Facebook and Twitter Access via Mobile Browser Grows by Triple-Digits in the Past Year

New research from comScore underlines the strong correlation between mobile use and social, with mobile use of both FB and Twitter growing quickly in the US. As the recent GSMA data showed, this is the same in the UK - 5 million people accessing Facebook via their mobile.


Mobile & Sport

An interesting interview with the owner of one of Yorkshires smaller football clubs highlights the potential for mobile and sports

"The mobile ends up being your passport that gives you access to the club. It's about arguing with your mates who are at the match on the mobile and using the mobile to project the image of the game on to your wall.''

We're working on some exciting ideas around the World Cup (including an updated version of our StattoStatto project from 2006) so we'd be delighted to talk with brands looking to get involved with sport in an innovative way.

Retail opportunities

Whilst there is lots of action around mobile couponing, there is also some cool thinking around how mobile can impact high end retail. Paying for clothes on mobile to avoid queuing at the till is becoming common in Japan and we're now seeing similar ideas in the west. This article looks at how designer Norma Kamali is using mobile in her store. As ever, the key to making the most of these technologies is to develop a strategic view on how they improve the experience for customers.

You Tube ads can be targeted to mobile users

Google continue to innovate and now have introduced ad opportunities on the mobile version of YouTube. With mobile search growing for Google, this new inventory consolidates their position as the go to vendor in mobile. We're doing a lot of work looking at mobile search - both paid and organic - and one thing fascinates us; despite the importance of the landing page quality score in PC search, mobile search still doesn't reward mobile optimised landing pages - as and when they do, that will cause a big upset.

addictive on the road

We spoke at the excellent Future of Advertising in one Afternoon event in London yesterday - organised by the APA, Contagious and the IPA. Alongside great presentations from Nokia, Google, AKQA, Anomaly and Rory Sutherland we spoke about Mobile, past present & future. Our deck is here - if anyone would like a live presentation let us know.

Good review of Meeting Magician

The excellent Mobile Industry Review gave a nice review to our Meeting Magician project this week - and the Blackberry version goes into testing next week...

I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at the APA / Contagious / IPA conference today - The Future of Advertising. A really good day with great presentations from AKQA, Anomaly, Nokia and Rory Sunderland amongst others.

My gig was about Mobile - past, present & future - and these are the slides. If you'd like the live version - with the drony Northern Voice Over - let me know.

And the video for Worlds Worst War (chart 27) is here

Whilst at the Mobile Marketing Association conference in Berlin in October I was interviewed by the bnet TV team and thought it might be interesting to add it here. Whilst we were then pre addictive (and using Big Picture as the company name), what I talk about here is very relevant to how we're approaching mobile now.

Mobile net users growing across Europe

New research from the EIAA shows that 71 million Europeans use the mobile internet in a typical week. and amongst those who do, they spend more time with the mobile web (6.4 hours a week) than they do with either newspapers (4.8 hours a week) or magazines (4.1 hours a week) - (the UK figures show 10 million people using it in a typical week). As you might expect, young people are the heaviest users with 24% of 16-24 year olds using in a typical week.

The mobile behaviours of the young are covered in a good article in the WSJ - which finds that they tend to not use the phone for calls;

Harvard University senior Drew Robb is so attached to his cellphone that he keeps it by his bedside at night and in his front jeans pocket every day. He uses the Apple iPhone to check email, text his friends and play games, pretty much for everything—except phone calls. Calling "really slows you down," says the 22-year-old physics and math major from Honolulu.

We've seen similar behaviours in Japan where it is considered rude to call someone without 'setting up' the call over SMS.

Mobile Banking

In a week that has seen China Mobile spend $5.9bn to buy a stake in leading Chinese bank, the intersection between mobile and banking is worth considering. Nokia have announced the first trial of their mobile money service through a partnership in India and this article looks at the success of mobile transfers in Somalia. In western markets most banks are looking at apps as their mobile play, but few seem to be thinking strategically.

