BMW Gets Personal With Targeted Mobile Video Ads
By Ken Liebeskind
Just before Christmas, BMW sent personalized mobile videos to 11,000 young people in China. As a video depicting the BMW X1 played, personalized text messages were interspersed, which the company says is an advertising first.
The targeted messages, sent Dec. 21-24 to cell phones in Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou, were prepared by Clip in Touch, an Israeli software development firm that specializes in Web and mobile video messaging. Ila Bialystok, Clip in Touch’s vice president of marketing, says video footage from a TV commercial was edited so it fit a 90k limitation to work with mobile phones. “The challenge was to generate a high quality clip that can be sent through MMS,” she says. Personalized text messages were integrated into the video, using a database of names provided by BMW. Each video included two text message segments, one personalized with a reference to the BMW X1, the other a holiday greeting with links to BMW’s websites.
Bialystok says the recipient’s name was the only personalized element of the video. “You could send them a clip that tells them to visit a local dealer with a relevant location, but they wanted it straightforward.”
Michael Becker, the global board vice chair of the Mobile Marketing Association, says personalization of mobile advertising is relatively common, but the personalized mobile video may be unique. “Personalization is the key to relevance, and we’re going to be seeing a lot more of this,” he says.
Personalized mobile video can work because the consumption of mobile video is growing, with 7 percent of mobile subscribers consuming it. The consumer adoption of smartphones, coupled with the desire to view video, will spur the use of mobile video.
As for the use of personalized mobile video, it’s an exciting concept because personalization makes the video more relevant. “If I see my name, it makes it more relevant,” Becker says.
BMW’s personalized mobile video was an example of “a major global brand creating original content,” he says.
The fact BMW introduced the idea in China is supported by the fact that 58 percent of Chinese mobile users access the Internet via mobile phones and post content. In China, “mobile is the access point for Internet usage,” Becker says. “BMW realized that the customer segment in China that will buy this type of car has higher-end phones with the right data plan, so it was the best medium for targeting their audience. They engaged the audience in relevant fashion and they got to share it with their friends.”
(There have been initial reports that the campaign was a success, but DigitalMediaBuzz was unable to contact BMW in China or its agency for details. It was also unable to determine whether BMW got the names for the mobile video campaign from a carrier or through a list it developed itself.)
Integration and Analytics: The Online Shopper’s Best Friends
By: ecommercetimes.com
Are your company’s technology investments paying off? If you’re not sure, now is the time to consider how well your applications are integrated and whether you’re taking full advantage of your analytics capabilities.
Mobile Me: Future of User Interface Mimics Consumer Behavior
By Ned Smith
If there’s one technology trend that offers hope for the ability of reality to trump hoopla it’s the wholesale adoption of mobile devices in spite of form-factor limitations such as squinty screens and clunky keyboards. What began as an invasion of dropped calls nearly has evolved into a category-confounding ubiquitous ecosystem of mobile devices that can satisfy an amazing number of human wants, needs and whims.
Want to surf the Web? There’s a mobile device for that. Need directions for a shortcut over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house? There are a number of devices awaiting your command. Want a bestseller to grab and go? Kindle, Nook et al., are lined up waiting for your business. Regardless of form or function, though, the one common denominator and marker for successful adoption is the user interface.
They’ve gone from ghastly to reasonably good over the past decade, but they still require the input of a human agent and a human frame of reference, whether that involves typing a query or voicing a command. Google Goggles is great, but it’s as dumb as a post without a human to point it.
GPS-enabled devices that automatically provide your location to your mobile device’s apps represent baby steps down the path that will lead to a whole new way for devices to engage the world. As the new decade dawns, “A combination of advanced sensors, new human-to-machine interface technologies and the Web for application development and real-time information, will enable next-generation devices to leap from being in our lives to being part of our lives and interacting with the world around us,” reports market intelligence firm In-Stat.
