As is the tradition on Mobile Marketing Magazine, our last monthly round-up of the year comes a day earlier than usual, and looks back at the highlights of the past 12 months in the mobile world.
It seems hard to believe that this time last year, AdMob, did not have a tracking service for iPhone app downloads, but that was not launched until January 2009, with an ad unit for Android applications also released the same month.
Also busy in January was mobile and online flirting service Flirtomatic, which launched a mobile beta in the US, and mobile agency Incentivated, which was commissioned by the charity, Save The Children, to handle the mobile response element of a text-based appeal to put pressure on decision-makers to do everything in their power to end the violence in Gaza. The appeal generated 115,000 responses in three days.
February saw the industry decamp en masse to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress, where Yahoo! unveiled Yahoo! Mobile, Nokia and Amdocs announced plans for app stores, and Zain said it would bring mobile banking to over 100 million people in East Africa, with the launch of its Zap service for consumers in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. We also got an early look at mobile Augmented Reality with a demo of the iPointer from Intelligent Spatial Technologies, and very impressive it was too.
Elsewhere, Google launched Google Latitude, Orange ploughed £7 million into a campaign to promote its Orange Wednesdays 2-for-1 midweek cinema promotion, and independent mobile ad agency RingRing Media revealed that it had booked in excess of $4 million (£2.75 million) worth of mobile search and display advertising since it launched in June 2008.
In March, the UK’s mobile networks showed their soft side by agreeing to waive their usual charges on text donations to the Comic Relief appeal, so that every £1 or £5 donation went in its entirety to the appeal.
In the same month, car maker Volvo turned to mobile with an ad campaign incorporating 2D barcode technology to promote its C70 Coupe Convertible by linking print ads directly to the mobile Internet.
National Rail Enquiries and Agant launched an iPhone app enabling iPhone and iPod Touch users to access real-time rail journey planning information across the national rail network, and the Direct Marketing Association’s Mobile Marketing Council published
the first ever set of best practice guidelines for the Bluetooth marketing sector. Finally, figures from Bango revealed that the US had knocked the UK off the top slot for mobile web browsing, with a 29% share of worldwide traffic, compared to the UK’s 20%.
And so to April, in which Apple revealed that its App Store had clocked up its 1 billionth download in just nine months. The European Parliament took action to end what EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding called “the roaming rip off in Europe,” by capping the price of a text message sent from abroad in the EU at a maximum of €0.11 (£0.10) as of 1 July, compared to €0.28 previously.
Buongiorno unveiled peoplesound, describing it as a “mobile-centric social network”, and Vodafone was named as the UK’s most valuable brand in a study prepared by brand research company Millward Brown Optimor. It responded by offering its customers a day’s free mobile web browsing, and launching a daily flat-rate fee of 50p for unlimited mobile browsing and email.
May saw the release of figures from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers that revealed that mobile ad spend in the UK was worth £28.6 million in 2008, split almost 50/50 between mobile display ads and paid search, and virtually double the previous year’s spend.
Mobile marketing firm Velti acquired Ad Infuse, which specialises in personalised mobile advertising, while 2ergo was also on the acquisition trail, snapping up Australian mobile marketing firm Wapfly Technologies, as part of a move to extend its global reach into the Asia-Pacific region.
Nokia finally launched its Ovi Store, though the launch was plagued by technical problems, and eight months on, Ovi has still failed to set the world on fire. And Orange celebrated the fifth anniversary of its Orange Wednesdays promotion.
Apple fans were smiling in June as the company launched the latest version of the iPhone, the iPhone 3GS. In the first three days alone, 1 million were sold. Android was also in the news in June, as Orange announced that it would be launching the HTC Hero, its first Android phone, early in July.
Sony Ericsson revealed that it was adding app store GetJar’s library of over 45,000 free applications to its PlayNow arena service, and QR Codes were in the news, with First HarperCollins Publishers and Arena BLM unveiling campaigns to promote book and movie launches respectively.
And Augmented Reality made a welcome return as IBM launched the Seer Android beta, which used location-aware visualisation technology to act as a real-time guide and interactive map of the 2009 Wimbledon tennis tournament for G1 users.
So much for the summer holidays, July was as busy as ever in the mobile marketing world. Social networking was to the fore, as O2 announced an agreement with Twitter allowing O2 customers to receive SMS alerts from Twitter for free from August, and Vodafone offered its customers one week’s free access
to Facebook on their mobile, or on their computer using Vodafone mobile broadband.
