Is anybody in the mood for an article about the recession? I bet you aren’t. And you can just imagine how excited I am to be writing it. Ironically, I pretty much have a free editorial reign, which subsequently suggests I am not obliged to even mention the recession here. But I’m going to, not because I want to, but simply to annoy anyone willing to venture past this paragraph.

It’s a simple test. I think those pushing through the inevitable bore that this article may well turn out to be are either desperate for answers in these trying times, or at least willing to keep an open mind. Let’s dig in then, shall we?

A smart man, evidently, some Vice President of Marketing at some mobile oriented company in the US, Mr. Jim Shilale, released an article on Friday (21st) addressing why advertisers should turn to mobile even during an economic slowdown. While marketing budgets are fed to the shredder, his article highlights key factors on why mobile marketing remains one of the pertinent channels to engage in.

Another smart guy, Michael something, bulleted three of the factors that are essential in your mobile marketing campaigns:

1. Combine the campaign with other channels. [I couldn’t agree more, but then I’ve been saying this for while now.]
2. Make it simple and focus on the consumer experience. [Another valid point. Ironically, I’ve been known to mention this in the past as well. ]
3. Offer an incentive or benefit for the consumer. [Low and behold…what do you know? There are even records of this in my archives too. ]

If you’ve managed to make it this far in the article, and have found a way to excuse my arrogance and cockiness, you would be well worth wondering why mobile marketing would be especially effective during the recession, given that Mr. Shilale’s 3 points have been covered ages ago, long before recession was even an acknowledged buzzword. The answer is that it won’t. It won’t be any more effective, and it won’t be any less. Mobile marketing simply is the best marketing channel to be used in conjunction with any other media format.

I wasn’t lying when I said that Mr. Shilale is a smart man. If you can manage to get your hands on a copy of his article, I suggest you do so. If you’re in a hurry though, and you trust me, then I’ll let you in on my 4 personal reasons why it’s critical for any business to complement their marketing strategy (prior, during and after the recession) with mobile campaigning.

1. Mobile marketing is not experimental. South Africa boasts with a 90% mobile penetration rate, one of the highest in the world. Not convinced yet? Move to point #2.
2. It provides instant gratification. There’s something rather appealing about making a purchase, receiving additional information or even entering a competition without lifting a butt cheek off my couch.
3. Despite economic turmoil, people simply won’t stop reading text messages, watching television, listening to the radio and reading newspapers and magazines. They won’t stop wanting and they won’t stop needing. If you can create a want or fulfill a need and combine it with instant gratification, you’re golden.
4. If Barack Obama does it, then so should you.

Enough said.

With the US presidential election now concluded and the world at large coming off a natural post electoral high it is South Africa that’s bracing itself for round number two in 2009. And what massive shoes we have to fill. The Obama 2008 campaign has shown us a couple of things:

1. Being connected in 2008 is critical to the success of any campaign.
2. Addressing the masses through all available media channels on a personal level can secure loyalty.

There is a definite heightened expectation for election 2009 in South Africa. It’s obvious that the broad availability of information and the sheer pace through which this information is delivered to our monitors have underpinned the importance of using electronic communications to spread the word.

Having said that, the DA and the ANC both have been utilizing the internet and mobile channels to gain momentum for a while now, but it is profound how ordinary their efforts appear when compared to the massive global appeal of the US elections.

The IEC have made it that much simpler for people to check whether they are on the voters roll for the upcoming elections in 2009 by either visiting their website and locking in our ID numbers or sending a text message with the ID to receive your status on your phone.

This is great progress considering the reluctance people had to previously go through the efforts to check their status, not to mention voting. There seems to be something like a national surge of responsibility and voting is top of mind of the masses.

Of course, the masses referred to here are those elite few that have the luxury of the internet. Less than 10% of the South African population is connected to the internet, which may or may not explain the IEC’s lack of urgency in getting their website compatible with various web browsers. Regardless, my point in question is whether we’re enabling the already enabled.

While Obama 2008 has shown how the internet could facilitate a ridiculously loyal following, one has to wonder what the respective parties in South Africa have in mind. My mind has been made up to whom my vote will go, but then to be truly honest, I was pretty much born into it. How many of the candidates have made the effort to communicate their message on a more personal level?

