One of the mantras trotted out by all and sundry is that the mobile represents a great marketing medium “because it’s so personal” or is even “the most personal medium ever”. It’s become such a frequent statement that no one really questions its validity. Indeed, it’s become true through repetition - a sort of affirmation principle where if you keep saying something, it eventually happens.
However, I thought it worth exploring as I’m not so sure it’s especially true, certainly in the cause and effect way it’s presented. The argument implies that marketing messages via the mobile are somehow more trustworthy or believable and thus more effective. Or that messages are more personalised in some way than other media.
I think the origin of the thinking came from the old days of SMS Push, which never really got much beyond the foothills of the mobile marketing mountain range. The idea was that because sms is so “personal” - they normally come from friends - recipients were very likely to open sms marketing messages. Unlike say, email or Direct Mail, where many messages get binned without being read.
There might have been some truth in that for a while. But users wised up to screening out unwanted commercial sms pretty quickly.
However, the mobile medium has evolved from those days and now the most common forms of mobile marketing are almost certainly SMS Pull and graphical and text banners on mobile web sites.
SMS Pull doesn’t rely on the medium being Personal at all. Portable is certainly important, so people can react and engage with marketing messages on impulse. You could argue that when they send the sms in response that it contains a unique identifier (ie the mobile number), which allows the marketer to respond. But that’s not an unusual feature - response information in the form of a snail mail address, email ID or landline call is a feature of any form of direct response marketing and the mobile isn’t more or less personal because of it. In fact, it doesn’t even normally cater for an especially personalised response, certainly in comparison to say, Post Code data, unless of course the mobile number is already known and profiled in some way.
So whether or not the mobile is Personal is largely irrelevant for this kind of activity.
Next up, let’s consider banner ads. Really, these are not very different to their online cousins, which have been around a lot longer and thus are more mature, plus have features like Cookies available to track behaviour. Despite this, you’d be hard pressed to argue that these forms of marketing were especially personal in any way.
Even banners related to search results aren’t really personal or even personalised to the individual. And these results are notoriously prone to misinterpreting what the searcher is looking for. Cory Doctorow’s latest short story gives an example of an individual suspected of making rockets on the basis that he’s been involved in launching a brand of coffee called “Jet Fuel” and there are many, many incidences of similar errors.
That doesn’t mean that the mobile doesn’t make an excellent medium for marketing messages. There are loads of case studies of successful campaigns, which deliver far higher ROI than any other medium. But these successes come from context (that it’s on a mobile), targeting, copy writing, creative execution and a few other criteria. No one can claim plausibly today that they personalise this sort of advertising, whether it be online on on-mobile.
The final area that’s worth briefly examining is sponsoring P2P sms. Some companies are trying to jump on the bandwagon of inserting an advertising message into an sms that I might send to my wife or friends. Presumably, I, the user, get recompensed in this model by getting cheaper sms.
Leaving aside the question of whether this is a good medium or not, I don’t see how it’s going to be any more effective because it’s embedded in a personal message on my personal device. Sure, the recipient will open it, but will they be more likely act on it because of that? I doubt it.
Now, obviously the mobile phone is personal - actually many people wouldn’t even lend their mobile to someone else (63% in this example) - but I would argue that it doesn’t mean that it makes a better medium because of it.
Finally, let’s look to the future - maybe 10 years out - will the cause (personal) be any more closely linked to the claimed effect (better medium) then?
We’ll certainly be looking at a very different marketing landscape. All digital marketing will be highly targeted, personalised (where possible) and employ sophisticated algorithms that take into account behaviour, preferences and profiling of the recipient. But will this result in the mobile being a better medium because it’s personal in some way? In other words, will people be more likely to respond to the same message on mobile, as opposed to their PC on the basis that the mobile is “theirs” and the PC is shared?
No, in a word.
Am I missing something? If you’re a proponent of the mobile being personal and thus a better marketing medium, please tell me what I’m missing.
I think you put a narrow frame around personal medium. If you broaden it to include the ability to save coupons and have easy to use loyalty cards (perhaps through NFC) then your connection to the medium is much more than a PC. Just look at how many people carry supermarket and department store loyalty cards.
Tim - Hmmm…not so sure really. I mean yes, you could use the phone in this way obviously, and it may even work better than the old ways. But it’s not going to work better because it’s personal, right? It’ll work better because it’s more convenient or more efficient to redeem coupons or use loyalty cards, right?
So the Personal argument seems to me to be a red herring.
Unless the idea is that because it’s somehow personal, marketers need to approach it more cautiously than other media. I think that this is pretty suspect too. After all, spam is spam and I can’t see people getting more upset by getting it on their mobile than on their PC.