Apple revealed that 1.5 billion apps had been downloaded from its App Store, while independent app store GetJar also reached a significant milestone with its 500 millionth download.
Meanwhile, Coca-Cola launched a promotion aimed at its teen audience, offering consumers of its Fanta, Dr Pepper and Sprite brands 50p free mobile credit with every purchase. It was a first for this type of promotion in the UK and let’s hope it’s not the last. And 2ergo went shopping again, this time buying mobile ticketing and couponing company ActiveMedia Technologies and its wholly-owned Indian subsidiary ActiveMedia Technologies Private.
Talk to any mobile marketing firm and they will tell you one of the biggest problems they have is getting clients to talk about the results of campaigns. That attitude went out of the window in August, however, as mobile couponing specialist i-movo revealed the results of a campaign for Coca-Cola Great Britain which ran in the UK during May and June. The campaign gave away hundreds of thousands of bottles of Fanta, Sprite and Dr. Pepper, using secure digital vouchers delivered to mobile phones. Over 200,000 free drinks were distributed to almost 100,000 consumers, over the course of the 8-week campaign, with a remarkable 87% redemption rate.
Another firm happy to talk about its mobile marketing hit rate was live music restaurant group, Bistro Live. It released the results of an SMS campaign devised by Text Marketer, that aimed to increase bookings at its three venues. One campaign targeted 10,500 customers and resulted in 280 bookings, generating a spend of over £8,000, against a campaign cost of just £472. That’s what you call ROI.
There was plenty of mobile advertising activity too. Mobile Interactive Technology (MIT) teamed up with sister company 4th Screen Advertising to launch what the companies claimed was the UK’s first premium Ad Insertion platform, allowing MIT’s messaging clients to monetise trailing ‘white space’ at the end of MIT SMS messages.
Another mobile ad firm, mKhoj, announced a rebrand to InMobi to coincide with its European launch, and Buongiorno Marketing Services UK unveiled a mobile advertising division, Buongiorno Mobile Advertising, representing premium inventory for publishers across Europe.
There was no let-up during September, as Orange and T-Mobile announced plans to merge, with the two brands co-existing for 18 months after the merger, slated for the first half of 2010, if it goes through, before a decision is made on what to call the combined company.
O2 had an up-and-down month, as it revealed that it had secured the exclusive rights to sell the Palm Pre in the UK from October, but also lost its exclusivity on the iPhone, as it was revealed that both Orange and Vodafone would begin selling the iPhone family, Orange in 2009, Vodafone in 2010. Vodafone also unveiled Vodafone 360 on an unsuspecting world.
On the mobile advertising front, YOC secured a contract to sell advertising on 3 UK’s highly-used pre-loaded ‘Favourites’ application’, while 4th Screen Advertising struck a deal with messaging service eBuddy to integrate and roll out a range of mobile ad formats within the eBuddy mobile platform. And Phonevalley announced a strategic agreement to create customised mobile advertising solutions, technology and metrics that will run across Microsoft’s mobile web properties.
In October, we celebrated our fourth birthday, but while we were celebrating, Nokia was in fighting mood, launching a lawsuit against Apple for allegedly infringing its patents for GSM, UMTS and wireless LAN (WLAN) standards in its iPhone handsets.
ROK Entertainment Group acquired mobile gaming company Player One, and also found time to strike a deal with football content website Goal.com to deliver Goal.com’s most popular online services to mobile phones in selected territories worldwide.
Digital measurement specialist comScore unveiled comScore Plan Metrix Mobile, the next generation of its Plan Metrix media planning tool, for use with mobile consumer segments, and mobile ad network 4th Screen Advertising struck a Europe-wide mobile advertising deal with mobile music discovery provider, Shazam.
The Mobile Entertainment Forum’s (MEF) released its third Business Confidence Index (BCI), compiled by KPMG, which predicted an average revenue growth of 33% for 2010 for the mobile entertainment industry, a 6% increase on the corresponding figure for 2009. And application developers welcomed Apple’s move to allow them to offer in-application purchases within free iPhone apps. Previously, Apple had only allowed in-app purchases in paid-for apps.
The highlight of November was Google’s announcement of its plans to buy AdMob for a cool $750 million (£470 million). There are various theories as to Google’s intentions, but the general consensus was that the move could only be good for the mobile channel.