It may seem incomprehensible that a candidate should address me personally, but then this is the age of Me, Myself and I. And while the US have an internet penetration level much higher than South Africa, we have the unprecedented advantaged to be one of the highest mobile penetrated markets in the world.

Yet, we haven’t witnessed any form of mobile campaigning that is worth noting. Is that still to come? Our candidates are ready, speeches polished, Windsor knots perfected, but who will they address?

In the mobile phone, the political parties in South Africa have arguably the most valuable tool to swing votes known to man. And while the extravagance of the mobile phone might be slightly diminished compared to the internet, it is by far the biggest reaching communications platform we have to our disposal.

Something to think about the next time you pollute my boulevard with your yellow posters.

Mercedes Benz has recently added to their marketing mechanics by including mobile to its repertoire of value added services. This is another innovative move from another top international brand, one that surely puts a smile on the faces of each of the Benz’s family members, iPhone users, not to mention the agency responsible for this piece of development.

The mobile portal as it is known contains four sections including New Vehicles, Brand World, Entertainment and Service & Contact and it has been joined by additional entertainment platforms such as Mercedes-Benz TV and the music download service Mercedes-Benz Mixed Tape.

The range of personalized services is rounded off by a car configurator and information on the technical details of each model offered by the Stuttgart-based automotive brand.

There are a multitude of features to this new development, but I’d rather spare my readers the technical specifications and focus on one rather important question: Why would Mercedes Benz, “the car for the older man”, identify the need to create a mobile internet platform for its fans?

Some of you might rightly argue that Mercedes Benz have become a lot more savvy of late, especially considering their uber cool new C-Class BMW basher, a car that certainly appeals to the more established and young executive market alike. But is mobile marketing pushing the envelope a bit far?

Let’s look at a couple of the core benefits of mobile marketing: Adding value to service delivery, ranging from access within reception areas to the global accessibility and uptake of the device. That’s massive value any which way you look at it. It is also likely to cloud the downsides to any mobile campaign, which is where my skepticism is borne from.

Without having any figures or ROI measurements to my availability, there are a couple of problems I can identify with developing mobile services to complement your brand, more so if you are smaller business and every marketing penny counts.

After the initial hype around the platform, what are the reasonable expectations of sustained usage of the site? If we look at demographics, it’s almost a given that the younger generation appeals much stronger to these types of technological advances and the younger the user, the shorter the attention span or interest.

Yes, it is a cool new addition to my iPhone, but how long does it take before this excitement is filed in the back of my phone’s memory bank and first in line for deletion once I run out of my incredibly large storage space?

Mobile is a strong and effective medium for marketing and brand awareness, but it’s important to keep a clear understanding of the basic needs of your business. It’s sometimes very easy to get carried away with creative campaigns, often lacking longevity, when simple and clear communications would’ve sufficed.

There are two types of businesses:

1. The Mercedes Benz’s with the capital to fill every possible marketing channel with content, regardless of the sustainability of its value add and the purchasing potential of the market it serves.
2. The hundreds of thousands of other businesses that need to focus a lot of time and energy on selecting a channel that reaches the largest possible target audience and ensuring that the campaigns possess the potential to optimally sustain its value.

Make sure you know in which category your business resides.

We may be slightly behind on internet technology here in South Africa, but I think it is safe to assume that it is exactly because of this that we are one of the most progressive countries in the world in terms of mobile communications.

The company behind Opera mini, a web browser that is installed on mobile phones, has recently released their State of the Mobile Web Report for August 2008.

The report highlights a couple of interesting facts, especially for businesses looking to incorporate mobile communications into their marketing mix.

1. Usage of the mobile Web continues to grow in terms of unique users, page views and data transferred.
2. This month, usage of the mobile Web saw significant growth in Ukraine, which jumped to 4th place, and South Africa, which jumped to 6th place in the top 10 list of countries, displacing China and the United States respectively.
3. Mobile Web users spend a significant amount of time browsing less popular Web pages in addition to the most popular ones.

From these highlights, it seems that South Africans are pro-actively engaging in online content, not only perennial favourites such as Google and Facebook, but also lesser popular websites. It would be interesting to note how many of these less popular websites are visited via an organic search in Google.

The list of the top 10 mobile browsed website in South Africa also provides a significant amount of evidence that users nowadays use their mobile phones to engage, rather than only seeking results or once off information.

