MOBILE MARKETING with a catch...

Although I hate to push Nick's "Thank You" blog down the page, I wanted to share some thoughts on Mobile Marketing and how it translated to one of our most direct response clients. As a sidebar, Nick is right. Media Two gives all the avenues for personal and professional growth. But Nick, don't sell yourself short, you already possess the skill set foundation of a media strategist, but you just may not know it yet or give yourself enough credit.

Ok, back to Mobile Marketing. It seems like everyday I peruse the industry news and there's always an article on Mobile Marketing and how to best utilize it to reach your audience. So, after multiple exposures, I decided to take notice of this article in iMedia Connection called Top 5 things to know about SMS advertising. Obviously, Mobile offers several formats to advertising, but this article focuses on SMS (Short Message Service) or text messaging. As I'll always preface an article I reference by saying that most of these industry articles are written by an expert in the particular channel being discussed, as it should be; however, most of these articles, like this one, are written from the publisher side. So, take this agenda into consideration and I'll show you what I mean later on.

The first three points of the article of excellent and very true. The channel does offer mass reach, easy implementation and enough targeting to be "in the ballpark" with your target. From a direct marketing standpoint, this is all we need for a test (get an aggressive out clause first). And this is exactly what we did for one of our clients, and the results were mixed, hence the reason for the blog.

In the article, Zaw Thet's first point was "big reach, and audiences are already opted-in". Both are true, but... The reach is dictated by the cost model you negotiate with your mobile partner. In our case, we negotiated a Cost Per Call program, which offered a massive amount of reach, and to be honest, a little bit of spam too. However, the benefits of a performance cost model on our ROI outweighed this negative. The other part of the statement, "audiences are already opted-in" is loosely accurate, with the key word being loosely. Very loose, almost deceptively loose. This is what I mean. Let's say I'm watching an NFL draft special on TV and see something asking me to text a shortcode to a number to receive draft updates to my phone. I'm not going to be able to watch it live, so this is perfect for getting my fix. Well, some conditions apply in small print on the TV screen that I may or may not have seen. In our experience, the user does not see this and just focuses on the shortcode and number to text it to. So, what they don't know is they've "opted-in" to receive sports alerts AND ADVERTISING. Also, within this fine print is their OPT-OUT language, which I'm guessing, most of the time, the user isn't paying attention to that either. So to continue my example, I get my draft updates to my phone, but I also keep getting sports updates well past this event and pretty much whatever else the mobile partner wants to send to me, including ads. And unfortunately, I can't remember how to make them stop (opt-out). Listen, I understand and am fine with the process described, but that's because I'm in the industry. Think of the general public. Two months from now, they have forgotten that they signed up for draft updates, they are getting addition text messages which they think are random, advertising is included, and on top of all that, it is costing them money if they do not have unlimited texting. So, this is exactly what happened in our case when we thought that "audiences are already opted-in". Within our ads, we included our 800 number to call to schedule an appointment, and we had a number of these types of complaints where users didn't have any idea where or when they "opted in" to receive these messages, and unfortunately, the CSRs were not able to help them because of their lack of recollection. So, you, the advertiser, are left cleaning up the mess of a flawed sign-up process and a consumer that doesn't pay attention. Fortunately, we were able to put a process in place to combat these occurrances and still show strong results, so we would do the program again.

We all know that targeting is a key component of any media strategy, and mobile is no exception. Zaw offers two great ways to achieve this, content and messaging. In our case, we used a performance cost model, which made the content targeting less important, although we were able to choose some verticals to test. The copy or message targeting is an excellent point with him saying "one size fits all ad copy is one of the most common reasons for poor campaign performance." Now, I don't know if this is the "most" common reason, but it behooves any advertiser to heed his advice.

Lastly, I'm not disagreeing in the last two points, because I do think that the channel can be an excellent CRM tool to build a relationship with your consumer, but the idea of "participation media" goes against at least 2 of his first three points. These custom games and surveys to engage the audience does require legwork, lacks reach, and what Mr. Thet fails to mention, is expensive, meaning more commissions for him, which is part of the reason why it conveniently made it's way into the article.