The world of marketing is truly changing - and at an astonishing pace. We often write here about the steady decline of the 30 second ad on TV, but its slightly more dodgy, less glamorous and decidedly more wasteful, second cousin, Direct Mail is undergoing a huge paradigm shift of its own.

In the UK (according to Associated Newspapers) 3.4 billion pieces of direct mail (aka junk mail) are sent every year, which equates to 60 per annum for every man, woman and child. 22% of these are simply binned without being opened. Very roughly, this equates to over a billion pounds ($1.8 billion) of money completely wasted, not even taking into account the environmental impact. With charity mailing, it’s even worse, ironically, with over 30% thrown away unopened.

Convenently, there are no stats to say how many of the rest are opened, glanced at and discarded, but if we take a response rate of about 1% (very, very high for a cold mailing) you can see that the industry has turned into the equivalent of an assassin wanting to eliminate one man, by nuking a whole city.

The marketing world is gradually turning to digital media and it was interesting to browse through the offerings at Ad:Tech here in London yesterday, which seems incredibly vibrant. Digital media is exploding as anyone who is involved in marketing realises. It takes the best of direct mail - targeted, accountable and measurable - but overlays an instant execution and response, lower cost, better metrics and low environmental impact. In other words, it’s simply a smarter way to operate.

What did quite surprise me though was that among all these established players, there was barely a mention of mobile. From the perspective of a few years hence, this will seem as extraordinary as the ideas of putting billions of bits of tree fragments, via an incredibly expensive and lengthy delivery mechanism through the doors of peoples’ houses, who just put them straight in the waste bin.  

Update 2: Mobile ESPN has confirmed it will shut down at the end of the year, and Deadspin has the internal e-mail. Unsurprisingly, ESPN plans to try to license the content to other operators. You know, if they would have asked last fall, somebody probably could have pointed this out and saved them the trouble, and the $150 million.

It’s the bottom of the ninth, we’re at the two-minute warning, it’s the final set — or perhaps it’s 4-nil and we’re about to get relegated: various industry sources have told me that Mobile ESPN, one of a handful of high-profile content-based MVNOs to launch in the US this year, is essentially at the end of the road, and will be shut down or sold this week — before parent company Disney’s fiscal year ends on Friday. It’s not yet clear exactly what will happen, but as usual, MocoNews has more info, speculating that a sale could fetch $300 to $400 million — but that seems awfully high for a service that’s managed to attract just a rumored 30,000 subscribers.

Ever since ESPN launched by trying to sell its phone for $500, its future didn’t seem particularly bright. While the content on the device was actually pretty cool, the number of people willing to switch to another operator with such high prices just to get it — and give up any other content or services that weren’t sports-related or ESPN-provided — was pretty slim. You have to imagine that ESPN has far more to gain by selling the content to any user that wants it, instead of demanding they pick up sticks, get a new phone and switch operators, and then pay through the nose on top of it. This approach could prove much better for other content brands — like Disney — that looked to virtual operators with dollar signs in their eyes as well.

While MocoNews has a source saying ESPN problems will cause a backlash against content-based MVNOs, that’s not completely clear. Before CTIA, Amp’d was hyping some fairly staggering subscriber figures, and has secured distribution deals with Best Buy, and more recently, Circuit City. But perhaps a little more impressive are rumors of $100+ ARPU from Helio, with 75% of its subs apparently choosing one of its “All-in” packages with unlimited data and messaging. Those ARPU figures are impressive, and the percentage of users going after data and services impressive, but only tell half the picture without knowing just how many users in total the operator has attracted. However, just because Mobile ESPN appears to have failed, it may be a little early to call time on the content MVNOs just yet.

Update: The WSJ has the story too, saying Mobile ESPN is “hoping to reinvent itself as a content partner of bigger wireless carriers…Now, the company is expected to shift its strategy significantly, getting out of the phone business and focusing on leveraging its greatest asset: its content. The most likely option is for the company to license its mobile sports programming to bigger carriers to sell, people familiar with the matter say… Even as it addressed initial launch problems, the company couldn’t address a fundamental flaw in its model — that consumers didn’t want to buy an ESPN-branded cellphone to get access to ESPN content.”

[tags]mobile, espn, mobile espn, helio, amp’d, mvno[/tags]

It sort of figures, I guess — after hanging on to my trusty K750i for more than a year, I finally decided to replace it recently with a Nokia N73, and it’s been pretty great so far. Then, just a few weeks later, out comes the N95, which, quite frankly, is shit hot — and relegates this new and expensive N73 to little more than a placeholder until the new model’s out in Q1. Spec-wise, this phone is without compare in the west, and stands up to pretty much anything in Asia I can think of. Perhaps a bigger sign of its hawtness, though, is the distinct lack of people bashing it already — a vote of confidence in today’s trigger-happy environment.