1. facebook.com
2. google.com
3. wikipedia.org ( back on the list )
4. gamejump.com ( down from 3 )
5. yahoo.com ( down from 4 )
6. mxit.co.za
7. peperonity.com ( up from 8 )
8. capetown.gumtree.co.za ( up from 10 )
9. amazon.com ( new )
10. twilightwap.com ( new )

Two search engines rank inside the top 5 browsed websites which strongly supports the importance of search engine optimization for higher result ranking for your website. Not only is search engine ranking crucial, but since such a large portion of users access the internet via their phones, it is critical that your website is mobile friendly.

Mxit continues to be the most popular 100% mobile chat interface for the youths, while Facebook can rightly defend its position as networking facility among the young and upcoming professionals.

There is no doubt that mobile browsing will continue to soar in a country where it seems we will have to make do with expensive broadband, busy schedules and a generation that are as tech savvy as they are dynamic.

The pen-to-paper generation is rapidly becoming extinct and as business professionals it is vital for us to keep in contact with the technological preferences of our target audiences.

“I have been disappointed at the slow rate of development of the cellphone — both what the gadget can do and what marketers are doing with it.” Anja Merret: TechLeader

I don’t really have any qualms about the functionality of the mobile phone, but I am in 100% agreement with Anja in expressing my disappointment on what marketers are doing with it.

In her post on Techleader she mentions “Jan Chipchase, principle researcher for Nokia, [who have predicted that] there will be three billion people connected on cellphones by the end of 2007.

That is a fair chunk out of the approximately 6.3-billion people inhabiting the Earth. He also anticipates that within another two years, a further billion people will be connected.”

Anja continues with a wish list of features for mobile phones and applications she thought would be “run in the mill” for marketers by now. But it isn’t.

My question today is why? How is it possible that with such a global uptake in mobile connectivity that it seems the international marketing minds are so slow to respond? Ok, fair enough, they probably aren’t that slow.

Let’s scale it down a bit then. How is it possible that with 83% mobile penetration in South Africa and 11% internet penetration, our marketers are still fighting over internet stakes?

I’m willing to venture a guess. I think our marketers, and predominantly our web strategists, are trying so hard to keep up with international web trends, looking to duplicate innovative web solutions such as Facebook and Youtube, that they seem to have little time left to worry about the internet’s “poor cousin.”

Our web strategists are so consumed by creating / adopting video and audio into marketing strategies, even though it is evident that our bandwidth doesn’t allow it. We’re so blindly mesmerized by Web 2.0 that it seems any form of rationale is being chucked right out the window.

We build social interactive press material including video features through Youtube, bookmarked reference material through Del.icio.us and enabling the material to be pushed to various content aggregators like Amatomu, Digg and Stumble Upon, blissfully ignorant of the fact that our users don’t even comprehend the effect or mere existence of any of these tools.

We try to educate businesses and consumers when surely marketers should not be forcing adoption onto them, but rather devise strategies that complement their usage patterns.

We often boast about our latest web platforms that have evolved to be of similar, if not better quality than our US and European counterparts, yet we are totally oblivious to the fact that we lack the core ingredient…traffic.

No wonder Vinny Lingham doesn’t think Afrigator is worth investing in. It’s not because of a poorly built platform, it’s simply because there is no critical user mass to support the business model.

We’re trying to keep up with international internet innovations, but we seem to forget that we aren’t even in the same league as the US. We simply don’t have the capacity, the infrastructure or the critical mass to support this Web 2.0 phenomena.

We’re already evangelising the rise of Web 3.0 when most of our businesses are still in Web 1.0 phase. We continue to blog even though most of our readers are fellow bloggers.

I’m not disputing the importance of internet marketing in South Africa, but I was once told that if the internet penetration is 11% then 11% of your marketing budget should be spent online.

Does that mean 83% of your marketing budget should be spent on mobile?

I remember my teenage years vividly. I was very impressed with the Winfield advertisements and commercials. It carried the essence of manlihood, rugby and satisfaction. I was too young to smoke back then, but I knew that Winfield epitomised the “Maxi-Man”. I wanted to be that guy when I grow up. Esteemed, in the know and well associated with the sport of men.

