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How Not To Go About Executing Mobile Marketing On Campus

MobdiscoveryshotSometimes it's easier to highlight of an example of how not to do something backed up with context and reasoning why. In this case, I'm talking about mobile marketing on college campuses. I can't think of a subject that's generating more buzz right now other than may be green marketing initiatives or branded Facebook apps. We've written extensively in our monthly Insights reports about the promise of mobile marketing and even have included several case studies of brands and companies that in our opinions have actually done a great job executing a program...and more importantly, why it was successful. That said, in catching up on my reading from yesterday, I saw a not-so-nice write up in the NY Times about a company called Mobile Discovery and a pilot program they're running on the campus of Case Western Reserve University (home to 34 of a our panelists, just checked). The piece starts out how we as a country are way behind the mobile power curve with consumers in Europe and Asia way ahead of us when it comes to making purchases via mobile and other activities that are still considered incredibly emerging here. Anyway, so the company, Mobile Discovery is conducting this test and working alongside the school's engineering department, whereby those students are helping to manage the program. Through the test program, students are able to download software to their mobile phone and using that software they are able to view a campus bus schedule, order a magazine, get news alerts from USA Today and even enter a sponsored sweepstakes. Ok, sounds relatively ok up to this point...right? Personally, I would have included a few more relevant apps besides a bus schedule, like what's on the menu at the dining halls, how about local campus news alerts and updates instead of just national updates, etc. Anyway, back to the crux of the story, here's where the ball got dropped, about 50 floors down, mind you. The first mistake was cost-related. Yo, if you're doing a test like this, and you're the lead service provider, you'd better have a deal in place with the carriers to either participate as a secondary partner and bypass data costs or step up to the plate and assume those costs, neither of which the company did. Lo and behold what happens, the kids get charged data fees every time they access one of these apps. How do you think the response rates have been so far? The article calls it tepid, which a nice word for shitty. Second, apparently the company's CEO needs a refresher course in morals and ethics. The article notes that the Mobile Discovery CEO gave a presentation to the one of the engineering classes and featured a slide of a topless woman who had a bar code on the rear of her jeans. As can be expected some students laughed it off while others were a bit dumbfounded. One of the students present at the time of presentation ended up writing up an editorial in the school's newspaper (which how I imagine the NY Times picked up on it) objecting to the company by saying they were "slapping bar codes on women as if they were six-packs of Budweiser from the local grocery store." Yikes. When it comes to mobile we've never said we had all of the answers, we like to believe that we can stimulate some thinking among our clients and readers and hopefully provide some insights as to best practices, but if you need a little (or a lot) of cold water splashed on your face for a quick reality check, this should be top of the list of things not to do.   

 

April 09, 2008 in Wireless | Permalink | Comments (2)

2008 Market Trends: Mobile Social Networking

TextingWhat will be the most meaningful and impactful technological/communications-related trend of 2008 among young people? We believe it will be the first wave of traction for mobile social networking. Based on our observations, the segment of young people who have become active mobile social networkers is strikingly similar to the segment that first adopted text messaging as their communications vehicle of choice two years back and we all know what happened from there. Mobile social networking is like text messaging on steroids, it's that relevant immediacy that audience members crave. The more difficult part of this trend call is accurately predicting who will be the preferred back-end solution? Is it Twitter or Jaiku? Or, is it Facebook Mobile? Early money has to be on Facebook. 

January 18, 2008 in Wireless | Permalink | Comments (0)

3% Of Teens Own An iPhone...Huh, I Don't Think So

IphoneIt's shit like this that absolutely drives us nuts. We've posted on numerous times about supposed "research" reports released from Wall St. firms. The latest news coming out of Piper Jaffray's research department has data showing that 3% of all U.S. teens currently own an iPhone. I guess these high-priced MBAs never consider doing a reality check. If their research was really accurate, here is what you would say: 3% of all U.S. teens, or 3% of 27.5 million teens, which works out to 825,000 own an iPhone. Working off that stat, then you would have to say that of 1.1 million iPhone sold to date, approximately 75% or three out of four, were sold to teens. Reality check: these figures from Piper Jaffray do not even take into account the 4% of U.S. adults they (meaning Piper Jaffray again) also own an iPhone. So, what gives? It doesn't make an inkling of sense, but I am sure people are reading it (like us) and picking it up for further coverage. Unfortunately, it is so ridiculously inaccurate that it is rather funny. The research report says it based its results on a survey of 980 teens. Our teen Lifestyle report is based on 1,200 teens nationally representative of the population based on the latest U.S. Census data. One would have to assume that Piper's 980 teens live in either Greenwich, CT, Beverly Hills, CA or the upper East Side of Manhattan, and even then, you'd be stretching reality. I really hope we are not the only ones throwing the bullshit card on this.

