of mobile’s future because it is compatible with just about every handset on the planet

marketing channel. “If you think how much it costs to send a letter, then it’s easy to see the cost savings SMS can bring,” he says. SMS has also evolved new capabilities, such as Flash messaging (which pops up on the handset screen), concatenated SMS (which allows messages longer than 160 characters to be composed, sent, and read) and MMS. It’s easy to see why SMS has become a powerful mobile marketing tool, although there were a few false starts. For example, ZagMe, a location-based SMS marketing service which launched in 2000. The service was designed to promote retailers based in major shopping centres such as Bluewater and Lakeside, and more than 150 retailers, including Argos, Debenhams, and Pizza Hut signed up. The idea was that consumers who signed up to ZagMe, would receive special offers via SMS whenever they

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visited a participating shopping centre. But ZagMe is generally considered to have been too far ahead of its time, and the company ceased trading in 2001.

With impressive numbers and big brands employing SMS, few would doubt the effectiveness of the channel. But could more media-rich messaging systems such as MMS and mobile messaging apps like WhatsApp eventually usurp basic texting? Collstream’s Robin Eyre says there are compromises with more complex messaging forms that just don’t apply to SMS. “I can see MMS being useful for inbound messages,” he says. “For example, if someone is making an insurance claim and sends the insurer a picture of their damaged car. But the case for outbound messages is not so compelling, because it’s more expensive.” Rosie Srao, mobile business development manager, new channels at Marks & Spencer,

Orange Wednesdays However, many SMS marketing campaigns have been successfully launched since then. Orange Wednesdays is one hugely successful example. The two-for-one cinema ticket promotion has been running for more than seven years, and has generated millions of additional cinema visits. Adhish Kulkarni, senior vice president of products and marketing at mobile relationshipmanagement company Lumata, says it’s clear that SMS is hugely appealing for this kind of marketing. “The Orange Wednesday promotion codes can now be received via IVR, SMS or mobile internet,” he says, “and yet more than 90 per cent of consumers still choose SMS.” Another strong example is O2’s Priority Moments service, which allows O2 customers to receive SMS offers for priority ticketing, as well as promotions from brands such as Odeon, Harvey Nichols, and WHSmith. Textlocal’s Townsend says that SMS

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‘If you think how much it costs to send a letter, then it’s easy to see the cost savings SMS can bring’ Robin Eyre, Marketing Manager, Colstream


DECEMBER 2012BER

says the retailer has tried MMS for marketing, but cautions: “You have different handsets and different networks, and it’s difficult to guarantee a good experience for all users. We’ve asked our aggregators to speak to the networks about making it easier for brands to use MMS.” Apps also present challenges. “The challenge with using apps is that you have to develop the app, and then people have to download it and accept badges and notifications,” says Collstream’s Eyre. “People may not know the app exists, so you have to market it, whereas SMS can reach everyone with a mobile phone regardless of whether it’s a smartphone or a feature phone.” M&S’s Srao adds: “With apps, you’re dealing with different operating systems and devices. SMS is the lowest common denominator that enables you to reach a diverse range of customers on a diverse range of devices.” Acision’s Nilsson says that app developers tend to see the smartphone more as a computer device rather than a telecoms device. “There’s an untapped opportunity to add telecom functionality – in the form of SMS – to many apps,” he adds.

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Emerging technologies Many see SMS co-existing with new and emerging technologies. “SMS is becoming the glue between getting in touch with the individual and then taking them onto a richer experience, such as the internet. SMS has an important role to play,” says Lumata’s Kulkarni. SMS and MMS could have a more interesting role to play as handsets and the mobile payments ecosystem develop. Shaun Jordan, country manager of mobile media company Blyk UK, sees SMS and MMS both playing a key role in the new generation of mobile wallets. “You’ll be able to target people with the right message at the right time and make the transaction process seamless,” he says. “You might be in a store and receive a text or MMS message telling you about a special offer. You pick up the item, go to the till and then pay with your mobile using NFC.” Despite the rise of SMS, its potential has still not been fully exploited by brands, claims Nilsson. “Brands can use SMS as a means of getting real-time feedback from consumers from advertising campaigns. You can then use this feedback to start a dialogue with

The success of SMS is driven by the simplicity of the technology and the fact that consumers embraced it as ‘fun’

SMS marketing ideas How marketers can use SMS to reach their target audience…

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s with any marketing, the success of an SMS depends on the quality of the campaign’s execution, and the channel can be used in a variety of ways. For example, one campaign by Subway through Textlocal was aimed at existing customers, with the objective of increasing sales and driving traffic during quiet periods. The campaign generated a 24 per cent response rate, enabling Subway to collect 1,400 mobile phone numbers over a three-month period. Domino’s Pizza also used Textlocal to target existing customers with special offers and promotions. A spokesperson

for the company says: “We received 10-12 per cent redemptions on texts sent, which equates to around £10,000 of sales for just £350 spent with Textlocal.” ENO (English National Opera) also found success through SMS campaigns. The company used SMS for last-minute ticket offers, and SMS activity generated an ROI of 16:1, with £500 spent with Textlocal generating £8,000 gross profit. Messaging company Collstream’s clients include retailers, financial services companies, holiday companies and utility firms. Amongst its customers is Interflora, which uses SMS to send customers time-

sensitive special offers or promotions (such as for Mother’s Day). In the retail space, Marks & Spencer has been using SMS to communicate with its customers since 2008, both for marketing and customer service (such as informing customers when an item is being delivered to their home). “Customers signed up for our SMS service can receive notifications about our Dine In offers and may be directed to our microsite to see menus and pictures,” explains Rosie Srao, M&S mobile business

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BUSINESS MODELS

DECEMBER 2012

CHANGING THE RECORD Ben Drury, CEO at digital music platform 7digital, tells Andy Penfold how 2012 has been a critical year for music and mobile The music industry has had a unique and arguably particularly troubled journey into the digital realm. From the birth of internet piracy to the ever-changing demands of consumers for new payment models, music has had its fair share of headaches since the days when selling music was as simple as shifting CDs. Since it formed in 2004, 7digital is a company that has blazed a trail in responding to the huge challenges faced by music. Offering both a consumer-facing music store and a technology-licensing business for partners to provide music to their customers,

7digital has helped countless companies legally negotiate the brave new world of digital music. Ben Drury, the company’s CEO and co-founder, believes 2012 has been a landmark year for both his company and the wider industry – with mobile a key driver. “For anyone who’s been following digital music for a number of years, it’s been a series of revolutionary changes,” he says. “There was the illegal Napster scene, then the shift away from DRM – these were all big seismic shifts. The shift in 2012 has been the emergence of Apple iOS and Android as the predominant mobile operating systems.”

This year also saw revenue from digital music sales overtake that of physical music sales for the first time. On 7digital’s platform, 60 per cent of sales are made on mobile devices.

Device central Drury says 7digital’s strategy is shaped by this new focus on devices. “It’s a bit of a cliché now when companies talk about ‘mobile first’, but it is very much at the front of our thinking. When we think about a new product, we think about how it will it exist holistically across all the platforms we support.” Aiming to be an open platform allowing consumers to access music, 7digital has certainly embraced multi-device thinking. The company’s digital music store powers Samsung’s Music Hub – which is built into the Samsung Galaxy range of devices. HTC and Motorola build 7digital apps into their devices, and 7digital has recently announced a deal with RIM that makes it the music store partner for the new BlackBerry 10 OS. “People want to be able to access music across many devices – they don’t want to be restricted to one,” says Drury.


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‘For everyone who’s been following digital music for a number of years, It’s been a series of revolutionary changes’ Ben Drury, CEO and co-founder, 7digital “If you’re at home, you want to be able to listen through your Sonos speaker system, or whatever you have. If you’re going for a run you want to be able to listen through your phone or your iPod. So I’m not sure ‘mobile first’ is the right characterisation for what we’re thinking. It’s about multiple devices – a holistic approach.”

Agnostic view This open approach defines how 7digital offers an alternative model to the vertical approaches of Apple, Amazon, and Google – where the shopping experience, payment system, and the device for listening are all closely woven together. “We try to be agnostic across all platforms,” says Drury. “The ‘access versus ownership’ characterisation of this industry is very naive. Today what we believe we’re selling when we sell a song is access to that song. We’re not selling you a file. “You can come back the next day and download it again. If you’re on a mobile network we’ll give you a highly optimised

version of the song. We may give you a stream. The whole idea of access versus ownership is the wrong question. Access is ownership.” The idea of access to music is a far cry from the CD, but Drury argues that digital needs to catch up with physical CDs in other ways. “Digital music has many many advantages – it’s convenient, and instantly accessed – but the overall quality isn’t as good as CD. The audio quality isn’t as good, and the extras you get with CDs such as lyrics and artwork, you don’t get. So we’re very much believers in improving quality. We already have the highest audio quality in the market, but we want to go higher. We want to improve the quality of the whole experience.”