Russell
Perhaps the mobile is the best current guess we have for merging identity with device - and it’s no more than that.
The power of personalisation is reliant on the quality of the continuous conversation. Where and how you continue that conversation with the individual is less relevant (ie on what device).
So, I think I agree that it’s not the mobile device that is the important ‘personalised’ element here, but the very strong connection between that device and the individual.
Interesting question. I should think more about this!
Really good points Russell. Personally, I believe the credit card issuers and payment networks are critical to providing the relevant data required to properly target users. I also agree that NFC will speed things along. (Now for the self-promotion) At RocketBux, we’ve narrowed the spectrum of relevance to three things: Location, time and suitability of the offer. If there’s a technology (perhaps even a human, gasp!) behind the scenes which knew my location, time of day and what my buying behaviour was over the past 10 years, I could be served a relevant offer with shocking accuracy. I may only get one offer per week or one per day but that one I get will be spot on. The other key point is handling redemption. If you deliver a message to the phone and use a CPM based model, you won’t make enough money to ever match delivery costs. There must be a mechanism for tracking a conversion that originated from the mobile offer. A conversion-based model will greatly outstrip CPM based models every time in the mobile space. In a perfect world, a user only receives an offer that has a near 100% likelyhood of being redeemed.
Russel,
The greatest challenge before mobile advetisers is to make effective use of the ‘personal’ nature of mobile..
I think that is the flaw in advertising on mobile today, NOT the fact that mobile is not personal. let me explain..
I mite use a laptop, palm tv, etc but the mobile is extensively used “only’ for personal reasons. it is more readily carried/ taken everywehre, all the time, unlike an other media of communication. so on and so forth… point being mobile is “infinitely” “more personal” than any other media available to advertisers today.
Now, the point that u have made about banner ads, SMS pull is very correct. They are not personal. That i think is not the flaw of the media, but the use it is being put to. Maybe the fact that most advertisers are children of the wwww generation may have to do with the duplication of online advertising in a slightly modified mobile world.
That is where the challenge lies to use the mobile media in a more effective, ’seperate’ way! We at our company are trying to keep that in mind while developing our mobile advertising. so when we or anyone gets to put together those pieces.. thats when.. to use the clice.. “Mobile Advt will be Personal” !!
Thanks for the comments everyone.
Fred - sadly you’ll find this LBS model really hard to implement effectively - I’ve been there and written the free white paper. Let me know if you’d like a copy. And there’s also the matter of tracking redemptions on a CPA model, which if not impossible, is very, very hard.
Manas - not sure I follow your logic here. Surely the mobile is as much a business tool as a personal one? And I don’t buy into the fact that because it’s portable (or mobile) automatically makes it more personal. I wear my watch and glasses pretty much everywhere, but does that make them a great marketing medium? And even if we could find an acceptable way of beaming ads to my glasses, am I more likely to react more positively to messages because they’re “my glasses” as opposed to seeing the same ad on my PC?
And while I admire and agree with your aspirations about making ads more relevant by personalising them, we have to be realistic about what we can deliver. There’s huge leaps to be made in better targeting, but true personalisation is some way away yet. Even mobile operators who (in theory) have a lot of the data to personalise marketing, find that in practice, the implementation is beyond even their mighty capability.
Russell
Russell, this week, RocketBux has implemented a LBS offer in 185 stores (the retailer has 1700 stores nationawide). The offer promo code is redeemed by the user and tracked automatically. There is no human intervention other than the user “pulling” the promo. I call it the “complete 360″. Yes, it was difficult, but alas, not impossible. I think the flaw in ZagMe was that you were way too early, SMS costs were too high for consumers, the offers were LBS offers but not surgically strategic LBS offers and redemptions were not valued high enough nor easily reconciled. LBS will happen but it will have to wait until the convergence of consumer acceptance and merchant necessity. With today’s NYT article’s quote from Visa, that time is fast approaching.
Russell,
You’ve said it: it is about the context! This however is why people equate it to personal: with the (theoretical) targeting and the fact that most people don’t share their mobile wherever they are, it is the one device that brings context and user closest, hence the most personal device.
Be it targeted marketing, LBS or what not, it is all about the context. Context evolves around objects, so targeting or tracking these objects is helpful to create this mesh in which to increase relevance of any given offering to any particular user. Diverting user and device can pull things out of context. If my wife, my son and I would share one mobile phone though, I would probably receive offers/ads/info on lip stick and airbags (her industry), my son would be bombarded (and bored) with golf offers and my wife would be drowning in various gadget and skater deals. Not so good…
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