October 11, 2007 in Wireless | Permalink | Comments (0)

What Were They Thinking: Did You Hear About The 600 Page iPhone Bill?

IphonebillJust when it seemed the pressure was coming off AT&T Wireless after announcing what was initially regarded as underwhelming results for sale of its iPhone (Apple announced iPhone sales about a week after AT&T results came out and its results, based on sales of the iPhone at its retail stores calmed analysts and the media down quite a bit), it seems another little quirk has come about and this not so little incident could result in widespread customer backlash. Newly minted iPhone customers started receiving their first bills from AT&T Wireless last week, no big surprise, right? (This next part is where I am having a hard time understanding how in the world they didn't see this coming). Well it turns out for those iPhone customers who actually use the features and functionality of the iPhone, like...uh, texting!?!? the bills they've have been receiving are bordering the point of obnoxious. Some customers reported receiving 300 page double-sided bills detailing every single 1K data transfer. Oops. I don't know where to start...Not exactly great timing given the emphasis Fortune 500 corporations are putting on environmental responsibility and sustainability--300 page bills certainly killed more trees than necessary. What's more, I can't believe that the back-office guys could not have envisioned this coming. I am a Verizon Wireless customer, so I can't confirm this, but if you are a AT&T Wireless customer and you have a BlackBerry, you don't receive 300 page bill every month...right? So, why would you receive one if you own an iPhone. Clearly, someone or some people missed this big time. If nothing else big pops up today or tomorrow, this story will definitely get a lot of play.

August 23, 2007 in Wireless | Permalink | Comments (0)

After Raising A Boatload Amp'd Files Chapter 11

AmpdpgYou couldn't dream up a bigger name of blue chip venture and strategic investors ranging from MTV Networks to Highland Capital Partners, but even the name brand financiers couldn't help save a business model that at the end of the day just doesn't make a whole hell a lot of sense. I mean, come on, if the king of brand marketers (I am talking about ESPN, of course) can't get it done, how could an upstart do it? Well it turns out that even after raising gobs, and I mean gobs of capital, $360 million to be exact, mobile virtual network operator Amp'd Mobile very quietly filed Chapter 11 papers last week. Amp'd claims to have upwards of 200,000 customers which based on the amount of capital they raised works out to a customer acquisition cost of $1,800 per customer. But really, that isn't a fair metric. The costs that Amp'd was unable to control were related to their infrastructure as opposed to just pure marketing costs. How did things get so bad so quick? I remember getting a blast email from someone representing them a couple of months ago touting their "fast growing" subscriber base and their unique content offerings headlined by their "Lil Bush" cartoon series. To be frank, we never were able to understand who their customer base consisted of, since they never showed up on our radar when tracking the youth market's cell phone service providers.

June 04, 2007 in Wireless | Permalink | Comments (0)

Verizon Wireless Goes On Offensive In Lieu iPhone Launch

VzwFor those of you who subscribe to our monthly Insights report, you are in store for some cool little nuggets of intelligence and insight when will distribute the June '07 report next week. The June '07 Report focuses on an in-depth analysis of the soon to be released iPhone from awareness to purchase intent to general attitudes and feelings about all things wireless. In anticipation of the wireless device release of the year, rival carriers are not exactly resting on their laurels, and instead several, including Verizon Wireless are launching new strategic offerings that will ideally add some new value to their offerings for consumers. Word is out today that Verizon Wireless, the number two cell phone carrier nationally, but number one among teens and college students, has just announced plans that it will offer a free download of Prince's new single called "Guitar" to its VCast customers. I'm sure this will be the first of many steps carriers will take as the iPhone nears market release later this month. What I found most promising reading the piece was that Verizon Wireless research showed (and ended up confirming our own) that 95% of downloaded songs for wireless devices came from "over-the-air" services like VCast as opposed to being connected to the PC and then transferring over to the wireless device. Certainly this trend bodes well for Verizon Wireless as it continues to add to its mobile music library of 1.9 million songs. As the year progresses though, I look for Verizon Wireless to introduce a new device that will be directly competitive to the iPhone, currently they do not have anything in their portfolio of handsets that fall under that category as iPhone killer, but hey, the year is only half over. 