The right tools The company’s technology-licensing arm further enables 7digital to provide access and quality, via an API toolkit that lets third parties loose on 7digital’s platform. The API is modular, allowing third parties to pick and choose what they need from 7digital’s wide-reaching music platform. There are modules for payments, streaming, downloading, recommendations, and more. “Our API offers all the modules you might need to build a music service,” says Drury. “We’re not dictatorial about what the music services should be – our role is to provide partners with that ‘LEGO kit’ so they can build what they want to build.” As well as this open platform philosophy, 7digital’s API addresses one enormous issue for anyone wanting to deal in music – licensing. “Music is incredibly complex in terms of licensing and dealing with the record companies, publishers, chart companies, and so on,” says Drury. “We’ve done all that heavy lifting and continue to go through all that pain, so we provide a way for our partners and consumers to access music in a legal way.” There are currently more than 200 active users of the 7digital API, all managed by the company’s dedicated account management team. Some are big companies such as Samsung with its Music Hub, while others, such as specialist music site World Of Brass, are independent developers.

BUSINESS MODELS

The API presents opportunities for marketers too. One campaign facilitated by 7digital saw Nestlé offer free song downloads with KitKat purchases, while Pringles has run a similar campaign. Drury says: “There are other marketing applications – you can access instant plays, or on-demand streaming. A brand might want to access a certain catalogue, or want its own radio or playlists. These are things we can enable – any engagement through music. “The role we provide in this space is very valuable,” he says. “Brands often want to do something with music, but the idea of them going directly to record labels to get music signed off isn’t realistic. We act as a ‘one stop shop’. We can get approvals and clearances for the campaign – and provide the technology to enable that campaign.” Providing access to legal music, as well as the technology to deliver it, is what makes 7digital one of the world’s leading digital music platforms. The industry may have changed beyond all recognition since the birth of digital, but music itself is as strong a pull as ever. “Music is unique amongst all of the major art forms in that it’s almost universally loved,” says Drury. “You’d struggle to find someone who’d say ‘I don’t like music’. Most people have some kind of emotional response to it.” MM

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DECEMBER 2012

thought leadership

Buckley on… the lure of influence marketing

Russell Buckley explains how targeting the key influencers in social peer groups can reap rewards for marketers There’s a new idea that’s rapidly going mainstream in digital marketing – ‘influence marketing’. It’s currently being used by big brands such as Ford, Guinness, and Reebok, and if you’re reading this magazine, you need to know about it. Influence marketing is the precocious love child of big data and social media and is a technique that just wasn’t possible a few years ago. The theory goes like this. Supposing a brand could work out who its most important customers were, as measured by how much they influence their peers? If that was possible, the brand could focus a marketing message only on those important people and they, in turn, could spread the word amongst the rest of their social network. If such an idea was possible to implement, the brand would cut costs by focusing on a few key influencers, without losing overall reach. And if the influencers were prepared to pass the message on, there’s an added dollop of credibility thrown in along the way.

Key influencers As an example, readers of this magazine will probably be pretty influential among their peers about mobile phones, but not necessarily fashion choice, judging by what I see at Mobile Marketing magazine’s events :-). So if I were to launch a new mobile phone or app, you would all be good people to tell about it. But if you were also very influential among

your peer group, you would be a marketing superhero. That’s the theory, but how would I know that you were influential, as well as knowledgeable? This is where social media comes in. The combination of the number of Twitter followers, LinkedIn and Facebook connections, and blogging and Quora activity all give a very good proxy for how important you are within your peer group. This allows the companies active in this sector, such as the UK pioneer PeerIndex and Klout in the US, to allocate a score based on influence and target their messages accordingly.

Engaging rewards The final part of the puzzle is why these influential people would bother to forward on marketing messages in the first place. And that requires a slight re-framing of the marketing conversation. Once you have selected the influencers, you reward them in a way that is engaging and worth talking about in social media. So, in the last few weeks I’ve been offered six free Guinness glasses, a 3D printed model Ford Fiesta with my own Twitter handle on the side (geek your heart out!) and a preview to a cutting-edge Shoreditch art gallery. And of course I’ve been Tweeting and Facebooking about this furiously. Bringing all this together, a recent case study saw a blue chip brand reach out to just 900 influencers, which then generated more than 14m page impression equivalents at a fraction of the cost of a traditional

digital media campaign. The next big leap for influence marketing is to incorporate the tools into a mobile environment, as we transition into the mobile world of the future. But the exciting thing for me as a consumer is – more cool free stuff to tell people about.

‘One brand reached out to 900 influencers, generating more than 14m page impression equivalents, at a fraction of the cost of a traditional campaign’

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DECEMBER 2012

RAISING THE BAR Just under six months ago, when we launched the call for entries for the 2012 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards, we had little idea what a tide of creativity and excellence we were about to unleash. More than 200 entries flooded in across 19 categories, from some of the bestknown companies and brands in the world. Our team of judges whittled the entries down to a shortlist of just over 100 across those 19 categories – an average of six per category – eliminating a few weak ones, but also a lot of very good ones, along the way. Quite simply, when the bar is set so high, even the good can fall by the wayside. This year, as in previous years, the onus was on effectiveness. While the judging process is designed to recognise mobile campaigns, platforms, and projects for their originality and quality of execution, the scoring is weighted to recognise effectiveness above all else. For those who

have been at it a long time, mobile may seem like a relatively mature medium; everyone else is still looking to prove the business case for it, so in our opinion, effectiveness has to be the watchword for sorting the winners from the also-rans. We increased the number of categories this year, introducing new ones to recognise excellence in mobile Augmented Reality, mobile affiliate and mobile search. All saw strong submissions, while elsewhere existing categories for mobile ad campaigns and apps, were as popular as ever. To everyone who entered this year, we

BEST PRACTICE

thank you for the time and effort taken over your entry submissions. To the winners, we offer our richly-deserved congratulations. To those who were Highly Commended, you should know that we only handed out this honour where the result was almost too close to call. And to everyone else who made the final shortlist, you shouldn’t underestimate your achievement in doing so. Now, read on for an insight into what, in our opinion, represent the most effective mobile marketing campaigns of the year…

The 2012 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards are sponsored by OpenMarket, 7Digital, Propel and Celtra

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BEST PRACTICE

DECEMBER 2012

MOST EFFECTIVE MOBILE SALES PROMOTION/DIRECT RESPONSE CAMPAIGN

Winner

UNILEVER/RABARBA CORNETTO MY LOOOOVE SUMMER CAMPAIGN Rabarba’s 2012 summer campaign for Unilever’s Cornetto brand in Turkey was a departure from the brand’s usual BOGOF (Buy One Get One Free) promotions. Consumers who bought promotional ‘Cornetto in Love’ and ‘Cornetto Disc’ packs could text in a code printed on the packaging to receive 120 minutes of free airtime. When they did so, they received an automated call back asking them to express their love for the brand by shouting “My Loooove!” for as long as they could, replicating the theme of the brand’s summer TV

campaign. The best efforts won a Cornetto teddy bear. The promotion was also integrated on Cornetto’s Facebook page, and in addition, Cornetto and Rabarba used location-targeted SMS and MMS messages targeting consumers on Turkcell’s opted-in database who were in popular beach clubs. In addition to increased sales, the campaign generated 1.4m participations in the first two months, including 300,000 IVR responses. Cornetto also garnered 35,000 new fans on Facebook. A very worthy winner.

Finalists

The Guardian/Muir Howard – Guardian iPad Edition Faberge/OpenFundraising/OpenMarket – The Faberge Big Egg Hunt Papa John’s/Net Media Planet – The Price Isn’t Always Right La Redoute – La Redoute Street Shopping

HIGHLY COMMENDED

DEBENHAMS / FETCH DEBENHAMS SUMMER SALE This campaign aimed to raise awareness of Debenhams’ summer sale, driving footfall and in-app revenue by driving app downloads and store location searches, then converting app downloads to sales. Fetch used a combination of media, including O2’s opted-in messaging platform; incentivised app download

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and low-cost performance networks, and specific placements on targeted sites including OK Magazine and TV Guide, with the banner ads reflecting the design of Debenhams’ summer catalogue. The results of the campaign are commercially sensitive, but were sufficient to merit a Highly Commended status.


DECEMBER 2012

BEST PRACTICE

MOST EFFECTIVE mCOMMERCE SOLUTION

Winner

screWfix direct/ netbiscuits SCREWFIX MOBILE SITE

When your target audience is on-the-go tradesmen, an mCommerce solution makes a lot of sense. Screwfix’s offering was developed by Netbiscuits in just four months, based on insight that showed that the company’s customer base was increasingly using wireless devices and mobile websites to shop. Key to the success of the mobile site is the integration of one IT platform in the backend that allows all products, prices, customer profiles and purchases to be linked to the same conversation across all channels. The entire range of products and services, including real-time pricing, stock infor-

mation, and ‘Click & Collect’ functionality, is available on all mobile devices. A ‘Quick Shop’ function gives customers a fast track from catalogue number straight to mobile purchase. And for customers reluctant to buy on a mobile website, the mCommerce integration makes it possible for them to create their order on the mobile website and complete it by calling the contact centre. Mobile visitors now account for over 10 per cent of all Screwfix online traffic, and customers are regularly using the mobile site as a stock-checker whilst in store. This is an excellent mCommerce offering.

