Posts filed under 'Advertising'
It’s pretty clear that engaging an audience via mobile advertising requires a different approach than through many other media. Simply sending an interruptive text straight to the device in somebody’s pocket isn’t likely to be received well; it’s likely to be seen as spam. Connecting with a mobile audience requires marketers to understand that they’re not sending users simple advertising, they’re sending them content.
Take, for instance, the SMS sent to Blyk members back in January from the UK government youth agency Connexions. The campaign didn’t just send users texts with a call to action, rather it sought to engage them by asking them to respond to a number of introductory questions as a lead-in to a conversation. Accordingly, the campaign got a 36% response rate — far higher than most standard, interruptive campaigns.
The campaign offered users something of value in exchange for their response, and that’s a key point. That in exchange for users’ attention, in exchange for access to their mobile phone, the most personal of devices, advertisers need to give users something in return. That something can take many different forms: a discount coupon, a piece of useful information, some entertaining video content, and so on. In some sense, the marketing aspect of the message needs to take a back seat. The initial focus needs to be on delighting the recipient in some way — and then you can get the marketing message across.
Marketers need to see themselves as content providers. A movie trailer isn’t an ad; it’s a piece of mobile content with the potential to engage and entertain the viewer. If it delights the recipient, it doesn’t simply make them want to go see the film, there’s a possibility they’ll pass it along. Do people pass advertisements along? Not really. They pass along content. Sometimes that content happens to be an advertisement.
Forget blurring the line between content and advertising. In reality, that line doesn’t exist.
Carlo Longino is a Las Vegas-based writer, analyst and consultant in the mobile industry. His past experience includes work for Nokia, Nortel, and a number of other mobile companies, and he blogs at MobHappy.
May 8th, 2008
In a recent interview Blyk members reported that the ads they enjoyed most were those that featured intriguing graphic effects. If this were taken at face value it would suggest a need for escalating innovation in Blyk advertisers’ campaigns. Not a bad thing in itself, and likely to happen anyway. But maybe not the only route to capturing members’ attention.
Blyk can, to some extent, track what members do when they receive different types of ad, as well as what they say they do. In January Blyk tracked the responses to a campaign of text messages for Connexions, the UK government youth agency, that combines traditional employment bureau with a wide-ranging advice service. The campaign was focused on 16-19 year-olds and featured a series of introductory questions covering bullying, employment and debt.
The average response rate to Connexions’ questions was 36%, and analysis of this response base revealed that 29% reported bullying problems, 29% sought careers or employment advice and 51% needed financial advice. Beyond the simple Y/N responses the campaign had anticipated, many respondents sent more expansive comments. For example
on bullying: Ma sis said she gets bullied all tha time and shes scared of them but she tryes to tell people whts goin on but they neva help her
on employment: No thanks im going into flight attendant training 4 da career of becoming a flight attendant
on debt: YeS i neva have enough.
These responses suggest a connection between the advertiser and members beyond attention-grabbing graphics. The content counts. And although members know this is not a live conversation, they’re offering a genuine exchange here.
It’s just this ‘almost human’ link via text messages that smoking cessation programmes are now exploiting to boost their impact. A trial in New Zealand showed that if people were supported by a sequence of text messages as part of their cessation counselling they were more likely to quit smoking than a control group who did not receive text messages (the trial is now being replicated in the UK to determine whether this effect lasts beyond the six-week follow-up tracked in the New Zealand trial).
Giving up smoking is a lonely process; so is worrying about money, bullying or unemployment. It may be that the private link between individuals and their phones creates a new opportunity for communication and support. One wouldn’t want to be too rose-tinted about this yet. But there was a hint of potential for a two-way connection in the pre-launch trials I ran for Blyk over 2006-7. One participant commented at the end of a post-trial interview ‘I’m going to miss my little friend Blyk.’
Part of the success of the Connexions campaign is likely to be due to its individuality among a range of different messages, and the focus on a specific target audience that Blyk can achieve. The experience would naturally be dulled if the communication was too repetitive or unfocused. And members’ willingness to engage in the future is likely to depend on the feedback and reinforcement they have received before. But if Blyk advertising comprises a balance of message type and content (something that could be hard for Blyk, as a business, to make a decision to control) it may help develop Blyk as a service that not only links members to brands they like, but also opens up communications that members hadn’t previously considered.
March 28th, 2008
Blyk have just carried out one of their regular Insight discussion groups with members and, not for the first time, participants said they felt time-pressured in their lives and wanted short cuts to information. The Blyk generation (16-24s) gets a pretty negative press but many are packing in studying, jobs, living independently for the first time and, quite reasonably, want some social life too. Maybe it’s not surprising then that they feel too busy, running between tasks, to notice advertising along the way: in an early piece of Blyk research one participant mentioned that she never got to see bands she liked because she was too busy to pay attention to posters and other advertising.