June 01, 2007 in Wireless | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some Friday Food For Thought

BladesTGIF...after a very busy week that included the Youth Marketing Mega Event and CTIA we thought it was time for a little decompressed fun and procrastination...so here are a few topics that grabbed our attention longer than they probably should have, but hey, it's Friday:

- Today is opening day for Will Ferrell's latest flick, "Blades of Glory," which should easily move to the top spot in weekend box office receipts. Ferrell is the eighth ranked celebrity according to our most recent Top Ten List Report.

- MTV Mobile announced some headline grabbing wireless ad deals at CTIA with Pepsi and Intel signing on as charter sponsors.

- A recent analysis of Nielsen's college viewing data essentially mirrors the majority of our television related data from our two main reports, bet our stuff is a boatload cheaper than Nielsen's, after all they are reportedly paying their new CEO $100 million...

- Michael Eisner, former Disney Chairman/CEO is looking a lot like a Web 2.0 superstar these days...His investment company has been on a tear lately pouring money into web video technology and media start ups, a baseball card company and even a web content production company...His first effort from the web production company he owns, dubbed "Prom Queen," is a video webisode series that will premiere on MySpace next week. Other than content distribution revenues the show is securing, it looks like they are doing branded entertainment product placement deals, with Fiji water, Teleflora and Victoria's Secret Pink signing on.

- Scouring through the trades for good, actionable news stories, we noticed a recurring theme similar to that of the cable news net's non-stop coverage of everything Anna Nicole...the whole Wal-Mart vs. Julie Roehm battle/conflict/future court case. I guess everyone must be really interested in this, because everyone from the NY Times to AdAge to Adweek have published multiple pieces on the drama. Personally, I would rather read more more market centric news and leave the drama and gossip for the Gawkers of the world. One story fine, two stories I'm still ok, but enough already...actually met Julie Roehm a couple of times when we working closely with Ford, she was the original brand manager for the Ford Focus when it hit the market in the late 90s. That was like three lives ago for her...

Finally, and this is personal more than anything newsworthy as it relates to the youth market, but as I mentioned at the start, it's Friday and we're changing things up a bit today (just for today)...got a new computer last week, brand of the computer is the same we've all had for a while, actually have no problem with the brand of computer, it's the operating system. Yes, it is a PC and I am not not following the market we cover who has transitioned successfully and happily over to the Mac...because it is a new computer it came loaded with Vista which, excuse my language, has a shit load of bugs that need to be worked out...every freakin time I open my Outlook I get the same annoying message that three very smart and very experienced IT managers can't figure out...The operating system has more pop-ups and permission windows than AOL did three years ago. I just don't get it really, may be I am extraordinarily naive, but shit, how could they ship something out (and they've already sold millions of copies) that has so many unresolved issues. My advice, hold out until that first service pack comes out, because it will be a big one, they have a lot of problems that need to be fixed...on that note, Happy Friday!

March 30, 2007 in Wireless | Permalink | Comments (0)

NBC Hit "Heroes" To Make Third Screen Debut

HeroesWhen it comes to capturing youth market viewers, it has been a great year so far for a re-surging NBC Television Network. The resurgence is lead by their fantasy drama "Heroes," which based on our most recent Top Ten List Report was the number three television show among males and number eight among females. In hopes of creating a multimedia franchise, NBC has partnered with with wireless game developer Gameloft, to develop "Heroes: The Mobile Game." For the most part the whole notion of playing games on mobile phones is more hype than reality. According to our research only about 4% of teens and college students downloaded and played a game on their mobile phone at least once in the past month. Pricing and availability are the big hurdles to overcome, but even with that said, we expect the number to increase to 7 to 8% by the end of this year, still fairly small in comparison to the 17% who downloaded a ringtone. 