The youth market is something hot on the lips of marketers and businesses, but something rather reluctantly pursued. For we (I included) know just how menacing teenagers can be. How a seemingly simple approach could amplify their distrust, distaste and “so not cool dude” attitude to their peers.

Let’s face it, we’re scared. We have a brand to protect. Not to mention our ego. And even worse, they hang about these weird places like Facebook and Youtube these days. Things I’ve heard of, but not likely something I’d bother to invest in. I can’t even manage to have him sit still and listen to me for one minute.

And the last time I asked if I could drop him off somewhere, his “friend” with the tattoo and weird peircings ogled at me as if I’m from another planet.

Remember the days when we as teenagers watched 3.2 hours of TV a day, listened to 2.3 hours of radio a day, read 1.7 newspapers per day and 3.3 magazines each week?

Do they do that today? Unlikely. But I reckon we can just ignore them until they grow up and transcend back to normal human beings.

The chances of that happening are even less my fellow people. They grow up with more savvy, more knowledge and a stronger opinion than you have ever dreamed of having. Their voices carry more influential substance than your greatest public speech or television interview.

If you do not believe this, then I’m willing the venture a guess that you’re probably a very gullible and naïve person. Straight up.

This is all well documented and understood by most, but the real issue lies not in acknowledging fact. It lies in implementing fact into a strategy that could ensure actual returns, a reputation that’s intact and brand that is engaging the emerging market to great effect.

We know they won’t appreciate your authoritarian television commercial. They also don’t click on your banner ads or pay the slightest reaction to your grandiose testimonials, quarterly reports or inflated bottom line.

They’re willing to participate in a brand that provides them with an incentive. It is in their inner being to expect something back for their time and effort. And that trend will continue from hereon in.

There’s a couple of things that should be at the top of anyone’s mind willing to engage the youth market and looking to do it right:

1. Engage them using their medium of choice, not yours.
Mobile marketing is top of the list. Social networking sites such as Facebook, blogs, Mxit, Youtube et al are all platforms they frequent. Fortunately, these platforms also allow them to pay your message forward to your friends very easily.

2. Make it worth their while.
Like a kid willing to do you a favour if you give something back, so to will they be willing to experiment with your products or services if you are willing to incentivise it.

3. Make sure they think it is cool enough. Not your wife, not your product manager, but them.
The coolness factor is important. This will change over time, but best would be to research popular trends, hot topics and engaging matters to grab their attention. Once you have their attention, it is yours to mess up.

4. It has to make them feel part of your brand.
Gone are the days when your brand is forced down their throats. These days they’ll tell you straight up that you suck and they’ll make damn sure their friends know about it too. You need to plan your campaign that would interest them in associating with you.

As you can see from these 4 points is that everything is about them. It has always been about them and one of the biggest reasons we’re getting it wrong is because we continue to build our marketing campaigns around our brands.

Are you contemplating taking on the most difficult market of them all? Share your wisdom and fears here and let’s make sure these campaigns are successful the first time.

From a recent analysis it was found that banner advertising is dying very quickly. Looking back, in reality, banner advertising never stood much of a chance at a good life anyway, at least not independently.

So what is the fixation marketers have with banner advertising and why is it a multi-billion dollar industry?

The short answer is twofold:

1. It is easy to track clicks. Marketers use clicks to sell advertising against.
2. There’s really no other way to track the effectiveness of banner advertising.

Here is a short summation of the report conducted in the US:

1. Most people do not click on ads, and those that do are by no means representative of Web users at large.

2. Ninety-nine percent of Web users do not click on ads on a monthly basis. Of the 1% that do, most only click once a month. Less than two tenths of one percent click more often.

3. Who are these “heavy clickers”? They are predominantly female, indexing at a rate almost double the male population. They are older.

Assumptions derived from these findings indicate some interesting points:

1. Clickers are more representative of lower income households than the average user.

2. They are less educated than the average user (or from less-educated environments in the case of minors).

3. They are more likely to live outside of the major metro regions.

Readers of this blog will know that I’m constantly looking to improve ways in which businesses can capitalise on the web without intruding their clients’ privacy, without interrupting their experience on the web and without force feeding their products to them.

Banner advertising done well does lends a credible amount of brand awareness, especially when the ad is informative, funny, experiential and bold. These banners are not about the clicks but more about the relevant experience gained from the associated brand.