Finalists

La Redoute – La Redoute Street Shopping Murat Paris/Agencie .V. – Murat Paris mobile app Pizza Hut/bemoko – Pizza Hut Delivery mobile site Bango – Facebook direct-to-bill payments

HIGHLY COMMENDED Allfancydress/Crafted Allfancydress.com Mobile Site Allfancydress.com’s mobile site, created by Crafted Media, is the first, and to date only, mCommerce platform in the UK fancy dress industry. Simple navigation and careful use of imagery makes for a quick and easy shopping

experience. Actual figures were for judges’ eyes only, but with increased mobile visits and revenues, this entry had more than enough evidence of effectiveness and success to warrant Highly Commended recognition.

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BEST PRACTICE

DECEMBER 2012

MOST EFFECTIVE MOBILE APPLICATION b2b

Winner

Wienerberger/ SYNC interactive Wienberger brick selector This entry is proof that no matter how apparently dull the product or service you are trying to promote – and we acknowledge that, to some people, bricks are undoubtedly beautiful – there’s no reason why you can’t produce a beautiful piece of mobile content to help you do so. Wienerberger and Sync Interactive’s Wienerberger Brick Selector app – the company is the largest brick manufacturer in the world – enables builders, architects

or regular DIY-ers to browse the company’s range of bricks, filtering the choice by style, texture, colour, pattern and shade to narrow down the selection. You can compare multiple bricks, with detailed technical specifications, including size, tolerances, water absorption, and durability. And when you’re done comparing, order samples. And the presentation of the app is simply gorgeous. There’s a tablet version too, which is also a joy to use.

Finalists

Aperto Move – AlphaGuide Compsoft – iPresent MPS and BBI – Norbar Torque Calculator QuickMobile – TechSpec

HIGHLY COMMENDED AUDI/SOMO

AUDI MILEAGE TRACKER This is a great-looking app that allows real-time tracking of car journeys using GPS mapping, then automatically calculates the expenses owed based on the claimable amount per-mile or kilometre entered by the user. The app can generate a spreadsheet that logs journeys over a given period and

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is integrated into email for easy sharing. With almost half of all new Audis each year sold as fleet cars, the app offers undoubted utility, and also a means for Audi to extend its relationship with thousands of company car drivers with whom it would otherwise have no direct contact.


DECEMBER 2012

BEST PRACTICE

MOST EFFECTIVE MOBILE APPLICATION b2c

Winner

EASYJET/MOBILE TRAVEL TECHNOLOGIES Easyjet mobile app The b2c App category is always one of the most fiercely contested in our Awards, and this year was no different. The winner this year is easyJet, for a transactional app that’s a delight to use. From the opening splash screen onwards it’s simple, fast, and intuitive. You can book flights, add luggage, speedy boarding and sports equipment, and check the status of your bookings, and of any other flights. And if you have registered your details online, you

can book a flight in around 30 seconds. One standout feature is the ability to check flight availability on days following the one you entered as the departure date simply by swiping to the left. The figures supplied in support of the app were for judges’ eyes only, and when you see them, it’s easy to understand why. Suffice to say, that in terms of effectiveness and user experience, this is an app that truly delivers the goods.

HIGHLY COMMENDED Hotels.com

Hotels.com Smartphone App This is another great-to-use app that makes the job of finding the right hotel in a far-flung city quick and easy. In addition to a fast, efficient hotel search engine, there’s also a ‘Tonight’s Local Deals’ feature that returns the best

Finalists

Barclays Digital Banking Team – Barclays Pingit Comet/Grapple – Comet mobile app La Redoute – La Redoute Windows Phone app Payback – Payback Mobile Samsung/Velti – Samsung Hope Relay Zurich Airport/Sevenval – Airport Zurich

deals in close proximity to your current location. The figures supplied by Hotels.com parent company Expedia also confirm the app’s popularity and effectiveness as a revenuegeneration tool.

Samsung Mobile/Cheil/Mobile 5 – Samsung: Take Part 2012 La Redoute – La Redoute Street Shopping Nestlé/Lumata – Nestlé Croquons La Vie The Gadget Show/XS2 – The Gadget Show 360 Science Museum/Qualcomm Vuforia – James May’s Science Stories Yoko One/Somo – #smilesfilm

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BEST PRACTICE

DECEMBER 2012

MOST EFFECTIVE TABLET APPLICATION

Winner

Compsoft iPresent Tablets offer brands and agencies a beautiful, interactive canvas on which to present themselves, and this category saw several strong contenders this year. But our award goes to a slightly different kind of tablet app. iPresent is a tool that enables organisations to take their marketing collateral, including videos, PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, image galleries, white papers and more, and make it available to their sales force on their iPads. They do so using an intuitive interface that makes it

easy to upload content to the iPresent portal, and update it whenever necessary. It solves the problem of presenting different types of media file on the iPad in a seamless way, with a choice of great-looking menu options that enables the presenter to navigate and present the content in a professional manner. Six months after the launch, iPresent had almost double its targeted number of pay-ing subscribers. Users range from SMEs to multi-nationals such as Evian Volvic, i2i, and Emap.

Finalists

Sky News Saudi Arabia/IMImobile – Sky News Arabia iPad app Hotels.com – Hotels.com iPad app Wienerberger/Sync Interactive – Wienerberger Brick Selector XS2TheWorld/Yune – NS Royal Waiting Rooms

HIGHLY COMMENDED Design Museum/Twentysix Digital Design Museum: The Collection for iPad The Design Museum’s iPad app ran iPresent very close for the top award. With the Design Museum’s name on it, you would expect it to look good. In fact, it looks absolutely beautiful, the home page boasting a unique twoway horizontal and vertical swipe navigation interface. Tap on an object and the rest of the grid vacates the

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scene, again, beautifully so. Then for each object, you get a description, and a video commentary from Design Museum director, Deyan Sudjic. Social media integration, with comments posted to the app, completes a stunning package. The app has been downloaded well over 100,000 times.


DECEMBER 2012

BEST PRACTICE

MOST EFFECTIVE MOBILE ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN

Winner NOKIA / YOC

Nokia lumia 800 Mystery ad Talk to most people who have used one of the Nokia Lumia handsets and they will tell you that the Windows Phone user interface is truly radical and a delight to use. But how do you convince iPhone and Android handset users to even give it a try? That was the genius of this campaign from YOC for the Nokia Lumia 800 handset. The campaign showed Android and iPhone users what the Windows Phone user interface looks

like and how it behaves, all on their existing iPhone or Android device. Perhaps not surprisingly given the nature of the campaign, it stopped the target audience in its tracks, delivering an outstanding clickthrough rate of 29.7 per cent in the process, encouraging Android and iPhone users to at least give Windows Phone in general, and the Nokia Lumia 800 in particular, the time of day.

Finalists Papa John’s/Net Media Planet – The Price Isn’t Always Right Millennial Media & M/Six – Carphone Warehouse campaign Hotels.com/Fetch – Hotels.com global mobile marketing campaign 2012 Starbucks/Manning Gottlieb OMD – Starbucks Rewards Yodelmobile – Jobsite O2 partnership

HIGHLY COMMENDED

MCDONALD’S/OMD McDonald’s Extended Hours This campaign was designed to drive business into McDonald’s’ late night stores, but with two thirds of its restaurants closing at 11pm, it employed location-based, geo-fence technology, supported by geo-targeted abovethe-line messaging, to avoid sending potential customers to a locked door. At the heart of the campaign was a ‘restau-

rant finder’ app to enable consumers to find a latenight McDonald’s. The campaign was designed to drive downloads of the app. The restaurant-finder app was downloaded 1.3m times over the course of the campaign, and when the sales uplift was calculated, the campaign delivered an

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BEST PRACTICE

DECEMBER 2012

MOST EFFECTIVE MOBILE ADVERTISING PLATFORM / NETWORK

Winner FIKSU

After the b2c App category, this is probably the most hotly-contested one in our Awards program. Most of the big mobile ad networks staked their claim, and their credentials were very impressive. Our winner, though, is a company that has built its reputation on helping brands to drive app downloads and attract loyal, long-term app users, at a time when the world, and the world’s app stores, are awash with apps, and where achieving visibility and standout for your app is increasingly difficult.

The Fiksu for Mobile Apps platform uses predictive algorithms to optimise mobile ad campaigns in real time through the relational evaluation of inventory; post-download activity, including app launches, purchases, registrations and upgrades; and key campaign variables, including traffic source, publishers, device, creative, organic uplift, and country. The platform makes the most effective use of client’s budgets of all sizes, and for that, Fiksu takes the award for Most Effective Mobile Advertising Platform/Network.