Orange began selling the iPhone, while IT security and data protection company Sophos issued a warning
to iPhone users that the world's first iPhone virus was spreading in the wild in Australia. The virus, dubbed the ikee worm, breaks into iPhones, changing their lock screen wallpaper to an image of 1980s pop star Rick Astley with the message: ‘ikee is never going to give you up’.
Mobile Interactive Technology (MIT) revealed that Children in Need had raised £1.75 million via mobile through £5 donations in just under a month since launching SMS donations. MIT powered the SMS donations via its MIDAS platform.
And UK bus operator Arriva rolled out an m-ticketing service for all of its regional services in England, Scotland and Wales. Customers can buy daily, weekly and four-weekly tickets via their mobile phones. The service has been created using mBlox Sender-Pays Data, which enables consumers to buy data-rich content via their mobile, and pay only the price of the content itself, without incurring any data download charges to their mobile.
And so to December, which saw Orange become the latest operator to launch an app store. The Orange App Shop offers Orange customers over 5,000 applications, games, ringtones and wallpapers. Google unveiled Google Goggles, a visual search application for Android devices that allows users to search with a picture instead of words. When you take a picture of an object with the camera on your phone, Google attempts to recognize the item, and returns relevant search results.
Tesco Mobile launched the iPhone to its customers at the lowest-ever monthly contract price for the device, just £20 a month for the iPhone 3GS. The Mobile Data Association hailed BBC Radio 1’s Free Picture Messaging Day, which was staged on Friday 11 December, a success, after attracting the equivalent of five months’ picture message traffic in one 24 hour period. Produced as part of the BBC Radio 1 Access All Areas week, listeners were invited to take pictures of their faces using their mobile phones, then send them to the Shortcode, 81199.
And in the true spirit of the festive season, Apple responded to Nokia’s legal action against the company by filing a countersuit claiming that Nokia is infringing 13 of Apple's own patents. Bah humbug indeed.
While that particular corporate battle rumbles on in the background, there will be plenty more to report on in the weeks and months to come. Our full coverage of the mobile marketing business resumes on Monday, 4 January, so please, join us then, and in the meantime, our best wishes to all our readers, advertisers and friends for a Happy New Year and a prosperous 2010
David Murphy
Editor
It seems hard to believe that this time last year, AdMob, did not have a tracking service for iPhone app downloads, but that was not launched until January 2009, with an ad unit for Android applications also released the same month.
Also busy in January was mobile and online flirting service Flirtomatic, which launched a mobile beta in the US, and mobile agency Incentivated, which was commissioned by the charity, Save The Children, to handle the mobile response element of a text-based appeal to put pressure on decision-makers to do everything in their power to end the violence in Gaza. The appeal generated 115,000 responses in three days.
February saw the industry decamp en masse to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress, where Yahoo! unveiled Yahoo! Mobile, Nokia and Amdocs announced plans for app stores, and Zain said it would bring mobile banking to over 100 million people in East Africa, with the launch of its Zap service for consumers in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. We also got an early look at mobile Augmented Reality with a demo of the iPointer from Intelligent Spatial Technologies, and very impressive it was too.
Elsewhere, Google launched Google Latitude, Orange ploughed £7 million into a campaign to promote its Orange Wednesdays 2-for-1 midweek cinema promotion, and independent mobile ad agency RingRing Media revealed that it had booked in excess of $4 million (£2.75 million) worth of mobile search and display advertising since it launched in June 2008.
In March, the UK’s mobile networks showed their soft side by agreeing to waive their usual charges on text donations to the Comic Relief appeal, so that every £1 or £5 donation went in its entirety to the appeal.
In the same month, car maker Volvo turned to mobile with an ad campaign incorporating 2D barcode technology to promote its C70 Coupe Convertible by linking print ads directly to the mobile Internet.
National Rail Enquiries and Agant launched an iPhone app enabling iPhone and iPod Touch users to access real-time rail journey planning information across the national rail network, and the Direct Marketing Association’s Mobile Marketing Council published
the first ever set of best practice guidelines for the Bluetooth marketing sector. Finally, figures from Bango revealed that the US had knocked the UK off the top slot for mobile web browsing, with a 29% share of worldwide traffic, compared to the UK’s 20%.