These are unfortunately difficult to measure as page impressions serve as the most accurate form of metrics.

Television advertising used to be the benchmark for advertising. With the likes of PVR and the multitude of channels available these days though, commercials tend to be skipped very easily and the effect of advertising on TV has decreased dramatically.

It does however still serve as an impressionable level of brand awareness. More and more brands turn to interactive campaigns as a means to engage consumers in participating in the campaign. The reason is to allow for greater measurement as participation can be used to warrant the budget spend and also as a means to extend the level of brand experience.

Consumer attention therefore becomes very important and the campaign material needs to be interesting enough to gain this. Therefore, we’ll find that competitions are usually the most popular drawing tool used.

It has been documented on this blog before that mobile serves as the perfect vehicle for consumer responses. Their mobiles are usually within reach of the majority of users and are perfect for everyday, everywhere advertising engagement.

So despite push campaigns (where products and services are delivered to the mobile phone), the pull campaigns are very effective in conjunction with print, radio, TV, outdoor and the web where consumers are often offered an incentive for their participation.

There are still opportunities for advertising, especially banner advertising, to serve a marketing purpose. The obvious truth is unfortunately that marketers and companies will need to keep adding interactivity, interest and inevitably sometimes more money to their campaigns to have their consumers experience the advertising in a positive light.

It is no secret that the future of marketing and advertising lies with the enormous growth of mobile communications and the advances of cellular technologies. In tandem with the other mass media tools mobile will serve as the ultimate differentiator between highly successful campaigns and the intrusive presence of (online) advertising.

“SUMMARY: Mobile marketing is on the verge of exploding as a specialty channel, but technology limitations and the marketplace aren’t quite in place yet. So do you want to be ahead of the curve or behind the times playing catch-up?”

I’d like to mash-up my article today a bit to cover most important sections pertaining to mobile, content distribution, convergence and creation.

While the marketplace isn’t exactly at the tipping point where mobile marketing is exploding onto the scene, it is important for businesses to identify technological trends and acknowledge the rapid pace at which it will happen.

When we look back at the dot.com crash in 2001, many never thought it realistic or even possible that the internet will again rise from the ashes and be a major role-player in business.

However, it has proven quite the contrary and it has escalated exponentially to where many marketers, I included, simply cannot see a way forward for businesses that does not converge their marketing strategies with online and wireless.

It simply cannot be ignored that consumers catch on to technological trends much quicker than businesses and marketing departments do. The irony of course is that most of these marketers are also consumers embracing technology, but due to reasons beyond scope simply do not manifest these societal trends into their marketing strategies.

Companies also often have the tendency to measure or require ROI to be measured in tangible monetary value. However, consumer demands have shifted as such that businesses need to rely on value added services more often to keep up retention numbers and have their consumers engage with their brand.

Content distribution is one such area where companies need to reevaluate consumer needs demands as many of them simply do not care for the company’s preferred method of distribution.

Many consumers do not wish and simply do not engage in newspaper formats anymore for sourcing of news.

They are on the go people and if media companies do not comprehend this shift and converge content distribution to mobile devices, their readership will simply shift to brands that do.

Financial & Advisory companies need to realise that these types of value added services aren’t luxuries, they are must-haves to keep their clients in the loop and informed at all times.

More prominent even are retailers. By advertising in magazines at extortionate pricing is failing to recognise that consumers spend the majority of their time on the internet and connected to their mobile phones.

These consumers not only prefer, but demand that product information be readily available to them or they will simply move on to brands that do provide these value added services.

The internet has enabled smaller businesses the same amount of access and opportunities to compete with the big corporates, whether they like it or not. It is often these smaller brands that also value innovation and manage to reach the sort of critical mass in a much shorter time span.

While the repercussions of failure to advance would probably not be felt immediately, it is absolutely crucial to understand that it is imminent. Moreover, it is critical to understand why it is going to happen.

These blogs serves a purpose, and it is not to deliver grandiose advice in search of your money. History suggests the patterns of the future and if the dot.com crash has served anything, it is that businesses have become smarter and have come to the inevitable conclusion that the future of business lies in smart marketing in the online and mobile arena.

They have learned through the mistakes of others. It is time to ask yourself whether you’d prefer to be the mistake someone else learns from, or whether you’d prefer to learn from the mistakes of others.