Finalists

InMobi Adfonic Placecast – Placecast ShopAlerts Trademob TapJoy

HIGHLY COMMENDED Celtra

Celtra takes a Highly Commended gong in this category for its AdCreator 3 self-service rich media mobile advertising platform. Rich media is hot in mobile advertising right now, and Celtra’s tech platform enables non-techies to build rich media campaigns in hours rather than weeks, then

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manage and track them. The platform has helped Celtra to win business from eight of the top 10 leading media agencies around the world, while more than 25 of the major global advertising networks rely on Celtra’s platform to create rich media mobile ads for their clients.


DECEMBER 2012

BEST PRACTICE

MOST EFFECTIVE MOBILE PAYMENT SOLUTION

Winner

BARCLAYS DIGITAL BANKING TEAM BARCLAYS PINGIT The idea of sending money to a friend via a simple text message sounds beautifully simple, but belies the complex infrastructure that such a service needs if it is to work efficiently, and be safe from fraud. Barclays Pingit has done the work necessary to ensure that it is now gloriously easy for one Pingit user to send cash to another, via an iPhone, Android, or BlackBerry handset. There’s also a strong viral element to the solution – send money to someone who is not registered, and they are given 24 hours to register in order to accept the payment,

or it goes back to the sender’s account. And if you’re looking for evidence of effectiveness, look no further than the stats: more than 20,000 downloads of the app in the first two days and more than 1.2m in total to date; payments through Barclays Pingit broke the £1m barrier in less than three weeks; and less than six months after launch, more than 742,000 payments had been made successfully, with a total value of over £28m. Barclays Pingit is a more than worthy winner of the award for Most Effective Mobile Payment Solution.

Finalist NeoMobile – Onebip

HIGHLY COMMENDED Bango

Facebook Direct to bill Payments Bango has struck some important deals during 2012, most notably with Amazon, Microsoft, and MasterCard. But its integration with Facebook, to enable the social giant’s mobile users to easily buy digital content – with the cost charged to their mobile bill and no need for credit

cards- or SMS verification – could be the company’s most significant. Given Facebook’s mobile ambitions, and indeed the extent of mobile access to Facebook’s platform, Bango’s deal is massive. A good day’s work for Bango, and good news for Facebook’s many mobile users.

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BEST PRACTICE

DECEMBER 2012

MOST EFFECTIVE MOBILE TRAVEL & TOURISM SOLUTION

Winner

Barclays/Profero BARCLAYS BIKES MOBILE APP The Barclays Bikes that now invade the streets of central London on a daily basis are a boon for commuters, many of whom now shun the London Underground to get from A to B, hopping on a bike instead. Before the launch of the Barclays Bikes app, however, finding a bike, and, more to the point, docking it after use, could be an issue. A lot of the docking stations are down quiet side roads, the street signage to the docks is not great, and when you get to where you’re going and find a docking station, there’s no guarantee that there will be a free dock in which to park your bike. The app solves the problem with an interactive map,

updated in real time, which tells you where your nearest dock is and how many free bikes there are to hire. It also lets you check the location of the nearest dock to your destination, and how many empty spaces there are, so you have a reasonable idea as to whether or not you will be able to park the bike and get on with the rest of your day. The app has tools to help you plan your journey across the capital, too. Evidence of the effectiveness of the app can be seen in the fact that at the time the entry was submitted, the app had been downloaded more than 130,000 times. At the time, there were 160,000 members of Barclays Cycle Hire scheme.

HIGHLY COMMENDED Hotels.com Mobile Apps and Sites Hotels.com earns a Highly Commended recognition for its mobile offering, which includes both smartphone and tablet apps, and a mobile-optimised and a

Finalists

tablet-optimised site). The breadth of the offering is in itself commendable, the user experience across all of the brand’s mobile platforms, even more so.

Hotel.de/Apertomove – Hotel.de mobile site easyJet/Mobile Travel Technologies – easyJet mobile app Fort Lauderdale Visitors Bureau – Sunny.org mobile site XS2TheWorld/McCann Erickson – Discover Hong Kong AR

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DECEMBER 2012

BEST PRACTICE

MOST EFFECTIVE MOBILE SEARCH CAMPAIGN/ SOLUTION

MOST EFFECTIVE MOBILE COUPONING OR BARCODE CAMPAIGN

MOST EFFECTIVE MOBILE AFFILIATE CAMPAIGN/ SOLUTION

Winner

Winner

Winner

Papa John's/ McDonald'S / Net Media Planet MOBILE BITS

THE BODY SHOP/ TRADEDOUBLER

MCDONALD'S THE PRICE ISN'T EURO ALWAYS 2012 RIGHT CAMPAIGN

MCDONALD'S EURO 2012 CAMPAIGN

THE BODY SHOP M AFFILIATE PROGRAMME

Papa John’s was looking to drive sales, without resorting to discounting. Working with its newly-appointed search agency Netmediaplanet, it took the premise that hungry people are susceptible to appetite-inducing messages, and applied it to a mobile search campaign, encouraging hungry consumers to buy more when ordering their pizzas, thus driving up average order value. Taste tests were used to identify the keywords most likely to tantalise customer taste buds. Different side orders and desserts were promoted at different times of the day, on different devices, in different locations, to identify the best-performing combinations. The campaign was a huge success, driving up order values, increasing revenue-per-click, conversions, and margin. Many brands still seem ignorant about the power of mobile search. This campaign should make them thing again.

To leverage its sponsorship of the Euro 2012 football tournament, McDonald’s and its agency MobileBits turned to the SAMY4ME Mobile Mall solution. SAMY4ME is an app that consumers can use to connect with merchants, and receive offers and coupons direct to their handset. The campaign was promoted through print media and in store. 21 McDonald’s vouchers and coupons were promoted to consumers as part of the campaign. To redeem an offer, consumers simply had to click on the coupon within the app and show it to the McDonald’s cashier for redemption at the in-store POS. The results of the campaign are commercially sensitive, but were sufficiently impressive to take the honours in this category.

The Body Shop (TBS) has run its affiliate program with Tradedoubler Performance Marketing Network in the UK since 2008. In November 2011, following the launch of TBS’s mCommerce site, Tradedoubler opened up the mobile channel for all TBS affiliates. Tradedoubler allocated in-store redeemable vouchercodes to key affiliates for them to distribute to their mobile users. Online vouchercodes were also made available on the mobile site. To overcome hesitation among affiliates about directing traffic to a mobile site, Tradedoubler offered an improved rate of commission for sales generated via the mCommerce site. As a result of the campaign, mobile now accounts for an increasingly large share of the total affiliate program. This is a fine example of how to integrate mobile into an existing and already successful affiliate campaign.

Finalists Finalists

Nectar/Aimia – Points for Search, Nectar app

Amplify Entertainment – Hey DJ! Mobile Request System Blockbuster/O2/Eagle Eye – Blockbuster ‘14Day Free Trial’ mobile coupon campaign Comet/Grapple – Comet mobile app nFluence – DealBoard

Finalists

BHS/Affiliate Window – BHS offline and online conversions VouChaCha/Affiliate Window – Affiliate Window in-storecouponing VouChaCha/Markcomedia – MyVoucherCodes.co.uk mobile app nFluence – DealBoard

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BEST PRACTICE

DECEMBER 2012

MOST EFFECTIVE CAMPAIGN FROM A MOBILE OPERATOR

MOST EFFECTIVE MOBILE CRM/ENTERPRISE MESSAGING CAMPAIGN

MOST EFFECTIVE LOCATION-BASED SERVICE/CAMPAIGN

Winner

Winner

O2 /CHERRY LONDON

McDonald’s/OMD

O2 PRIORITY MOMENTS

McDonald’s Extended Hours

O2, in partnership with its agency, Cherry London, launched Priority Moments in July 2011 with 20 strategic partners. The program provides O2 customers with unique experiences and exclusive offers from top brands via their mobile phones. At the end of the first year of the program, O2 had attracted 2.6m customers and over 100 UK leading brand partners. Each customer had been offered savings of up to £840; over 1bn offers had been viewed; and over 4.5m rewards and offers had been accepted. You can’t argue with stats like these, and coming from a sector which is not known for inspiring loyalty among its customers, they look even better. O2 and Cherry London are worthy winners in this category.

Finalists

Beeline Laos/BigTime – The Gold SMS Mega Promo Orange/Lumata – Orange QuickTap Treats

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Winner British Gas/IMImobile British Gas Appointment Reminder Service British Gas’ Appointment Reminder service, powered by IMImobile, covers three types of visit: first service, annual service, and breakdown. After the appointment has been booked, reminders are sent to the customer at various stages, up to and including the day of the appointment itself, via a personalised pre-recorded voice message (to a landline) or SMS (to a mobile), to confirm the date and time of the appointment, and offer the option to reschedule. Prior to the launch of the service, 7 per cent of all inbound calls to British Gas contact centres related to appointment checking. This number has been significantly reduced, with associated cost savings. There has been a similar reduction in the number of ‘no access’ appointments, where the engineer arrives for the appointment but cannot gain access to the house. The service has also increased customer loyalty towards British Gas.