The arms race in mobile advertising continues

Google have announced a patent for location based advertising just days after Apple announced that developers can only use location in iphone apps for beneficial purposes - ie not for targeting ads. And Apple are hiring  a manager to work on supporting next generation mobile advertising.

Its clear that we'll see lots of innovation in mobile advertising in the coming months, but its also clear that what works on one platform may not work on another. Which is why we talk of mobile coagulation; as these platforms evolve we will see 'clotting' of mobile advertising and commerce. To ensure our clients get maximum benefit from the mobile world we have both creative and media skills inhouse so we can develop communications that get the most out of all platforms.

Quarter of US population read news on their mobile

New Pew research shows 33% of all US cellphone users read news on their mobiles. And with the Guardian having sold over 100k apps and a number of news broadcasters (including the BBC and Al Jazeera) launching live news on iphone apps through Livestation, this trend is not limited to the US.

Traffic shaping coming to mobile?

One of the key factors in the mobile opportunity is the wide take up of all you can eat mobile data plans. But the effect of this take up is being seen as the networks struggle to meet demand - dropped calls are getting worse in New York and starting to be noticed in London. Not many people picked up on Eric Schmidts comment in Barcelona that tiered pricing was inevitable and now we see AT&T suggesting the same. Different parts of the industry have different views on the problem and the solution - such as this browser company suggesting the problem is all about apps and the answer is , yes you guessed, browser based content.

Looking at Japan, low price mobile access has been key to the success of mobile - but a crucial difference is that mobile operators there share in the success of mobile commerce and can therefore justify investment in data capacity. We should support the efforts of operators in the west as they struggle to find a way to derive revenue from the new mobile opportunity - whether that be through advertising or other commerce - so they will invest in improving capacity.

But as Morgan Stanley showed, the reach achieved by the UK carriers mobile sites declined from 57% in 2007 to 22% in 2008 so there is a big job to do. We think there are big opportunities for brands to partner with the operators to develop services that take advantage of the operators customer base - for example why doesn't a drinks brand partner with a Vodafone or a Sprint to develop their own location based service? Orange Wednesday has been a hugely successful cooperation between an operator and another industry - whats next?

Apple COO: We're A Mobile Device Company

Building on Google declaring Mobile First in Barcelona last week, the Apple COO came out and declared that Apple now think of themselves as a mobile company. As we've stressed before most of the big web players now see mobile as the priority which is why we believe any brand that recognises the importance of digital needs a mobile strategy.

Smartphone sales soar

New data from Gartner shows that smartphone sales rose 41% in the last quarter of 2009, compared to the same period in 2008. Over the whole year 172m smartphones were sold - up 24% on 2008. ( on the basis of these fugures we think there are now more people with smartphones than use Facebook - around 400m - but of course a huge proportion use both.)
It won't surprise you that Apple and RIM (Blackberry) grew market share nor that Android did especially well in Q4. But we should remember that Nokia still sold 3 times more smartphones than Apple - so for any mobile campaign the strategy should balance reach with richness; making the most of the possibilities of the iphone and android - together with  apps where the experience elegantly degrades according to the reduced capability of the device and through replicating the experience in the browser.

Testing Location based advertising

The promise of location based advertising (LBS) has been exciting people for a long time - Admob's Russell Buckley points out this BBC coverage of his pioneering location based service in 2000 - when LBS was forecast to reach $11bn by 2005...
But the right technology now exists and the challenge is to work out how to make it work for people - things like Foursquare demonstrate both the promise and the opportunity for annoyance. Ski-wear retailer North Face have been early adopters of mobile ( their app - available on iphone and blackberry - has been very succesful) and they are now testing LBS marketing around their stores. We're great believers that smart mobile marketing is about creating a permission based dialogue and this test seems to be a good start.

Admob data suggests 12.5 million ipad sales

Admob always share interesting data about the mobile market and their latest report doesn't disappoint. A survey they carried out suggests 91% of iphone users would recommend it to a friend - and that 16% plan to buy an ipad; that sort of customer devotion is invaluable. Other findings show that android owners are just as appsessed at iphone owners - downloading an average of 9 each month.