The epicentre of all things marketing and advertising shifted from mass distribution and mass delivery (which too often also includes spam) to what is brilliantly termed Just-in-Time marketing.

Just-in-Time marketing is timeously putting forward your products and services to a segmented, targetted audience base that has shown or is prone to an interest in it.

Traditional and online Marketing / advertising has always been a Just-in-Case practice including the larger part of society and demographics to hopefully conjur up the sort of sales conversion rates that get Managers and their clients excited. (You know, the 5% to 10% industry norm)

Since advertising has taken over mainstream media, with the average American exposed up to 3800 marketing messages daily, society has become immune to almost all forms, shapes and sizes. Mostly, that is.

Businesses and marketers, the smart ones at least, have kept an eye on developments and trends and came to the realisation that the only true form of marketing today is permission based.

There is no better platform to lauch permission based, Just-in-Time marketing campaigns from, than consumers’ most personal and valued commodity: their mobile phones.

Three things that stand out from consumers’ mobile behaviour:

1. They are convenience driven. Instant gratification has never been such high priority in the information overload era.

2. They use their mobile phones predominantly for communications with their personal contacts. There are no greater marketing effects than word of mouth recommendations. (ie. Text message forwarding)

3. They carry their mobiles everywhere they go. Simply texting your messages to them might not be enough. Businesses have to stimulate its audience’s senses. Billboards for retail, websites & television for Financial Services, radio for Arts & Culture.

“Mobile is already a platform, but the consensus was that leveraging the power of the web, integrating web services into mobile medium is the future of mobile.”

| View | Upload your own

Source: Slideshare / swamicrm

Synonymous with the age old dilemma of solving the chicken or egg theory, many marketers and businesses are struggling to find the answer to the ultimate entry point into their target markets’ minds.

Which route to go first: Mobile or Web?

It is no secret that I evangelise the convergence of both media vehicles, but for many businesses the outright jump from conventional marketing, or in some cases, no marketing, might be too great.

While both media have been around for a while now, at least in a capacity to conduct proper business, the internet has certainly enjoyed a head start in the marketing department. Mobile has caught up however and in many ways surpassed the internet / computer for portability, efficiency and convenience.

Ann Holland from MarketingSherpa had this to say:

The new generation of Europeans, Asians and, increasingly, our own American kids, too, think of PC-based communications as old school. An Internet tied to a PC is such a 20th-century thing. Get with the program, Grandmother, mobile is everything!

The new generation worldwide update their Facebook accounts with their phones. They blog with their phones. They tell everyone where the coolest party is tonight with text messaging. They make YouTube movies with their phones. They trust their phones. They love their phones. They carry their phones everywhere. The “third screen” is the first screen of their hearts and everyday lives.

Despite the savvy youth, which are the business professionals of tomorrow, more and more established consumers have also caught on. They have found means to ease the burden of regular daily commodities through the use of their handhelds. They have found new ways of communicating cheaply via services such as Mxit.

Banking is merely a text message away and e-mails these days are sent within minutes and with little hassle. Handhelds provide regular people with video conferencing, shopping, voting, RSVP’ing, weather updates, stock market trading, taking pictures and sharing, music / video downloads and playbacks, traffic congestion, tidal updates and of course the one that started it all, browsing the internet.

Mobile’s functionality has improved in such a way that in many cases we can already see a transcendence of attitudes from smart marketers and -business people alike. With the introduction of handhelds such as the Nokia N95, HTC Tytn and soon the Apple iPhone we are undoubtedly witnessing a digital transformation.

What that means in laymen’s terms is that more and more consumers would prefer connecting and interacting with their mobile’s to reduce cost, improve portability and comfort. Mobile phones are currently the prized belonging to the majority of the population.

Improved technology and functionality is altering the way in which businesses need to market their products, as the immediate future suggests some changes to target market communication strategies already. For businesses it is important to accurately segment their target market for optimum reach and communication via a prefered medium.

I’m worried that conventional marketers and businesses aren’t aware of what is happening to the market outside their scope.

I’m worried that businesses are reluctant to change their behaviour in terms of marketing of their services and products.

Note: I would encourage business owners and roleplayers to attend the Nomadic Marketing course at the UCT GSB on 31 October 2007.