I meant to post about this last week, but got caught up with travel and business and just didn’t get a chance. But it doesn’t seem to have been too widely covered in the blogging community, so better late than not at all.
M:Metrics, the analysts who produce hard, factual and thus, useful data released their findings about one important aspect of mobile marketing - sms pull and push campaigns across 5 key markets (UK, US, Germany, Spain and France). In other words, they were measuring how many people responded by sending an sms to a short code in response to an advertisement in the media, broken down across TV, Radio, Magazines, Newspapers and an “unknown” category. And then separately looked at how many received sms based ads that hadn’t been immediately requested.
The most responsive market, by some way, was Spain, with a massive 29.1% of the survey having responded at least once in the previous month . The vast majority of these (75%) were to TV campaigns. Other markets total responses were UK at 18.5 percent, France at 10.1 percent, the United States at 7 percent and Germany at a lowly 3.4 percent. In all cases, TV proved to be the dominant media, which isn’t that surprising as the mobile is an excellent “Remote Control” Direct Response tool.
I’m a little disappointed that outdoor advertising didn’t do better, being lumped in the “other” category and a tiny fraction of the whole. It seems to me that when you’re out and about, that the mobile makes a great way of requesting more information by sms, even if it’s just to get an email sent to bookmark it for later. I wonder if this is because advertisers aren’t using short codes in this context (my bet) or that consumers aren’t responding when they are used?
M:Metrics then looked at the reason why the short code was sent - in response to a contest/competition, offering a download, Entertainment or News. In most markets, responses to contests was the dominant call-to-action, with the US being the exception where downloads marginally won the day.
However, Downloads was the second highest category in the other markets, which I found really unexpected, as getting people to download applications to their mobiles is generally pretty hard to do. It would be interesting to see what percentage of these leads converted to actual downloads, as our experience is that drop off can be as high as 75%.
The numbers for those who received a push-based SMS ad are even greater. In Spain, an incredible 66.8 percent of mobile subscribers reported receiving one, with France following at 50.1 percent, then the UK at 36.8 percent, Germany at 29.6 percent and the United States at 12.8 percent.
However, the largest source of the ads by a wide margin was mobile operators themselves and therefore it’s hard to draw too many conclusions from this part of the report. What would have been great is to differentiate between operator campaigns and the rest, but that would also have been hard to do with any accuracy, using a panel approach. It would also have been fascinating to see how many people considered these to be unsolicited or opt in campaigns.
Having said that, this is easily the most comprehensive snap shot on this aspect of mobile marketing and I hope we can see more along the same lines from M:Metrics in the future.
If I had to have a bash at extrapolating a key trend from this, I’d suggest that the push channel will start to implode during the next 2 years (with the exception of operators’ own messages) as it’s both expensive and too intrusive for most users’ tastes. The perception of spam can vary by when a message is received, as much as what is received and if prior permission exists. The combination of these factors means that this form of marketing simply risks pissing your customers off - and that’s never a canny thing to do.
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Russell-
Thanks for the post, and for the compliments! I wanted to add a few points of clarification:
1) We do ask specifically about billboards, but in some of the markets, the response rate was too small for us to project with accuracy, so we did not include it in the press release. In any case, “Billboard or Poster” was the least popular response to this question, in every geography, despite the very logical argument you provide for the medium.
2) The question that pertains to the source of the SMS solicitation offers three options: current mobile network; company with permission; company without permission. The numbers of people who claimed to receive unsolicited SMS ads was higher than those who received ads that they believed they had opted into. More on that phenomenon in an upcoming annoncement! As always, you always have your finger on the pulse of this market!
We are very focused to measuring the mobile marketing/mobile advertising market, and will continue to update these, as well as other, marketing-related metrics.
I’m assuming you’re referring to the “downloads for device” in the second table from the report. I’m not sure those are application downloads however. I’m thinking of IPSH style campaigns that have downloads of ringtones, wallpapers, and themes. Are those grouped in the downloads category? Cause that would make a lot more sense. If it is app downloads, I agree, that’s very unexpected.
I agree that Billboard could be a powerful tool for reaching out to mobile customers but evidence for this right now is largely anecdotal as M-Metrics suggest. There is a structural problem here in that mobile promotions are not part of the core marketing package at point of inception, but rather a consideration downstream when contingency budget is still available. Most poster, TV (and other) campaign creative is usually fixed at this point even to the point that a simple mobile call-to-action cannot be included. The advertisers (or agencies) that have the earlier foresight and include mobile upfront, I think, will be rewarded by broader adoption by mobile users. Time will tell.
Excellent Points, Scott.
The point of exception, creative and effective call to action applicable for each medium is crucial for success. Marketers should look to mobile as a way the thread the needle across all mediums. It specifically unifies Internet, Offline and Mobile technologies into an iron triangle of interactive and meaurable marketing efforts.
Reno
Founder
Pointr.com
Sorry, should read ”point of inception” as scott mentions and *not* the ‘point of exception (although that can be funny as well :-))
Two comments on your post:
1) I agree with you re. outdoor advertising being weaker than one would expect. The figures confirm our own experience too. I suspect that the reason for the low take-up is that outdoor has usually been treated as an ‘above-the-line’ medium where branding is more important than response. Big pictures and catchy copy, but not necessarily attention to consumer response.
2) The download stats are interesting irrespective of whether they are for apps or assets. In both cases consumers would have had to switch from SMS to WAP, which is the main cause of drop off (I’d say 30% more than 75%).