Finalists

ApertoMove – AppRadar Virgin Atlantic/OpenMarket – Virgin Atlantic SMS Flight Alert Service

This campaign was designed to drive downloads of a ‘restaurant finder’ app to enable consumers to find a late-night McDonald’s. Since two thirds of its restaurants close at 11pm, it employed location-based technology and geotargeted above-the-line messaging, to avoid sending potential customers to a locked door. Banner ads were served to smartphones on sites that the target audience – late night travellers and shift workers – were known to browse, when the recipient was in close proximity to an open restaurant. Messaging on cashpoint screens, petrol pump nozzles, posters and till receipts with QR codes from outlets close to the open restaurants also directed the audience to the app. The app was downloaded 1.3m times over the course of the campaign, and when the sales uplift was calculated, the campaign delivered an ROI of 2:1.

Finalists

Aperto Move – AlphaGuide La Redoute – La Redoute Street Shopping SevenVal - View City Guides app Telmap – Telmap Navigator


DECEMBER 2012

MOST EFFECTIVE MOBILE SITE

Winner Pizza Hut/bemoko Pizza Hut Delivery Mobile Site

Pizza Hut opted for a mobile site, rather than an app, in order to achieve greater reach. The site integrates with Pizza Hut’s back-office systems, and renders to all devices, but with a user experience tailored to each device. The site, created by bemoko, offers all the functionality of the desktop site. A User Console enables Pizza Hut to add and remove offers and new products. By the end of the first week after going live, the site accounted for 10 per cent of all online orders, with orders on mobile increasing by 60 per cent over the next two weeks.

Finalists

Macmillan Cancer Support/ bemoko – Macmillan mobile site Hotels.com – mobile- and tablet-optimised sites Copa Airlines/NCR – Copa Airlines mobile site Obergine – White Scar Cave mobile site Mercedes-Benz/Sevenval – Brand Portal & COMMAND System Furniture Village/We Love Mobile – Furniture Village mobile retail site

MOST EFFECTIVE MOBILE AUGMENTED REALITY CAMPAIGN/ SOLUTION

Winner Stylist/Blippar

MOST EFFECTIVE MOBILE CHARITY CAMPAIGN/ SOLUTION

Winner

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MOST EFFECTIVE MOBILE TICKETING SOLUTION

Winner

VODAFONE

Samsung/ Kilimanjaro Live/Intellitix

JustTextGiving by Vodafone

RFID Ticketless Technology Project

This service, a partnership between Vodafone, the Vodafone Foundation and JustGiving, enables anyone to donate by text to individual fundraisers – and Britain’s 184,000 charities – via a unique textcode. The solution was launched with the backing of a major ad campaign. In addition, celebrities such as Amanda Holden and Lisa Snowdon set off on a series of fundraising challenges, to show how easy it is to fundraise via text. At the time of writing, more than 16,000 charities and over 40,000 individuals had signed up to JustTextGiving, raising more than £4m for their respective causes.

Working with Kilimanjaro Live and Intellitix, Samsung brought RFID ticketless technology to festival goers for the first time this summer at a Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ gig at Knebworth, and the Wakestock festival, as a precursor to using NFC at future events. RFID wristbands were used to process thousands of fans though custom-built entrance portals. At the Knebworth event, 15,000 people were processed in one hour, using 30 handheld RFID readers. Ticket-holders could register their RFID wristband in advance and link it to their Facebook profile. If they did so, when they gained entry to the event, a check-in message was posted on their Facebook wall. The Facebook posts generated an online audience of 3m people, and a significant amount of press interest.

Stylist Olympics Issue On 25 July, free weekly lifestyle magazine Stylist partnered with Blippar to create an AR Olympics issue. The cover featured a photo of Team GB’s synchronised swimming team, which turned into a video when the image was ‘blipped’. Other AR treatments included a showcase on trainers that readers could click to buy using the Blippar app. In the seven days post publication, more than 28,500 unique users blipped the pages, on average 5.8 times each. The trainer showcase generated 6 per cent of all blipps, showing a direct link between AR and commerce.

Finalists

Auto Trader/We Love Mobile – Goodwood Festival of Speed Samsung Mobile/Cheil/Mobile 5 – Samsung: Take Part 2012 La Redoute – La Redoute Street Shopping Volkswagen/Agence .V. – Virtual Golf Cabriolet XS2TheWorld/McCann Erickson – Discover Hong Kong AR

Finalists

Macmillan Cancer Support/ bemoko – Macmillan mobile site OpenMarket/OpenFundraising – The Faberge Big Egg Hunt Prostate Action/Reading Room – iWee mobile web app Samsung/Velti – Samsung Hope Relay App Sport Relief/Velti – Sport Relief

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DeCEMBER 2012

Present and Correct

David Murphy talks to Compsoft CEO Phil Lenton about the company’s iPresent app, which aims to turn the iPad into a powerful sales and presentation tool You could be forgiven for thinking that the company behind an app that enables marketing teams to put beautiful presentations and other marketing collateral on the sales force’s iPads would be a start-up working out of a converted leather-curing warehouse in London’s East End. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Compsoft, the company behind the iPresent app that has been turning heads since its launch in January 2012, has been around for 33 years and works out of unassuming offices in Alton, in the Hampshire countryside. “As a tech company, you need to reinvent yourself every few years,” explains Compsoft CEO, Phil Lenton. “We started out in the 80s and 90s writing

development tools aimed at the non-specialist end of the development market, then in the second half of the 90s and the noughties we were building more comprehensive systems for people, using .NET and our own technologies. Then when the iPhone came along, we got into mobile in a big way, building apps for some big organisations.” Big is the right word. Among the companies Compsoft was building apps for were MTV, Hotels.com, Computacentre, and Belron, best known for its Autoglass replacement windshield brand.

Mobile heritage So there’s a strong mobile heritage at Compsoft. Even so, iPresent seems to be something of a departure for the firm. It’s a combination of an iPad app and a Content Management System (CMS). Using the CMS, nontechnical personnel can upload PowerPoint presentations, videos, white papers and any other marketing materials their sales teams need at their disposal when they are talking to clients or prospects. The content is downloaded to the app. All the sales person then needs to do

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“What we wanted to achieve was something that looked as if it had been designed, but also something that didn’t need a lot of design input from the user, so creating the interface and synching with the server base at the back end is where a lot of our efforts have gone.” The ease with which you can put existing content on to the iPad is one of iPresent’s major selling points. But of course, it’s not the only way to achieve that goal. Dropbox is the most obvious alternative. Lenton concedes that it’s reasonable to talk about the two in the same breath, but argues that iPresent trumps Dropbox both in terms of design and distribution, especially in terms of having the latest up-todate version of the content on the iPad. “iPresent makes it easy to distribute updated content to a large number of people,” says Lenton. The users get a push message to say the content has been updated, and they can then choose whether to download the updated content, or, if they are about to start a meeting off-site, leave it until later. An additional plus is that update downloads are, in tech speak, differential, so if the content that has been updated is a 60-slide PowerPoint deck, but only one slide has changed, that’s all that is downloaded. “Things like technical specification sheets might be routinely updated on a daily basis,” says Lenton. “Companies have always been able to send out updated versions of their spec sheets, sales figures or whatever, but they have not been able to ensure that recipients actually used the updated version in their presentation. It’s very difficult to take the old version out of someone’s briefcase or remove it from their hard drive when they are 300 miles away. “We are trying to solve a problem that has been around a lot longer than the iPad, and that is the problem of distributing content to

‘The user interface, the way the sales person switches between different presentations, is part of the experience; it’s something they can proudly do in front of the customer’ Phil Lenton, CEO, Compsoft

is to present it. This, too, is a doddle, since the system comes complete with pre-built user interface templates, which mean the sales person has a beautifully designed menu system from which to switch seamlessly between PowerPoint, PDF, and other file formats.

Next-gen sales book “Our plan with iPresent was to create the next-generation sales book, so that people didn’t have to cart around large numbers of brochures, or root around among last week’s emails trying to find the updated presentation, white papers or sales figures they had been sent,” says Lenton. “We were seeing a common need emerging around the desire to use the iPad a sales tool, so over the past 18 months, we have invested a lot of time, resource, and over £1m into developing this solution, which turns the iPad into a powerful sales tool with a luxurious, gesture-driven interface.

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wide array of different users, especially if they are geographically diverse and the content is updated frequently. It’s a headache that many organisations have had for a long time.” iPresent’s third big selling point, says Lenton, is the way in which it beautifies the content. “It’s way beyond simply accessing a filing system,” he says. “The user interface, the way the sales person switches between different presentations, is part of the experience. It’s something they can proudly do in front of the customer rather than crouching over their laptop while they hunt around for the right file.”