In-Stat took a look at that new world in its series examining the evolution of mobile technology, “A New Paradigm in Mobile User Interfaces.” Host Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist of In-Stat’s mobile Internet group, was joined by Fred Cohen from Texas Instrument, Ludvig Linge from The Astonishing Tribe (TAT) and Andrew Hsu from Synaptics.
Opening the gates to this new mobile Age of Aquarius, Cohen says, “will require a new level of cooperation with partners.” Chipset developers like TI and device manufacturers and software developers will need to come to grips with an environment that places a premium on interoperability.
The success of Apple’s App Store (more than 65,000 apps, more than 1.5 billion downloads to date), Android Marketplace and, to a lesser degree, Windows Mobile Marketplace, shows how profitable and user-pleasing cooperation can be. A characteristic of a great ecosystem, TI’s Cohen says, is that it “produces products people really want to buy.”
Those products, says Hsu, Synaptic’s technical marketing and strategic partnerships manager, will feature versatile and intelligent user interfaces. Today’s display-based controls will be supplanted by controls that offer users and devices more ways to interact with the world.
One glance at traffic accident reports involving drivers using mobile devices offers proof positive that we’re not so good at touch-based, one-handed interactions. Alternatives to touch such as gesturing, gripping, squeezing, rotating, rolling, shaking and proximity to objects will provide a much richer, more nuanced environment.
In the pipeline for users, Hsu says, are sensors and technology that will give us the ability to multitask using multiple displays, incorporate augmented reality in our apps, share multimedia experiences, interact with projected images and enjoy real 3-dimensional displays.
Our devices and applications will also be able to interact with us as well as the external world when new bio-sensory input is able to integrate user data such as heart rate and temperature into fitness and medical applications. If you think today is self-referential, just wait until tomorrow.
In spite of all this innovation, the mobile world won’t have to reinvent itself; existing sensors will evolve and collaborate to enrich the device’s interaction with the user’s environment, Hsu believes.
All the sensory connectivity in the world, though, won’t make for a compelling device unless the user is able to understand how to use it. “A good user interface,” says Linge, co-founder of TAT, “is a user interface you don’t notice. The experience that’s going to win is the one that combines the ‘Wow’ effect with intuition.”
Mobile devices - and their user interfaces — need to mimic how the real world works, Linge believes. And they need to make better use of the real estate you have on the screen.
Linge envisions a mobile ecosystem where passive input from GPS, compass and camera feeds is superimposed on images in the real world and where the use of accelerometers and camera motion tracking alter graphics depending on the user’s viewing angle.
With high-density layers in 3D, it will be possible to look behind objects to access more information and reduce clutter. Eye-tracking capabilities may empower your devices to intuit your interest and intentions. This new generation of devices will increase connectivity between the digital and physical worlds.
The forces of convergence and device proliferation in the realm of mobile devices have combined in a tempest that often overwhelms users with an infinitely expanding applications grid. But that storm may quickly dissipate in this new decade of mobility. The course today is away from all-in-one devices toward devices targeted to specific user needs. “Today, TI’s Cohen says, “it’s about hundreds of different apps; it’s no longer looking for the next killer app.” We may be migrating from a world of limited features to a universe of unlimited functionality, but that functionality needs to be tailored to your needs at a given time.
Convergence now, In-Stat’s McGregor says, is around the connectivity, not the devices. “We don’t have to put everything in a single device,” Cohen says. “The Internet is the ultimate common docking station.”
Though the proof-of-concept launch pad for these new technologies may be the mobile world, this is just the beginning of their influence. “This is technology for all consumer applications,” McGregor says, not just the mobile world.
We have met the new mobile user interface and he is us.
Location-Based Mobile Advertising Platform AdLocal Enters America, Wants To Win With Japan Know-How
By: techcrunch.com
Mobile advertising is poised to become a huge growth area, with research firm Kelsey Group seeing the market grow from just $160 million in 2008 to $3.1 billion in 2013. eMarketer projects mobile advertising spending in the US will balloon from $648 million in 2008 to over $3.3 billion in 2013.