And so to April, in which Apple revealed that its App Store had clocked up its 1 billionth download in just nine months. The European Parliament took action to end what EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding called “the roaming rip off in Europe,” by capping the price of a text message sent from abroad in the EU at a maximum of €0.11 (£0.10) as of 1 July, compared to €0.28 previously.
Buongiorno unveiled peoplesound, describing it as a “mobile-centric social network”, and Vodafone was named as the UK’s most valuable brand in a study prepared by brand research company Millward Brown Optimor. It responded by offering its customers a day’s free mobile web browsing, and launching a daily flat-rate fee of 50p for unlimited mobile browsing and email.
May saw the release of figures from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers that revealed that mobile ad spend in the UK was worth £28.6 million in 2008, split almost 50/50 between mobile display ads and paid search, and virtually double the previous year’s spend.
Mobile marketing firm Velti acquired Ad Infuse, which specialises in personalised mobile advertising, while 2ergo was also on the acquisition trail, snapping up Australian mobile marketing firm Wapfly Technologies, as part of a move to extend its global reach into the Asia-Pacific region.
Nokia finally launched its Ovi Store, though the launch was plagued by technical problems, and eight months on, Ovi has still failed to set the world on fire. And Orange celebrated the fifth anniversary of its Orange Wednesdays promotion.
Apple fans were smiling in June as the company launched the latest version of the iPhone, the iPhone 3GS. In the first three days alone, 1 million were sold. Android was also in the news in June, as Orange announced that it would be launching the HTC Hero, its first Android phone, early in July.
Sony Ericsson revealed that it was adding app store GetJar’s library of over 45,000 free applications to its PlayNow arena service, and QR Codes were in the news, with First HarperCollins Publishers and Arena BLM unveiling campaigns to promote book and movie launches respectively.
And Augmented Reality made a welcome return as IBM launched the Seer Android beta, which used location-aware visualisation technology to act as a real-time guide and interactive map of the 2009 Wimbledon tennis tournament for G1 users.
So much for the summer holidays, July was as busy as ever in the mobile marketing world. Social networking was to the fore, as O2 announced an agreement with Twitter allowing O2 customers to receive SMS alerts from Twitter for free from August, and Vodafone offered its customers one week’s free access
to Facebook on their mobile, or on their computer using Vodafone mobile broadband.
Apple revealed that 1.5 billion apps had been downloaded from its App Store, while independent app store GetJar also reached a significant milestone with its 500 millionth download.
Meanwhile, Coca-Cola launched a promotion aimed at its teen audience, offering consumers of its Fanta, Dr Pepper and Sprite brands 50p free mobile credit with every purchase. It was a first for this type of promotion in the UK and let’s hope it’s not the last. And 2ergo went shopping again, this time buying mobile ticketing and couponing company ActiveMedia Technologies and its wholly-owned Indian subsidiary ActiveMedia Technologies Private.
Talk to any mobile marketing firm and they will tell you one of the biggest problems they have is getting clients to talk about the results of campaigns. That attitude went out of the window in August, however, as mobile couponing specialist i-movo revealed the results of a campaign for Coca-Cola Great Britain which ran in the UK during May and June. The campaign gave away hundreds of thousands of bottles of Fanta, Sprite and Dr. Pepper, using secure digital vouchers delivered to mobile phones. Over 200,000 free drinks were distributed to almost 100,000 consumers, over the course of the 8-week campaign, with a remarkable 87% redemption rate.
Another firm happy to talk about its mobile marketing hit rate was live music restaurant group, Bistro Live. It released the results of an SMS campaign devised by Text Marketer, that aimed to increase bookings at its three venues. One campaign targeted 10,500 customers and resulted in 280 bookings, generating a spend of over £8,000, against a campaign cost of just £472. That’s what you call ROI.
There was plenty of mobile advertising activity too. Mobile Interactive Technology (MIT) teamed up with sister company 4th Screen Advertising to launch what the companies claimed was the UK’s first premium Ad Insertion platform, allowing MIT’s messaging clients to monetise trailing ‘white space’ at the end of MIT SMS messages.
Another mobile ad firm, mKhoj, announced a rebrand to InMobi to coincide with its European launch, and Buongiorno Marketing Services UK unveiled a mobile advertising division, Buongiorno Mobile Advertising, representing premium inventory for publishers across Europe.
There was no let-up during September, as Orange and T-Mobile announced plans to merge, with the two brands co-existing for 18 months after the merger, slated for the first half of 2010, if it goes through, before a decision is made on what to call the combined company.