But it may not just be a question of being too busy. In dealing with the range of advertising impinging upon them, consumers make systematic decisions about what to pay attention to and what to ignore, when they can give attention and when not, and whether the risks of giving attention outweigh the benefits. Research (in 2005) by CBS, on the attention London commuters give to advertising in different media, highlighted some of the decisions that people make:
- they welcome and pay attention to advertising on transport (which fills in down-time and gives a focus for their attention on crowded buses and trains), but dislike billboard posters
- many like cinema advertising (they’re relaxed, it’s part of the show) but dislike TV commercials (which get in the way of focused viewing)
- internet advertising fares poorly compared to other media and is far more likely to be avoided (like TV advertising, it interrupts users’ focus but, additionally, users are wary of the outcomes of clicking through to advertisers’ sites).
There is complexity, though. What people attend to may not be what they act on. TV advertising may be disliked, but it is seen as more up-to-date than other media; it’s also more memorable and more likely to be acted on.
The CBS research pre-dates Blyk but it’s interesting to consider how mobile advertising might rate compared to other media. The positive news for Blyk is that the research found that 16-24s are more likely to see advertising as useful, compared to other age groups. Mobile advertising has the advantage of potential for personalisation so it can be focused on 16-24s’ interests. As we know, teens use their mobile phones to fill in down-time, to keep in touch with friends, and (occasionally) to browse the web; it’s something to do, a focus of attention. So mobile advertising shares some of the benefits of transport advertising in its availability in those in-between times. Beyond that, mobile ads have the same benefit of being up-to-date that TV advertising brings. So they should not only get attention, but also prompt action.
SMS and MMS seems to fit the bill for Blyk’s target group, with the potential both to reach them and prompt action. But mobile advertising is still challenged by users’ reluctance to click through to the web to browse content. Any general mistrust of advertiser web sites is amplified by concern about costs (everyone seems to know someone who has racked up astronomical browsing bills) and, often, a poor user experience of the sites themselves. 16-24s often don’t have up-to-date handsets (despite the stereotype of their obsession with gadgets) so any browsing they do may lack the exuberance of users with the latest technology. So while the Blyk model of sponsored links to click through from SMS and MMS seems to work, the expectation of more general browsing may not.
A white paper by Mobile Economy calls on Blyk (and any other ad-funded mobile network) to start innovating tariffs for mobile browsing in order to provide more useful services than currently. But at the moment 16-24s seem to be sending a strong, conservative signal about how much browsing they want to do. A survey by AppTrigger reports that in January 2008 people, generally, were using their phones in a similar way to in 2003. On the up-side for the industry, 62% of 16-24s have downloaded music or games. But it’s quite a step from downloading a game to phone browsing.
Blyk’s Insight group want Blyk to ‘make my life easier’. So would free browsing stack up in attracting members compared, say, to simply providing more free talk time? It could bring useful information to them, at times they are open to accessing it. But, it may hit precisely the ‘Opportunity or Attention Compression’ Alex describes in her post. Without the momentum of users’ experience and trust, offering it would be something of a leap of faith.
Link to AppTrigger data from Usability News
March 23rd, 2008
Improveverywhere (IE), the informal flash mobbing group that stages ‘missions’ in public places (mass standstill on Grand Central Station, synchro swimming in Washington Square Park fountain etc.), has posted a video of their most recent event: a spontaneous musical by ’staff’ in the food court of a Los Angeles mall. It struck a chord with me because at high-school my clique of friends dreamed of a similar outburst in the class room or on the hockey pitch (but of course we never carried it out in those deferential, British, pre-Hairspray days). If you look at IE’s blog most comments are full of admiration for the food court video; but one or two see this mission as a departure from IE’s core of informal, inclusive activities. Typically, IE’s missions are organised via internet (their web site, social networking) and mobile phone. Participants (‘agents’) turn up on the day ready to do what’s necessary, and it works, more or less. The food court mission required a song to be written, a day’s rehearsal, negotiations with the mall authorities, and a team of actors who could sing and dance. Instead of IE’s typical compilations of unsteady video clips after the event, a professional-looking edit was posted. And the end result was less about the experience of the individuals involved (although it must have been a blast) than about the reactions of bystanders in the mall, as this erupted in front of them. But it was fun to watch and share, and most bloggers wished they had been there to experience it, so why carp?