In the meantime, though, can anybody suggest some good S60 3rd Edition apps for my N73? Maybe that will take my mind off the pain one feels from having to live on the bleeding edge. (That’s a joke, in case your browser can’t detect sarcasm tags.)

[tags]mobile, nokia, n series, n95, n73, s60[/tags]

Matthew Miller at the Mobile Gadgeteer has done a very fine job of pulling together this week’s Carnival for your delight and edification.

I especially like Matthew’s own entry on the past and future for the QWERTY keyboard in (on?) the mobile phone.

I’m also looking for more hosts for future Carnivals. Drop me a line using the link above right and tell me when you CAN’T do one between now and year end. You must have entered the Carnival 3 times to host, but all welcome - new and seasoned veterans alike.

I’ve been playing around with the web-based version of Mercora in the last few days, on the run up to the launch today on Windows Mobile and Pocket PCs, which turns these devices into streaming music players.

I don’t have a Windows Mobile device, so haven’t been able to test this on my phone, but would love to hear from any readers who can. (Or if some kind person feels like giving me and Carlo one to play with, that would be nice!).

While I’m very sure that playing music is going to be the next victim of the mobile category killer adding to its domination of pagers, PDAs and cameras (not to mention calculators and watches), there’s two ways this could happen.

Firstly, we have the iPod download-and-store approach where you carry your music around with you. This has the advantage of instant replay and in these days of massive storage within tiny packages, it truly is possible to carry all but the most mega-huge collections around.

But then we have the option where the music is stored on the network and streamed for consumption on whatever device you happen to want to listen to. This could be your specialist device, mobile, friend’s mobile, airline seat or your computer. Assuming that connection speeds are fast enough and reliable enough (a reasonable assumption in the immediate future), maybe the flexibility of thin client and streaming is the way to go. For what it’s worth, this is certainly what the likes of Google are betting on, so let’s not dismiss the thin-client strategy, by any means.

Mercora have certainly invested their future in streaming, but before coming on to the mobile element, let’s quickly give a run down of their core product.

Mercora was started in 2003 and has quietly built a user base of over 1 million music fans worldwide. It’s a kind of social networking meets radio, where users can choose to listen to music by genre, artist or listen to other people’s record collections, plus chat and form friendships with people whose music you like. You can also play Mr DJ yourself by uploading your record collection for others to listen to.

This a great for music discovery, as the chances of sharing someone’s taste in music has got to be significantly higher than an automated recommendation engine.

All this gives listeners access to a collection far larger than most of us can ever envisage and also much bigger than you can cram into even the largest MP3 player. Anyone listening to this form of digital radio has access to over 100,000 artist channels alone, or thinking of it another way, 1,000 genre or style channels.

So far, it’s pretty similar, in principle at least, to Last FM, which I’ve been using for a while now and really like. Mercora is certainly its equal and I’ll be using the web based service.

But the big news is that all this is now available on a mobile, assuming you have Windows Mobile and I assume (I have no inside knowledge here), soon Symbian and maybe Linux will follow. You can also use the mobile to access biog data of artists you’re listening to and pictures, which would be quite cool, as well as all the familar features on the web.

So far so good - how much does this little lot cost on mobile? It’s not so bad actually, with a full year costing $49.99, certainly when you consider that this gives you virtually unlimited music choice on your mobile phone. So provided Mercora can get over the hump of getting people to pay anything, it’s very good value - it’s less than the price of two ringtones a month.

The mobile version of Mercora is free until the end of October though, so give it a try. The web version is free anyway.

If you asked 100 penguins in the wild if they’d like Killer Whales to eat fewer of them next year, I’m pretty sure they’d overwhelmingly say yes. In an astute follow up question, they’d also probably agree that Killer Whales will eat less of them - if you’re an penguin, living in a dark, cold and pretty inhospitable environment, optimism has to be pretty high up on your ability to believe you can survive. After all, if you started to think “brrr…but it’s sooo cold…” life isn’t going to be very enjoyable.

So when payment enabler, Valista (PR-led survey bias alert) questioned penguins delegates at Mobile Content World last week about operators’ cut of PSMS revenues, surprise, surprise, 65% of respondents believed that it should fall to less than 20% in less than 3 years. And a further 18% felt it should fall to less than 5% - which would be in line with credit card payments, for instance. Currently, it’s around 40- 50%.