O2 had an up-and-down month, as it revealed that it had secured the exclusive rights to sell the Palm Pre in the UK from October, but also lost its exclusivity on the iPhone, as it was revealed that both Orange and Vodafone would begin selling the iPhone family, Orange in 2009, Vodafone in 2010. Vodafone also unveiled Vodafone 360 on an unsuspecting world.
On the mobile advertising front, YOC secured a contract to sell advertising on 3 UK’s highly-used pre-loaded ‘Favourites’ application’, while 4th Screen Advertising struck a deal with messaging service eBuddy to integrate and roll out a range of mobile ad formats within the eBuddy mobile platform. And Phonevalley announced a strategic agreement to create customised mobile advertising solutions, technology and metrics that will run across Microsoft’s mobile web properties.
In October, we celebrated our fourth birthday, but while we were celebrating, Nokia was in fighting mood, launching a lawsuit against Apple for allegedly infringing its patents for GSM, UMTS and wireless LAN (WLAN) standards in its iPhone handsets.
ROK Entertainment Group acquired mobile gaming company Player One, and also found time to strike a deal with football content website Goal.com to deliver Goal.com’s most popular online services to mobile phones in selected territories worldwide.
Digital measurement specialist comScore unveiled comScore Plan Metrix Mobile, the next generation of its Plan Metrix media planning tool, for use with mobile consumer segments, and mobile ad network 4th Screen Advertising struck a Europe-wide mobile advertising deal with mobile music discovery provider, Shazam.
The Mobile Entertainment Forum’s (MEF) released its third Business Confidence Index (BCI), compiled by KPMG, which predicted an average revenue growth of 33% for 2010 for the mobile entertainment industry, a 6% increase on the corresponding figure for 2009. And application developers welcomed Apple’s move to allow them to offer in-application purchases within free iPhone apps. Previously, Apple had only allowed in-app purchases in paid-for apps.
The highlight of November was Google’s announcement of its plans to buy AdMob for a cool $750 million (£470 million). There are various theories as to Google’s intentions, but the general consensus was that the move could only be good for the mobile channel.
Orange began selling the iPhone, while IT security and data protection company Sophos issued a warning
to iPhone users that the world's first iPhone virus was spreading in the wild in Australia. The virus, dubbed the ikee worm, breaks into iPhones, changing their lock screen wallpaper to an image of 1980s pop star Rick Astley with the message: ‘ikee is never going to give you up’.
Mobile Interactive Technology (MIT) revealed that Children in Need had raised £1.75 million via mobile through £5 donations in just under a month since launching SMS donations. MIT powered the SMS donations via its MIDAS platform.
And UK bus operator Arriva rolled out an m-ticketing service for all of its regional services in England, Scotland and Wales. Customers can buy daily, weekly and four-weekly tickets via their mobile phones. The service has been created using mBlox Sender-Pays Data, which enables consumers to buy data-rich content via their mobile, and pay only the price of the content itself, without incurring any data download charges to their mobile.
And so to December, which saw Orange become the latest operator to launch an app store. The Orange App Shop offers Orange customers over 5,000 applications, games, ringtones and wallpapers. Google unveiled Google Goggles, a visual search application for Android devices that allows users to search with a picture instead of words. When you take a picture of an object with the camera on your phone, Google attempts to recognize the item, and returns relevant search results.
Tesco Mobile launched the iPhone to its customers at the lowest-ever monthly contract price for the device, just £20 a month for the iPhone 3GS. The Mobile Data Association hailed BBC Radio 1’s Free Picture Messaging Day, which was staged on Friday 11 December, a success, after attracting the equivalent of five months’ picture message traffic in one 24 hour period. Produced as part of the BBC Radio 1 Access All Areas week, listeners were invited to take pictures of their faces using their mobile phones, then send them to the Shortcode, 81199.
And in the true spirit of the festive season, Apple responded to Nokia’s legal action against the company by filing a countersuit claiming that Nokia is infringing 13 of Apple's own patents. Bah humbug indeed.
While that particular corporate battle rumbles on in the background, there will be plenty more to report on in the weeks and months to come. Our full coverage of the mobile marketing business resumes on Monday, 4 January, so please, join us then, and in the meantime, our best wishes to all our readers, advertisers and friends for a Happy New Year and a prosperous 2010
David Murphy
Editor
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