March 29, 2007 in Wireless | Permalink | Comments (1)

Amp'd Takes Another $100 Million In...May Be Even More Coming Soon

Ampdpg_2Who said the MVNO space is sucking wind? In case you haven't heard, MVNO Amp'd Mobile, headed up by Peter Adderton, the founder of Boost Mobile, raised a ton dough to add to their impressive war chest. In just two years, yeah two years, LA-based Amp'd has raised just over $350 million including yesterday's latest round of $107 million. There were a lot of rumors circulating late last year regarding the MVNO's subscriber numbers. As you may know the company sells pre-paid wireless service with a heavy downloadable media component as their value proposition to the youth market. Well, anyway, rumors were floating around (many got picked up in some of major trades) questioning their actual subscriber numbers. Amp'd put out a press release last September saying they were on track to hit 150,000 subscribers by the end of 2006. The press release also highlighted the fact that the average monthly bill for an Amp'd subscriber was over $100, nearly double the average cell phone bill. That in itself is quite impressive. However, at this point I believe the question (or challenge more specifically) really revolves around the market opportunity. Is it an additional 1.0 million subscribers or 5.0 million subscribers? That's the $107 million question. Truth be told, with only 150,000 to 200,000 subscribers, Amp'd barely shows up on our wireless industry research, even Virgin Mobile has more teen and college student subscribers, but both are still very, very small compared to the big guys like Verizon Wireless and Cingular. So maybe that is their strategy, stay relatively small in the space, say $1.0 billion as opposed to $8.0 to $10.0 billion for category leader Verizon Wireless. Lots of questions still to be answered, but one thing I know for sure, they definitely have the most impressive list of institutional and strategic investors I've seen in a long time.

March 23, 2007 in Wireless | Permalink | Comments (0)

Is $500 Too Much For A Cell Phone? We'll See With The iPhone

Iphone_1If you've bet against Apple over the past three years, you've lost. They thoroughly dominate the digital music space with their iPod devices and corresponding iTunes downloading service. Their Macbook notebook computer line has sent shock waves throughout the consumer segment of the hardware category, best illustrated by their run up over the mission critical back to school and holiday shopping season last year. More teens and college students were foregoing previous staple brands like Dell and HP in order to get their hands on the hottest notebook around...and purchase intent for Macbook still remains high. Their next great challenge, and I believe it is extraordinarily great is conquering the mobile phone/smart phone space with the launch of the iPhone, which will come to market this June, only a few short months away. Apple is so confident in the iPhone that they have forecast to sell 10 million of them in just a year. To put that into context though, the 10 million would represent only 1% of worldwide mobile phone sales. If in fact Apple is able to sell through those 10 million iPhones it would bring in $5 billion in new revenues based on an expected retail price of $499 for the new phone. Is it doable though? Steve Jobs and team preach the iPhone is unlike any smart phone to hit the market, it has all of standard goodies of any smart phone model--the email, the web browsing and of course Apple's unique touches: the music and movie downloading and viewing capability. We just started tracking buzz and purchase intent for the iPhone among a select portion of our hyper-communicative panelists and early indications say that Apple has an uphill battle, at least among the youth market. First off, the iPhone will only be available to Cingular Wireless customers. Many panelists thought the iPhone would be available to anyone regardless of their current carrier. Cingular is the number two carrier behind Verizon Wireless among teens and college students nationally and by no coincidence also receives the highest quality and satisfaction ratings from the audience. The next challenge is that big price tag. Our panelists aren't scared of a $200 or even $300 cell phone, but the $500 price tag might end up being a big hurdle. There is a little bit of an indirect precedent for this. Look at what happened with Playstation 3 when it went head to head with Nintendo's Wii this past holiday season.  At this point though, we don't have enough tracking information to make an educated prediction, it's just too early to say what will happen, but unlike digital music category when Apple came to market in 2001, the cell phone industry, especially among young adults is very mature. I am not one to doubt the Cupertino gang, but this is clearly there most formidable challenge since perhaps 1984 when the original Mac came to market. It will be exciting to see what happens as we continue to track this event and I'll update everyone as more tracking data comes back from our panelists.   

March 01, 2007 in Wireless | Permalink | Comments (0)

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