I assume that the other 17% of the respondents were operators, or maybe some killer whales snuck in - did anyone notice?

Of course, just because the outcome of this survey was patently predictable, doesn’t mean to say that its conclusion is invalid. As I wrote earlier this week, the current share of PSMS is unfair and needs to fall if operators are to maintain a place in the mobile payments value chain. While their huge slice of the action can perhaps be justified while they are both payment enablers and the principle marketing channel, they might be able to get away with this. But with the rise and rise of off-portal, the marketing role is no longer going to necessarily be valid, making it increasingly difficult to maintain these kinds of margins for payment provision.

This leaves them very vulnerable to another payment system launching, bypassing operators entirely, leaving them with no role in mobile payments. This will be a great shame as, in my view, the mobile is poised to take over the role of cash, dwarfing today’s already huge mobile payment ecosystem.

Surely, mobile operators need to be thinking about pre-empting this inevitability and start getting competitive now.

News just in: Turkeys vote to abolish Christmas.

MMS was a bust for photo sharing (not as if that’s news or anything), but the problem was in the execution, not the concept. People like to share photos, and they want to do it — but sending a message to another person every time you take an interesting photo is a pretty awful mechanism. Thus entered moblogging, and all was good. Then people started using things like Flickr on the desktop, and some of them said, wow, it would be cool to have something that worked so nicely on the phone, too. And an industry was spawned. There’s no shortage of companies taking a crack at photo — and other media sharing — from mobile devices. Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of junk out there, but there are some people doing pretty excellent work.

At CTIA, I met with John Poisson, who I’d first heard of back towards the end of TheFeature, when we ran an interview that made him sound like somebody that knew what was up when it came to cameraphones. His company, Tiny Pictures, has released a new application/service called Radar, that, as Poisson puts it, isn’t about photo sharing, but about sharing experiences. Something like Flickr is great, he says, for sharing pictures, but Radar is really designed for mobile users who want to share their lives with their friends. It’s designed in such a way so that the photos aren’t an end in themselves, they’re just a jumping-off point for more interaction among friends. The idea isn’t “hey, look at my photo”, but rather “hey, look at what I’m doing”.

This aim really shines through in the design, both of the web site, and on the Java app for compatible handsets (there’s a mobile Web version too). The setup is pretty simple: login to the site, and you’re presented with a page showing the latest photos from your friends and the latest comments on your own photos. What I think is a little cooler is the “Channels” view, which shows your own photos in a timeline at the top of the page, followed by your friends’ images — which emphasizes the idea that your friends are telling you a story, or really, their story. Radar is very cool, and worth checking out. The only problem? It’s no fun if you don’t have any friends on it too — so buddy up and get on there.

While we’re talking about media sharing, I also checked back in with the good folks at ShoZu at CTIA, and they’re still cranking. They plan to have version 3.0 of their software out by the end of the month, which will include support for ZuCasts, a feature that’s been in beta for a little while now. The first phase of ShoZu was to enable people to push their content, like photos, up to sharing site; this second phase will push media down to users’ handsets. ZuCasts are different kinds of content — photos, video, audio — to which users can subscribe. It’s basically like a podcast, but with all the same benefits when downloading as ShoZu offers when uploading photos, like compression, transfers in the background, recovery from interruptions and so on. Users can also control when feeds are updated — every night, for instance, so fresh content is available in the morning, or manually.

ShoZu’s signed up several content partners, and they’re working on more, with things just swimming right along. The bigger news: they’ve got deals in the works with three of the top five handset manufacturers to get ShoZu embedded in their devices. And that’s not just smartphones, but mid-range featurephones too.

That’s not all the sharing fun from last week — I’ve got news from Vizrea as well, but I’ll save that for another post.

[tags]mobile, cameraphones, mms, shozu, radar, tiny pictures, photo sharing[/tags]

Mobile Entertainment Vision, quoting an unnamed Vodafone spokesman, says that Google will launch on Vodafone’s portal Live later this year, despite earlier reports that they were actually now considering a white label version of search, following the initial announcement of the partnership.

Rumours were rife at CTIA that this was a dead deal though and was only initiated because Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin and Google Chairman, Eric Schmidt, were buddies. Certainly they were at the University of California at roughly the same time, so maybe there’s some truth there.