Low-friction pricing Lenton says he has been staggered by the response to iPresent. This is no doubt due in part, he believes, to the low-friction pricing model, which starts with a free 30-day trial, and then advances to a £20 per user, per month fee. “It’s incredibly affordable,” he says. “We have billion dollar companies buying a few licences for their team on a credit card to let them try it out before rolling it out across the marketing and sales teams.” Current iPresent users include Symantec, Evian Volvic, i2i, and Emap, plus plenty more that Lenton is not allowed to talk about. What they like about it, he says, is that it gives the sales force a sophisticated presentation tool, while at the same time enabling the marketing team to retain a degree of control over what content the sales force presents. Next stop for iPresent is a Windows 8 version. Lenton says that despite the plethora of Android tablets out there for consumers, the company has no plans for an Android version unless and until it sees evidence of growth in Android tablet use in the corporate market. For the moment though, iPad-owning sales teams who are revelling in what iPresent has to offer won’t lose too much sleep over that. MM

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BEST PRACTICE

December 2012

Making Sense of Mobile Payments Rob Thurner, mobile consultant and lead trainer at the Mobile Training Academy, analyses the mobile payments landscape Mobile channels are now a significant source of revenue for retailers. According to a study by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) and NetSuite, mobile now accounts for 10 per cent of UK High Street spend, with mobile-optimised commerce sites and smartphone apps expected to generate sales totalling £56bn in 2012. According to an IMRG CapGemini report, payments via smartphones and tablets leapt 356 per cent in June 2012 compared to the same month last year, against online payment growth of 12.5 per cent. Average order values for mobile and online are now comparable.

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These figures prove what most smartphone users already know: it’s convenient and easy to research product information and buy on mobile devices. In one IAB study, 42 per cent of shoppers interviewed said they use mobile because it’s the easiest way to research and buy, and 49 per cent of those who did not currently engage in mCommerce said they planned to do so. Many believe the banks and credit card providers have had it their way for too long, and it’s no surprise to see multiple mobile payment models and consortium partners jostling for position in the race to develop convenient, secure, and trusted mobile payment solutions. Here’s a summary of the main runners and riders.

Person-to-person payments Apps that allow money to flow between people via SMS have proved popular in developing markets, where few people have access to bank accounts, and several new services have now emerged in more developed mobile markets. Barclays Pingit is one such example – an app that allows anyone in the UK with a UK-based mobile phone and a current account with any UK bank to pass sums of money to their friends and family. The eventual winners in this market will be those who succeed in combining a seamless and easy user experience, secure payment processing, and flawless tech and data integration at the back end.

On-device payments Two main rivals provide on-device b2b and b2c payments: Square and PayPal Mobile. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey set up Square to enable anyone to take credit card payments on smartphones. Users simply attach the white ‘Square’ device to Apple or Android phones and insert the card into the device. The card transaction is verified and validated


december 2012

via a secure connection. Apple and Android charge a 2.75 per cent commission for each swiped payment. In the other corner, PayPal Here enables businesses to take payments using a similar (albeit blue and triangular) credit card reader device, which is plugged into the smartphone’s headphone jack. The card data is encrypted before transmission, and the customer receives email confirmation of the transaction.

Contactless payments There is extensive interest and investment in contactless payments and all the key players are at the table, including banks; mobile operators; point-of-sale technology providers; mobile app and site developers; and device manufacturers. The stakes are high – the prospect of contactless payments brings the potential for making margins on hundreds of millions of transactions, and real competitive advantage in winning and retaining customers. Contactless payments are just one of the data exchanges enabled by NFC (Near Field Communication) technology, which requires a second chip (or ‘tag’) to be installed in the handset. At the time of writing, there are very few handsets (the Android-powered Samsung Galaxy S II and SIII are two notable examples), that are equipped with this second chip. Many industry commentators were surprised by Apple’s decision to omit a second

chip from its iPhone 5 model. That said, there are a number of retrofit solutions, such as NFC-enabled stickers which can be attached to the handset, as well as NFCenabled SIM cards. To date, use of NFC on mobile devices has been confined to social interface, transport and ticketing, mobile ID recognition, and customer loyalty programmes. NFC’s use for mobile payments, whether person-to-person or with retailers, remains at a nascent stage of development, with low transaction values.

Mobile wallets We’ve left this one till last because, while it promises to have the most radical impact on consumers’ shopping behaviour, there are some considerable barriers to adoption to overcome first. For mobile wallets to become part of an end-to-end consumer experience, the process has to be more convenient, and as user-friendly and secure as the traditional payment options. All eyes are on Google, as usual, to see how the ‘Mobile-first’ internet giant will roll out its solution. Google has teamed up with Citi MasterCard as its credit card partner. Users can also select a Google Prepaid card. As you’d expect, connectivity sits at the heart of the Google Wallet offer, with Google Offers synced automatically to the handset. Users can lock their Google Wallet with a secure PIN.

Google Wallet is available as an app that securely stores your customers’ credit cards and offers on their phones. When they check out at bricks-and-mortar stores that accept Google Wallet, they can pay and redeem offers quickly, by simply tapping their phone at the point of sale.

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In store, consumers can already see High Street and shopping mall merchants accepting Google Wallet, providing a quick, easy, and fast checkout experience with real-time reporting of all transactions and loyalty program redemptions.

NFC in the market How various service providers are embracing NFC Visa & Samsung payWave This joint NFC wireless payment system launched in London for the 2012 Olympic Games. Some 3,000 wireless payment terminals were installed across Olympic venues, enabling Visa customers to make contactless transactions. Samsung, one of Visa’s fellow Olympic sponsors, weighed in with its NFC-enabled Galaxy S III handset. Barclaycard and Orange Quick Tap One of the most high-profile NFC services on the market, Quick Tap was launched by Barclaycard and Orange in April 2011, enabling Barclays debit and credit card customers to make payments via their handsets using NFC. The limit for single payments was increased in June 2012 from £15 to £20 to meet growing customer demand, and retail outlets now accepting Quick Tap include McDonald’s, Subway, EAT, and Pret a Manger. Barclaycard PayTag PayTag is a plastic sticker, one third of the size of a credit card, which users stick to their handset to make contactless payments. PayTags are linked to customers’ traditional credit card accounts, and can be used by mobile users regardless of their handset, whether smartphones or feature phones.

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BEST PRACTICE

DECEMBER 2012

payments made by consumers either electronically in store, or online, using a smartphone, tablet, or PC. MasterCard will offer services to help retailers, banks and tech companies build digital wallets, and allow other parties to plug their digital wallets into the PayPass network.

O2 Wallet Barclays Pingit is one app that has got mobile payments moving – enabling users to ‘ping’ money to friends via SMS.

Google rivals Isis is one of Google Wallet’s main challengers, and enjoys the backing of nearly every major US carrier, as well as support from most of the big credit card companies. Mobile users can access their payment options, offers, and social streams. This enables merchants to send timeand location-sensitive deals to the user’s handset. The user experience is quick and easy – you simply click on the payment option, hold the phone near an NFC-enabled point of payment, and the transaction is complete. MasterCard’s offering is called PayPass Wallet, and was unveiled in May 2012. PayPass Wallet is designed to enable banks and retailers to harness the expected growth of electronic payments. Like Google Wallet, PayPass is a unified network that enables merchants to accept digital

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O2 Wallet features multiple functions that can be accessed and shared via an app and a web interface. The service includes Money Message – which enables users to send up to £500 to other O2 Wallet users via SMS – as well as an O2 Money account, which works like a bank account. This can also be used with an O2

Money Account Card – a physical card O2 Wallet users (including children) can use to load money and use as a standard contactless prepaid payment card. The app also features shopping services, such as a directory of products from over 100 UK partner retailers. Powered by Cogenta, this enables users to scan barcodes while in store to look for better prices online or elsewhere on the High Street. Discounts and special offers are also available from partner retailers. O2 Wallet is compatible with smartphones and iPads.

Boom time There’s little doubt that the mobile payments industry will

boom, fuelled by consumer demand, growing handset capabilities, and investment appetite in cornering a massive growth market. But let’s factor in the pace of consumer adoption. While the mobile wallet promises to do away with cards, cash, and coins, in reality, adoption will take time, and many doubt that the mobile wallet will ever become mainstream. Meanwhile, the early winners will combine a seamless and intuitive user experience, secure payment processing, and flawless tech and data integration. MM For a free download of Rob’s book, 7 Steps for Mobile Marketing Success, text KNOWLEDGE and your email address to 88600

Contactless mobile payment technology is ready, but it will take time before it is the norm on the high street.

