It clearly something of a truism to state that today’s Smartphones are the most powerful handheld devices we’ve ever seen – indeed their computing capabilities now put to shame the desktop PCs we were using only a few years ago. Furthermore, there’s no reason to expect that phone manufacturers will stop innovating anytime soon so we can only imagine what might become available over the coming years. It is therefore not surprising that more and more people are now taking the plunge and upgrading to the latest iPhone or Android handset so that they too can experience the delights of these little technological powerhouses which are capable of just about anything you throw at them (e.g. managing your diary and contacts, taking photos, satellite navigation, playing music & videos, social networking, web browsing, playing games etc. etc. – even making phone calls…) Read more »

Surfing the internet via mobile phones is now the fastest growing mobile media activity – so why are so many brands under utilising its massive marketing potential? One in four UK Consumers are on the mobile web daily and if you look at the ‘yoof’ demographic – the UK actually lead Europe in their utilisation of the mobile web. Given these and a plethora of other facts and stats every brand should be doing more or a taking the first steps to produce a good quality, user focussed mobile web site. According to the Internet Advertising Bureau “2011 is the last chance that brands have to do mobile before they are too late “– so prevaricate no longer and just get cracking.

Peter Richards – June 2011

Recently the world population of mobile phones broke the 5 billion barrier. Does this mean that 5 billion mobile phones can access the web on the mobile. Not quite, but in the fullness of time we should expect that every mobile phone will be a smart phone and therefore web-enabled providing every brand with a new and improved shop window for their product or service.

Roll the clock back a few years when the internet was coming of age and providing new channels of sales, marketing and distribution and imagine a major high street retailer without a web site. We will soon be approaching the point where a brand without a mobile web site will be treated with similar derision. Not only is there an exponential growth in the uptake of the mobile web – currently 400% faster than the internet, but more than one in every seven minutes of media consumption now takes place on the mobile phone.

With over 5000 different internet enabled mobile handsets available enthusiasm and engagement with mCommerce (buying on the mobile normally through a mobile web site) is growing by leaps and bounds. ABI Research have predicted that this market will have grown by to US$ 119 billion by 2015 further predicting that that 51% of consumers are more likely to shop at retailers who have a mobile website.
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At the risk of stating the complete obvious and now that mobile advertising has seemingly come of age some interesting facts are starting to emerge.  Apparently the U.S. will be joining Japan next year in the $1 billion mobile advertising community and is expected to generate $5 billion in revenues by 2015.  Being a larger population compared to most European nations, U.S. mobile advertising spending is much higher than in Europe on a per-campaign basis, topping $100,000 for the average ad effort.

There are several drivers behind this uptick with smartphone adoption being the predominant force.  It’s expected that 50 percent of Americans, or roughly 150 million people, will own a smartphone by the end of 2011, for example.  According to analysts Nielsen, 28 percent of the U.S. population already carries one and the halfway point of adoption could come even sooner.
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Those of you that have been using smartphones and PDAs for some time will no doubt be aware that the Microsoft Windows mobile platform has been around in various flavours for a number of years now.  For many people, the first experience of a handheld device that did more than just make phone calls (the term smartphone was not in use back then) was with devices such as O2’s XDA and HP’s iPAQ and these machines all ran early versions of Microsoft’s mobile OS (e.g. Windows CE, Pocket PC etc.)

Over the ensuing years we’ve seen a proliferation of sexy new handsets with all sorts of clever advancements in the underlying hardware capabilities and Microsoft’s software platform has slowly evolved into today’s Windows Mobile 6.5. Read more »

Opinions are like the nose on your face – everyone has got one. In the mobile world opinions seem to change on a regular basis so in this blog I’m not even going to proffer one save only to say the stats are getting bigger and more impressive as time creaks forward. So in keeping with the predilection for bite size pieces of information here we go then:-

Mobile apps (Juniper Research) The global market for mobile applications is expected to more than triple from just under $10 billion at the end of 2009 to $32 billion in 2015. By the end of April 2009, Apple had confirmed that downloads from their App Store (to iPhone and iPod Touch combined) had just passed 1 billion; by early-April 2010, this number had exceeded 4 billion. Read more »

It would appear, that in matters of debate, I favour the alternative. Having been roundly thrashed proposing ‘the future of marketing was digital’ at the B2B Conference last year, imagine my enthusiasm when I was asked to propose the motion at the recent IDM B2B Conference, ‘This house believes that mobile marketing will be a crucial channel for B2B brands in the UK in the next 12 months’. I politely declined.

My reluctance to take the stage and wave my arms around in a passionate display of mobile affection wasn’t so much the fear of defeat (and the motion was squarely defeated…), it was more a response to the depressing realisation that the B2B industry is catastrophically unable to respond quickly to game-changing shifts in market development. Read more »

Earlier this week it came to my attention that the public’s honeymoon period with Apple’s iPhone may be finally drawing to a close.  NPD Group, a US market research company, reported that during the first quarter of this year, sales of Android-powered smartphones overtook sales of the much loved iPhone for the first time.  Following an online survey of 150,000 consumers it found that 28 per cent of smartphones sold between January and March 2010 were Android based whilst iPhone sales during the same period accounted for 21 per cent.  With 36 per cent the US market leader is currently Research In Motion (RIM), makers of the popular Blackberry range. (Windows Mobile lags way behind the others with a mere 10 per cent.) Read more »

So as we at Mobestar bring another major brand kicking and screaming into the world of mobile the eternal question is asked “Why is it so hard?”

It really should not be the case when you have nearly 3,500,000,000 mobile phones in worldwide circulation and mobile has long been acknowledged as the marketeers ‘silver bullet’ for global domination.  So with apologies to Tom Waites : it  really is Big in Japan so why not here in Europe?  Japan has much higher mobile Internet penetration than the US or Europe. This high usage of the mobile Internet (and mobile data generally) means mobile advertising/marketing is considerably more advanced than elsewhere. Read more »

Today is Retro Mobile Marketing Day and we have compiled a collection of tips & tricks on Interactive SMS Marketing / Text Message Marketing.  These are all from personal experience gained over the years, during which time we have seen countless marketeers make the same mistakes over and over again.  So apologies in advance if this is all a little passé for you but a little extra homework never hurts.

Most of these are pretty straightforward to follow, and have been written in an attempt to show you just how easily you can improve on your campaigns, or, if you’re just starting out, what to look out for, when buying and setting up mobile marketing campaigns.

First, some background, for those of you not entirely familiar with the concept of Interactive SMS Marketing.  It’s called interactive because consumers are required to initiate the process of participating in the campaign, by sending an SMS to a short code, or virtual number, starting with a predefined keyword, and usually followed with some other text. Read more »