I was watching this video (see below) of Laura Marriott, President of the Mobile Marketing Association being interviewed by Michelle Sklar of bnetTV.com at the CTIA Wireless show earlier this year. At one point they begin to discuss what they feel is the biggest obstacle facing mobile marketing right now. While Laura gave a much more detailed answer in this video, her take on it can be summed up in one word – consistency.
She pointed out that mobile campaigns and the way they can be launched and tracked is not consistent across vendors and therefore brands are not able to get apples to apples results in reporting. I agree this is a big obstacle. Do you? What other obstacles do you see and, more importantly, how can we overcome them?
It is very clear that consumers are driven by promotions in the physical world to use the mobile device as a RESPONSE MECHANISM TO INTERACT WITH BRANDS!
At Adheadz.com, we continue to see Mobile Response rates higher than 15% when Brands run radio, TV and traditional advertising with their Mobile Tag like ‘Text BMW to 95613 for More Information”.
The increase of Mobile Tagging, where marketers add their brands’ Keyword and Short Code (like ‘BMW to 95613 for More Information”) onto their brochures, collateral and marketing outreach, is similar to the use of URL tagging which happened at the onset of the Internet.
All the best – Scott
Scott Kline
scott@adheadz.com
Kim,
Outside of SMS, there is still very little that can be done in the area of consistency in look and feel. This, therefore, effects reporting, as the user experience is dependent on what they viewed, how, and on what device. We were asked to build out a .mobi website for a Fortune 100 consumer goods company. Obviously, keeping it in straight HTML, everything on the server side, nothing on the client side. This was to look good on the Blackberry.
However, all Blackberrys are not alike, as with all other mobile devices. Images are stretched, some HTML cells can not be read by the various browsers, and one could not get a great consistent look across all mediums.
The answer lies in the fact that there are over 1700 different mobile phones currently in use with over 450+ different operating systems and configurations. One can just not get a consistent look and feel on the user end, thus not enabling control of the user experience.
We ultimately built a downloadable app where we could control the experience.
The mobile web is just not there yet. Downloadable apps still have to be downloaded. MMS is still very confusing to the end user in general. This leaves SMS.
And with SMS you can get consistency. The others will come along in time, but clients need to realize the state of mobile technology in our country and work within these walls to make the end user consistent and solid.
Giff