Mobsessed?

Finally, this article looks at the problem of becoming too attached to your smartphone; including a couple who needed counselling after the husband began surfing his smartphone during sex!

"The new rule. Mobile First" - Eric Schmidt - Google CEO

This week the great and the good in mobile gathered in Barcelona for the annual Mobile World Congress (MWC). And as well as all the operators and the handset manufacturers the big names from the Web were there - reflecting just how important mobile is now. We'd recommend taking some time to read our coverage and watch the presentations - these companies are making very big bets on mobile and we believe that those brands that are equally forward thinking can gain real competitive advantage. Wouldn't we all have approached digital more aggressively in the 90s had we known just how important it would become? Morgan Stanley believe that mobile will be 10 times bigger than the PC web...

The Google session was really interesting - as well as this new rule "Mobile First" Eric Schmidt was very keen to position Google as a positive force in mobile - despite earlier comments from Vodafone about them being too powerful. He also demonstrated Google Goggles and pointedly made reference to how well Flash runs on Android.

More information here - plus a link to the video of the presentation

But Google wasn't the only game in town. Microsoft chose MWC over the recent Consumer Electronics Show to launch Windows Mobile 7. First reports say it's really good - which it needs to be if Microsoft are to regain their once powerful position mobile. Some thoughts on the sheer scale of mobile and on Microsoft here.

And Facebook gave a really important presentation about how they are embracing mobile - and how they think it can help them get billions of users. There is a video of their presentation here - well worth watching.

The rest of MWC was a little subdued - few new devices apart from some really nice handsets from HTC  and the new technology that everyone was talking about is LTE or Long Term Evolution - the technology that will drive 4G . But despite the huge increases in data driving capacity problems for the 3g networks, there is view operators may look for cheaper interim fixes. Interestingly Eric Schmidt said he expected operators to introduce some form of tiered pricing for mobile data.

We've summarised our thoughts on MWC here and this is worth a read too.

More ipad demos
Outside of Barcelona there is still plenty going on - this video demo of how Wired expects to use the ipad shows how magazines are going to be researchnted by tablets.

Mobile and financial services
Some new reseach underlines how important mobile is for US financial services brands - and news of recent initiatives by Nationwide and NatWest show similar trends in the UK

US Mobile commerce to reach $2.4bn - this year
The apps from Amazon and eBay have helped drive mobile commerce and this new research suggests rapid growth.

Facebook gave a very interesting presentation in Barcelona. Building on their recent announcement of 100m mobile users FB are very bullish about mobile ( they want billions of people using their service) and it's well worth taking 15 minutes to watch this video.

Some of the key elements were around how FB have worked with operators to drive usage - from zero pricing Facebook for a week on Vodafone UK, which drove a huge spike in usage and resulted in 20% more people paying the data charges to continue to get access. They are now producing a text only version called Facebook Zero which operators can give away and use as a way to encourage transition to a paid service.

They also talk about using Facebook Connect as part of the DNA of the device - with clear desire to build an OEM relationship with handset manufacturers as well as operate as an app and part of the OS. They are also testing fanning by SMS in the US. Techcrunch have a good summary which is worth reading.

Mobile is coagulating around a small number of key platforms that will dominate the next decade - on both mobile and on the PC web. In our opinion those platforms are Apple, Google/Android, Nokia and Microsoft - and the health and wealth of all the other players will depend on their relationship with these platforms. Which is why the operators and the other handset manufacturers are so keen to retain their current place in the pecking order.

For example Adobe Flash are really keen to be the write once run anywhere development platform - but until they sort a way of working with Apple they will struggle.

Facebook will continue to be a key player but with 100 million mobile users we expect them to start to flex their muscles before too long; they will remain platform agnostic but could we see them do an Apple/ Google and launch their own handset?

The operators are seeing their ondeck audience evaporate and are really keen to develop their relationships with their customers to prevent them morphing into dumb pipes - and it may be that their role in facilitating mobile advertising and content can prevent this?