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Heads in THE CLOUD

Silvio Kutic, CEO at mobile services company Infobip, explains to David Murphy how keeping development in-house has set the firm up for success Infobip understands what mobile can bring to a business better than most. Headquartered in London and Zagreb, the company was founded in 2002 by a 24-yearold Silvio Kutic. Infobip has grown from a brave business idea that included SMS, to a mobile specialist with tens of thousands of business clients across the globe. Today, at 35, Kutic is running a company with business operations firmly established on six continents. In this year alone, Infobip has opened offices in Sydney, Warsaw, Vancouver, Istanbul, and Dubai; and has launched three major products and made considerable refinements in its existing portfolio. “Our main product is a high performance transaction platform for a range of mobile services,” says Kutic. The company can enable mobile terminated (MT) and two-way SMS, number portability resolution, mobile payments, and push notifications. Infobip’s USSD interactive services

‘Our technology is supported by all types of mobile phones, not just smartphones, so our potential reach is vast’

can be used on any handset for surveys, voting, acquiring public or consumer opinions – essentially wherever interaction is needed. “As we are mostly b2b oriented – these services have brought considerable value to major social networks, OTT players, financial institutions, marketing agencies, and other organisations,” says Kutic. “Our technology is supported by all types of mobile phones, not only smartphones, so our potential reach is vast indeed. It is our mission to innovate constantly, to discover how to do things better. We have plenty of ideas and we are really proud of the scale of our R&D investment.” Infobip’s technology platform lies at the heart of its proposition. And the platform is the company’s greatest asset, says Kutic: “What makes our platform special is the fact that it was built entirely in-house, taking years to build, and involving knowledge and expertise of our people from different corners of the world.”

In-house expertise Kutic says that the platform is built for scalability, so new technologies can be integrated easily. And with all software built in-house, the company can offer a high-quality service to clients. “We build our services from scratch and then connect it into the ecosystem by ourselves,” he says. “Only a handful of companies in IT business have persisted in such an

approach, which allows complete control of the processes and services that are offered. That is how we guarantee high performance and stability throughout the system we maintain. Of course, the platform is matched by 24/7, highly skilled technical support.” Offering its services on a cloudbased model means services can be implemented through a single API. The company also offers directcarrier relationships with more than 100 mobile network operators, as well as access to the majority of the other 800 MNOs currently operating worldwide. “With mobile cloud, one can easily use this massive telecom network – one of the largest in the world,” says Kutic. And mobile developers represent the next frontier on Infobip’s roadmap. Offering access to a massive network of MNOs, alongside its cloud-based mobile technology platform, means Infobip could bring real monetisation opportunities to app developers. From the boom in SMS in 2002 to the opportunities presented by the developer community today, it is Infobip’s in-house expertise that allows it to innovate as the mobile space evolves, says Kutic. “We are an engineering company built on our own knowledge,” he says. “It gives us the flexibility to move with the industry and trends, but also the power to create them.” MM

www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com

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DeCEMBER 2012

Tapping tv on mobile

Tafi Media’s director Dmitry Filippov tells Andy Penfold how the company’s platform is helping its clients get to mobile TV viewers Advertising on mobile TV is one of the biggest industry opportunities – but this opportunity is so far largely untapped. That’s the view of Tafi Media, the world’s first cross-platform mobile TV ad marketplace. “For several years we have been observing a solid growth of the mobile TV audience worldwide,” says Tafi Media director Dmitry Filippov. “But

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2011 to 2012 beat our estimates – the number of viewers has doubled this year. Watching TV on the go was already a common trend, but the last 12 months represent a breakthrough.” While the take up of smartphones around the world rockets and the quality of content and TV service improves on mobile, advertising in this field is a few steps behind. Filippov says Tafi Media aims to address

this problem. “Mobile TV traffic is being monetised with low-quality ads neither optimised for the new demanding user, nor customised for different groups of audience. More often it’s even only monetised by paid subscriptions,” he says. “We want to give mobile TV viewers a choice between high-quality, well targeted advertisements and paid subscription.” To this end, Tafi Media has developed a platform that brings together all the elements required to advertise effectively on mobile TV. It is dedicated to empowering the kind of advertising that is most suitable for mobile TV consumers – rich in content and non-obtrusive – while also providing live bidding solutions for filling the ad space. “To put it simply, we want to make a unified platform for all mobile TV solutions and multiple advertisers, so that all of the players on the market can understand what to expect from mobile TV campaigns,” says Filippov. “For advertisers, we offer an easy-to-start and intuitive platform and interface for targeting a specific type of


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Tafi Media has come from good stock in the mobile TV business – it was born out of the sales arm of SPB TV, one of the largest mobile TV operators in the world. SPB TV has over 20m subscribers worldwide, as well as white label solutions for specific markets. However, its advertising was under-perfoming, with only a 40 per cent fill rate. Tafi Media now has an exclusive agreement with SPB TV – it handles all of SPB TV’s advertising through its technology platform, and the early signs are promising, with hugely positive campaign results for the likes of Nokia and HTC. “They were amazed with the clients’ response to these ads as we have reached impressively high CTR figures, and the user was not distracted from the mobile TV experience,” says Filippov. “We are now working with big ad networks such as Smaato and Inner-Active.” The advantages of mobile TV advertising go beyond simply delivering rich ads to consumers. Mobile gives advertisers the chance to accurately target audiences like never before – and the chance to combine this targeting with rich media is the medium’s real pull. “This new technology provides the advertisers with new ad space, the publishers with new opportunities for monetisation, and the end users with relevant and not annoying ads that don’t interrupt the watching experience,” says Filippov. “With the opportunities provided by modern mobile networks and phones, it is possible to obtain as much information about the end user as he himself wants to

‘This new technology provides the advertisers with new ad space, the publishers with new opportunities for monetisation, and the end users with relevant ads’ Dmitri Filippov, director, Tafi Media consumer, so they will get the message to the desired segment of the market without seeking out any other agencies. With more than 20m viewers in the audience base we have a large audience to bring the advertiser’s message to.”

Strong beginnings

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give. This establishes absolutely new levels of targeting. With all this data, we can provide the end user with a truly relevant and expected message. “For example, say a bank is giving out a new credit opportunity with low interest rates, but only at two branches in the big city and only for working people in the area of these branches. We can specify the targeting just to working people, between 25 and 35 years old, and in that particular area, and show them the ad while they watch TV.” Filippov says that mobile TV users tend to give up a lot of information about themselves to facilitate the targeting, so that they only get relevant information.

Unobtrusive ads The ads are specifically designed not to disturb people from their TV content. Consumers are used to waiting a while for the video to load, so this is the optimum time to show them an ad. “We achieve high CTRs by not disturbing people from their primary activity,” says Filippov. “We show advertisements only while the stream is loading during the original commercial break in the channel. By doing this we have only positive emotions correlated to the ad.” Filippov says that the platform is ready for use, and is also set for further development. Currently, the platform facilitates pre-roll and post-roll advertising, and enables any advertiser to sign-in and choose what and where it wants to promote its product or service. The system also calculates the optimum price for the campaign. But there’s more to come from the system. “In the near future we will launch a new type of advertising, which appears inside of a live stream, replacing the initially inserted commercials,” says Filippov. All this development alongside the conditions in the market stands Tafi Media in good stead. The roll out of 4G services around the world (with the UK finally starting to follow suit); the uptake of smartphones; and the subsequent impending boom of mobile TV consumption mean the company

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DECEMBER 2012

Trend Setters Lowri Davies, usability consultant at behavioural research company SimpleUsability, takes a look at emerging mobile trends among fashion retailers and brands

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Native app or mobile site? Full mCommerce or editorial-focused? Exploring current thinking on the relative strengths and weaknesses of apps versus mobile sites in fashion retail – and the mobile landscape in general – is a complex task that at the very least involves a sharp eye for deciphering jargon. When you consider that fashion shopping is one of the most stubborn bricks and mortar stalwarts – yet has achieved massive online penetration in recent times – it’s easy to join the dots and see that mobile is ideally placed to bridge the divide. From the customer’s point of view, and despite the wealth of opportunities online shopping presents, there are still clear benefits to hitting the high street when shopping for clothes. The practicality of needing to try on clothes – to see and feel them – combined with the social experience of shopping, remains alluring. The major opportunity for retailers is to now combine these experiences with mobile content. Shoppers want to be able to apply the conveniences they’ve

grown accustomed to in desktop research (price checking, inspiration, locating stores and individual items) on the move. Mobile web is, and will increasingly be, a great enabler to the fashion consumer. It is opening up a new frontier of opportunity that simply didn’t exist five years ago. We’ve seen a lot of good, bad, and ugly in the early rush to ‘have an app’, though things are slowly improving. Where it was once common for retailers to merely throw a few new season collection images and a store locator into a mobile app, consumers have quickly demanded more. Retailers are increasingly succumbing to the pressure for full transactional capabilities within apps and mobile sites, as well as being expected to carry full product inventories and make the shopping experience more intuitive and usable. So what should you look out for when developing a mobile strategy in the fashion sector? Here are some things to consider.

Exclusivity, scarcity and fast fashion These are some of the most valuable attributes to consider when creating a mobile brand experience. We’re talking ‘Sneak Peak’, ‘New in Today’, ‘Limited Edition’ and ‘Voucher Codes’. Essentially anything that brings the mobile user in and provides something more than any other channel can; making them feel special and rewarded for having gone to the effort of downloading an app. Social sharing features are also important. Sharing every wardrobe decision with the world isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but you will have a potent source of free marketing from those that do it. Nowhere is the mobile opportunity greater than for the dedicated fashion follower who wants affordability and variety, a new outfit, bang on trend, without breaking the bank every time they hit the town. These users are


DECEMBER 2012

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Fashion Victims SimpleUsability’s verdict on the big names in mobile fashion… ripe for exploitation, and they rely heavily on editorial and word of mouth to tell them what’s new and hot right now. But with all the talk of disposable fashion, let’s not forget those who have strong brand loyalties. Brands can foster these relationships by providing apps that give followers up to the minute releases, how-to-wear editorial, and stockist finders.