But partnering Google to handle your mobile search seems to be a little like Little Red Ridinghood inviting the wolf to give her cooking classes. He may be a world class cook, but will you end up on the menu?

This is certainly the view of most people who I know in mobile operators. And while I’m still not convinced that mobile search will be quite as big as everyone seems to think it will be, there’s no question that giving Google power over the phone’s screen is at least going to dilute the power and dominance of the operator’s brand.

Anyway, it would be nice to know if this engagement is on again, or if Vodafone will abandon their bride before the happy couple reach the alter. Anyone know what’s actually happening? On or off the record - I’d love to know.

Robbing bus drivers of their takings from bus ticket sales is apparently a big problem in parts of Sweden, so much so that they stopped selling tickets on buses. But now they’ve switched to an sms based ticket system where punters get sent an sms with an expiry time built-in.

I assume this is going to lead to a spate of bus hijackings, where robbers will steal everyone’s mobile phone, as passengers are guaranteed to have one if they’re on the bus.

That aside, such small experiments as these are pointing the way to the future, where the mobiles will increasingly become the standard way of paying for small transactions and perhaps larger ones too, until cash becomes a thing of the past. Certainly, I think the days of coins are numbered in developed nations and in no longer than 10 years, if still in circulation at all, will be about as useful as a groat or florin today.

The only real question that remains as far as I’m concerned is will operators claim a slice of this high volume, low margin pie, or will they allow a cheeky little upstart to steal it from under their noses by maintaining their extraordinarily high cut of the transactions they enable via premium sms. It’s all very well making hay while the sun shines in a business context, but I think the clouds are coming and they need to seriously think about reducing margins before it’s too late.

One of the lessons of the last 10 years is that when change comes, it comes mind buggeringly quickly. So, now’s the time to start taking a fairer share and justifying their place in the value chain.

Do I have any particular payment alternative in mind? Nothing specific, but I can feel the changes in the ecosystem. Next year will be a watershed for mobile payments in the same way that 2006 has been the time when mobile marketing finally really started to happen.

At CTIA last week, I met with a company called SNAPin, which makes a particularly interesting kind of customer-service software. Russell met with them at 3GSM, and like him, I came away pretty impressed. SNAPin software, once installed on compatible handsets (S60 and Windows Mobile at the moment), delivers context-relevant messages and content to users to help the user experience and aid in customer service, as well as to automatically perform service tasks on user devices. For instance, it can automatically adapt APN or other data settings when a user roams, or self-correct broken settings. It can intercept customer-service calls and present users with common call topics, like the ability to check their bill.

It also can pop up with messages triggered by certain events. An operator could set it to pop up the first time a user takes a picture with a handset, offering a tutorial on how to send photos, or offer to use a contact backup service after a user enters names into their phonebook. It can offer help and guidance, but also drive users to content and services, such as the backup example, or in the image at right, where it’s pushing the user towards ringtones. It’s that sort of thing that concerns me a bit — I’m worried that operators could shoot useful technology like this in the foot by taking something designed to significantly improve the user experience, and overextend it in such a way that it’s pretty detrimental.

I raised this issue with Tom Trinneer, a SNAPin VP, and he told me it’s something the company has spent a lot of time thinking about. The software is engineered to be largely invisible to the user, and the company pays special attention to ensuring it won’t drain a users’ battery or subject them to extra costs, and they’ve developed a set of best practices for operators that can be summed up as “don’t be annoying”. Clearly SNAPin realizes that it’s got nothing to gain by encouraging operators to bug the hell out of their users, but at the end of the day, they’re just the vendor, and the operators will pretty much do whatever they want. I’m optimistic that operators will be intelligent enough to use this properly, but it’s not as if they’ve got no track record for doing things on handsets to irritate subscribers.

The point of this isn’t to cast doubt on SNAPin itself — as I said, I think it’s pretty cool technology, and their carrier trials and upcoming deals with vendors to get their software embedded in devices as standard go some way to prove this. But I really wonder if overzealous operators will be able to restrain themselves — I’ve got visions of the Microsoft Office paper clip thing in my head. But, fortunately that paper clip could be turned off when it became annoying. Users will hopefully have the same ability with operators’ implementations of the software, and have a measure of control over what it offers them. Perhaps there’s even room in here for some advertising usage — ie opt-in to our content pushes, and get discounts or free stuff, or something similar.

So, as I said in the title, if operators get the ability to pop things up on users’ screens, both in cases where they can help a lot, or simply just to push them to services or promotions, can they be trusted to do so responsibly?

[tags]mobile, ctia, snapin[/tags]