Cutting Edge Technology Targets Female Demographic
Image courtesy of Prospectiv
By Barbara Gengler
With women playing an increasingly crucial role in purchase decisions, ads targeted to their specific interests are helping build brand trust and boosting their online experiences.
Prospectiv is one marketing company using these tools. PrismPro is Prospectiv’s proprietary targeting engine that groups Web users into thousands of segments, based on geographic, demographic and lifestyle dimension, using anything from whether or not somebody owns their own home and if they have children, to whether they live in Boston or New York.
“We use those demographics to put people into buckets and then we target based on those buckets,” says Jere Doyle, Prospectiv president and chief executive. “Literally we have thousands of those buckets because what you do is basically overlay 25 different characteristics on people and maybe you and I have exactly the same 24 out of 25 and there’s one that’s different. I’m male and you’re female and that would put us in two different buckets even if we have everything else exactly the same.”
The technology, Doyle says, allows a health care client, for example, to say I want a client with a particular condition, whether it be asthma or allergies, or Kraft can say I want to acquire people who cook.
Doyle spoke about the company’s focus on females, 25 to 55 years old, who are making the purchasing decisions or buying the products. Eighty-five percent of women in the U.S. make the purchase decisions in a household, according to Don’t Think Pink, by authors Lisa Johnson and Andrea Learned.
“We put the stake in the ground and told people what we do about three years ago,” Doyle says. “But we’ve always focused mainly on the female population, the female audience, that’s where our sweet spot has always been.”
He says the company does a lot of research on what makes females do things and over the last six months Prospectiv conducted surveys and studies on what women think about online coupons. “We asked do you trust online coupons and we found that 76 percent of females told us they did trust online coupons and online couponing is one part of our business that we do for a lot of our brands.”
Doyle says the survey found that moms trust coupons more than single women without children, 79 percent of moms trust coupons versus 66 percent of women without children at home.
“So when we’re sitting with a client and talking to them about maybe building their subscription database, we may suggest that they use a coupon as a mechanism or means to generate interest to join a subscription list,” he says. “I think that’s what makes us pretty unique is we’re really diving in and asking women a lot of questions to find out what’s motivating them to make purchasing decisions.”
Bravado! Designs marketing manager Alina Szober says the company faces the unique challenge of having an extremely specific and oftentimes very difficult market to precisely target: pregnant and nursing moms.
“Drilling down even further, ideally we want to reach these women and begin building a relationship with them in their third trimester of pregnancy,” she says. “Knowing that this is our sweet spot, the return on investment for programs that can get this specific is proven for us — Prospectiv’s capabilities in this area to segment consumers and target messaging to this level of detail are absolutely critical for us to build not only the quantity of names in our email database, but most critically the quality of those names.”
Another customer, Kelly Cates, manager, Web development, brand relationships, direct sales at Hanes, says in the acquisition campaign the company ran with Prospectiv, Hanes goal was to reach winter sports enthusiasts. “Their targeting technology allowed us to reach new people and successfully add to our database with highly engaged and qualified consumers,” Cates says.
Similarly, Nestle generated more than 200,000 registrations for Nestle Very Best Baking. The campaign averaged a 22-percent conversion rate overall with 15 percent failing in the MVC (most valuable consumers) category.
Doyle says the company has a very robust analytics program, which runs back-end analytics to measure things like campaign performance. “I think the success is measured based on our repeat campaigns and on our longevity with our clients,” he says.
Local, Geo-Targeted Ads on the Rise
By: websitemagazine.com
According to digital media consulting firm BIA/Kelsey, geo-targeted ads will more than double in the coming years - from spending of $897 million in 2008 to more than $1.9 billion in 2013. According to the firm, geo-targeted ads currently represent about 10.2 percent of the market for display ad units, which will grow to 15 percent in 2013.
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