Thinking outside the box When you look past the major retailers, you very quickly find a thriving app and mobile community focused directly on serving the wants and desires of even the most dedicated fashion followers. You can gain an understanding of what fashionistas want from the popularity of several categories of paid and free apps. With everything from wardrobe organisers (Stylebook) to virtual changing rooms (Smartdresser) and social feedback (Pose) to cocreation (Stylestudio) covered off.

Make it seamless Offering joined-up integration of app, mobile and web experiences is difficult to do, and few have mastered it with any conviction. What matters is the end-to-end customer experience, irrespective of where and when they begin engaging with you. It’s easy to get caught up in thinking about channels in isolation, but consumers view

web, in-store, and mobile web as different faces of the same brand or retailer. They will bring their knowledge of interacting with your brand (whether in-store or on your website) and expect your app or mobile site to have the same attributes.

River Island The iOS app’s large main womenswear navigation listing mixes editorial (autumn preview and just arrived) and product categories (tops and dresses), making it hard to locate product specific sections. At the time of writing, the brand doesn’t offer an Android app or mobile optimised site.

H&M Mobile site or app? There was a time when the app ‘revolution’ was proclaimed to be the end of mobile web, and that apps represented the future of mobile connected services. The preferred mode of connection (browser or app) is often specific to the task being undertaken. Games, social networking, music and maps are all types of media that users preferred to consume using apps, but for many other activities they prefer browsers. It’s clear there is no magic bullet. For example, an mCommerce sales drive might be best tackled with a mobileoptimised website, but delivering fashion editorial and loyalty programmes would be better done with a native app.

Context of use Gone are the days of mobile use being confined to the commute to work, with users increasingly likely to be using their phone instead of their desktop computer at home. Clearly discussions of context have moved on from ‘they’ll be using it on the bus’. Considering

where and when a consumer will interact with your brand using their smartphone or tablet is now a much more complex and nuanced exercise. And as an increasing minority

iOS and Android apps are fashion editorial and not fully transactional. Users who ‘dig down’ for further details are redirected to the full desktop website. Product information (codes, materials) is also missing, but the gift card balance checker is useful.

Next A simple and comprehensive iOS app that focuses on the transactional experience and driving sales, although it could make better use of screen real estate when displaying product results. The Android app just redirects to the mobile site – and the quick shop functionality is unusable.

New Look Good fashion editorial content in the iOS app, but launches into the mobile site for most browsing and transactional activity. Mobile site looks different to iOS and Android apps which may confuse consumers.

Zara iPhone app makes good use of good quality images and utilises screen space well, but individual items aren’t labelled – it’s unclear if the skirt or shirt is on sale in this image. Android app simply redirects to the main desktop site, which is not optimised for mobile devices.

Topshop The mobile website asks users if they want to save a bookmark, creating a permanent ‘applike’ link on their device homescreen. The iPhone app is also strong for those running latest iOS versions, while the Android app just connects to the mobile site.


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Melina Jacovou, founder and CEO at mobile recruitment specialist Propel, offers advice on how to retain the talent in your organisation

At this time of year many employees start to consider their career options. The bright lights of new opportunities are especially dazzling against the grey backdrop of the winterery cold months. Years of recruitment experience have shown us that the reasons people give for leaving their jobs are many and varied: money, professional development, a change of scenery, boredom, a personality clash, a lack of training. These fragmented sources of frustration belie a simple truth – if a member of staff decides to look for a new position, it’s because they’re not being looked after by their employer as they

would like to be. There are major costs to staff attrition. When an employee leaves your business they take with them the precious investment of time you’ve put into developing their knowledge and capability. Their departure can cause disruption to the working lives of remaining staff. The financial impact of hiring and training replacements is significant. The advice we give to our clients is consistent and simple – retention is key to a sustainable, successful talent strategy. It’s a common pitfall for employers to focus hard on the tangible, reward-oriented answers to retention challenges: regular pay reviews, generous bonuses, myriad perks and benefits. Whilst it would be foolish to ignore the value of these things, on their own they do not hold all the answers. After all, plenty of very well-paid people still seek job satisfaction elsewhere. Less tangible factors contribute equally, if not more significantly, to reducing your employees’ likelihood of departure.

No short cuts The good news is that, generally, these measures cost less than the reward-oriented ones I’ve already described. The bad news – if you’re feeling lazy – is that they require thought, engagement, prolonged effort and an appreciation of the nuances of your individual employees: in short, a lot of hard work. Those businesses that enjoy the manifold benefits of retaining their best and brightest staff have all worked long and hard to get to know their staff, and manage them

appropriately. There are no viable short-cuts. Key to that process is an ongoing obsession with communication and, more specifically, listening. Each employee’s happiness is the net product of their motivation versus their current circumstances. Employers should constantly appraise and reappraise this balance and take appropriate action. What’s the quickest way to acquire that information? Through a series of honest and constructive conversations.

Management challenge The difference between great managers and merely good ones is the ability to respond in the right way to that information. It’s one thing to find out that your sales executive feels undermined by their colleague’s dominance of a given client base, for example. It’s another thing to know what to do about it. Conceiving of the best possible responses to potential problems can be challenging, but becomes a lot less so if you remember another simple fact – your team are human beings, and so are you. If you were in their position, how would you like the situation to be dealt with? Employees who feel listened to and informed will tend to also feel more satisfied. Building dialogue in an organisation, and then visibly responding to the information that such dialogue uncovers, is a powerful way to develop a sense of vested interest in a team. Vested interest creates loyalty. Loyalty leads to long-term retention. Successful staff retention boils down to

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thought leadership

DECEMBER 2012

OFFDECK Helen Keegan muses on mobile

Fresh from the Effective Mobile Marketing Awards judging panel, Helen Keegan reflects on her experience with this year’s many and varied entries… I know some of you will be reading this on the way home from the Effective Mobile Marketing Awards ceremony, perhaps clutching the magazine in one hand, and a winner’s trophy in the other. If so, hearty congratulations to you. Anyone who walks away with an Effective Mobile Marketing Award has come through some pretty tough scrutiny, and can be rightly proud of their achievement. Many others, undoubtedly, are nursing their wounds and wondering what went wrong. So I thought it would be worth sharing some thoughts from the judges’ side of the fence about the whole awards process. If I had to lean one way or the other in assessing the overall standard of the entries in this year’s Awards, I’d say that not only was it better than in previous years, but also better than some other awards programmes I’ve judged in the past. The focus on effectiveness seems to have the desired effect of making most of the companies who enter really think about what their app, mobile site, ad campaign, tech platform, whatever it is, actually achieves. I say ‘most’. To those companies that didn’t make it through to the final shortlist this year, I’d say there were

‘I was impressed by the scale and ambition of the entries – they felt bigger, more important, than in previous years’

48

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two main reasons. The first, positive reason, is that the standard of the very best entries in most of the categories I judged meant that even some very good ones didn’t make the cut. The second reason is that, in some instances, I don’t think the people submitting the entry had really got a good fix on what these awards are all about.

Focus on effectiveness A key element is the evidence of effectiveness, or in other words, the numbers and the analysis of what those numbers mean. Some companies just didn’t supply this information, making it hard for the judges to give the entry a positive score or to be able to judge it on its merit. Simply saying that “the client was delighted with the results” is not enough. Many companies that did make the shortlist did submit highly confidential figures, on the understanding that we would not share them publicly – a request we will always honour. And not only did they offer the figures, they gave us some context of the figures by sharing typical industry standards or other benchmarks they used to judge success. Like the rest of the judges, I appreciate that filling in entry forms can be a bit of a mundane task, but you do need to tailor your entry to the awards and also the specific awards category – especially if you are entering the same campaign for

more than one category.

Thinking bigger So much for the negatives, what about the positives? Every judge will have their own view, of course, but for my part, I was impressed by the scale and ambition of many of the entries. They felt bigger, more important, than in previous years. I was impressed, too, by the global nature of the competition this year, with entries coming in from all over the world. I was pleased to see entries coming in from smaller businesses too. Independent retailers and attractions featured in both the mCommerce and Mobile Site categories, for example, and gave a very good account of themselves. This shows that mobile marketing is accessible to a wide range of businesses and not just the big guns. And I was particularly pleased at the strength of the entries in the b2b App category. Picking a winner here was especially difficult for the judges, due to a very high standard. And when you consider that these included an app to convert torque measurements from one unit to another and an app to help you compare different bricks, the achievement is all the more remarkable. It just goes to show that no matter how apparently dull the subject matter is, it can come to life if treated in the right way. So congratulations to the winners, commiserations to those who came close. I’m confident that next year’s awards will be even bigger and better. Just remember, if you want to get


MOBILE RETAIL SUMMIT LONDON 24th APRIL 2013

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