Coincidentally Newsweek published an article last week, The Revenge of the Experts, claiming that web users now seek expert knowledge rather than peer commentary on the web. The article used Google’s Knol expert knowledge pilot and Mahalo (a start up Google rival, where search results are vetted by experts) as examples of responses to this need. Read a little further in the Newsweek article, though, and you find a comment from Jason Calaconis, Mahalo’s founder, ‘The more trusted an environment, the more you can charge [advertisers] for it.’ Ah, so that might be what’s going on. Could it be that users are being sent an ever-so-subtle message about peer group unreliability in order to drive them to more profitable sites? And will they be getting what they’re looking for even when they choose those authoritative-looking sites? According to Mindhacks, a set of apparently authoritative articles on sleep disorders have been published by the National Sleep Foundation, an organisation that receives funding from drug companies, which it spends on ‘public education’ i.e. advertising the existence of sleep disorders. Not an isolated example, I am sure, but just an indicator of the potential for messages with a specific bias from an apparently authoritative source.
It’s a bit of a stretch from Improveverywhere to the National Sleep Foundation but it’s worth it to make the point that much can be lost when basic user-generation is compromised. Heartwarming as the food court video is, it raises the bar for other IE missions. Will its high production values put them off? Will highly orchestrated mobs like this reduce the inclusivity of future missions (as far as I can tell many people join IE and turn up for missions without knowing anyone else who involved, and that’s where their social networking begins)? It will be interesting to see. It could go either way: the video could spawn many more adventurous mobs, or it could clip the wings of the project as a whole.
More generally the web is messy and full of mis-information, and production values are often low. But, nevertheless, good information will out. As the commercial story behind the Newsweek article unfolds, Andrew Keen, author of ‘The Cult of the Amateur’ is quoted as saying ‘no one wants to advertise next to crap’. But what’s his definition of crap? Slightly rough content, sometimes contradictory, sometimes superficial but which is, nevertheless, up-to-date and may just include some nuggets you couldn’t find anywhere else? User-generated content has its pitfalls, and web users need to be educated about them (and about the pitfalls (and strengths) of expert information too). But to lose peer commentary, to authorise and sanitise it would be to lose much of what drives people to the web in the first place. Olly Buxton, writing one of several critical Amazon reviews of Keen’s book, picks up on the issue of what can be gained from user-generated content. Citing the Britannica/Wikipedia dispute he writes
‘if the choice were blind faith in Encyclopaedia Britannica or a sceptical read of Wikipedia, I know which I’d have, and which I’d counsel for my children - especially since Wikipedia is automatically up-to-date, preternaturally following the zeitgeist, and replete with good know-how on things that Britannica would never have in a million years’.
So I would say to advertisers think twice before investing in the authority and expertise the internet ‘controllers’ want to bring about; there may be more to trust (and to invest in) in peer commentary, ‘crap’ notwithstanding.
Newsweek link via Putting People First
March 12th, 2008
CBS Mobile have announced the first US trial of location-based advertising to mobiles, in partnership with Loopt, the friend tracking and networking site. The service will be opt-in and the ads will arrive at CBS web sites on subscribers’ phones. Having worked on ‘future concepts’ of this kind some years ago (with the luxury of not having to join up the underlying technology, nor worry about the protection of individuals’ privacy) it will be interesting to see the service develop. (In fact the concept I worked on was peer-to-peer, rather than advertiser-to-consumer: a sort of location based Gumtree, where individuals could advertise rooms to let, yoga classes, lost cats etc. And I’m sure such a mobile service will emerge sooner or later.)
I wonder how many people will opt in to the CBS Mobile service and, once in, will use their web sites often enough to get the benefits of the advertising. It will, of course, depend on what the deal is and whether the content is enticing. With the delivery format as described, it’s likely to be a service people with conventional cell phones use when they have some down-time ‘let’s see if there’s anything interesting near here’ rather than always on. How many times would you go through the process of accessing a web site and finding nothing relevant to you before you stopped altogether? Still it’s early days and I’m sure this is nothing CBS Mobile and Loopt haven’t thought of.
If the location-based element is combined with personal profiling the service could be powerful, e.g. just as I’m going into a bookshop to buy a birthday present for someone, I’m notified that there’s a sale on all SciFi (having previously listed SciFi in a profile of my reading). Anecdotally it seems there might be broadly two sorts of response to this kind of prompt: some would welcome it (just as they welcome Amazon recommendations ‘those who bought this, also bought…’); and some would dislike the intrusion (and probably wouldn’t sign up to the service anyway). In any case, the combination of location and personalisation might be too ‘micro-personalised’ for advertisers who may want to prompt more serendipitous buying. And (although it’s hard to tell from the available information) that sort of personalisation may not be possible with the current CBS Mobile plan, where advertising is to be delivered anonymously.
Now that mobile advertising is up and running in several different implementations it will take some time before effective delivery formats bed down i.e. until users vote with their feet about what is acceptable and what isn’t. And my suspicion is that it might be quicker on mobiles than on traditional internet (i.e. via computers), where many companies continue to use advertising practices that frustrate users (despite the admonishments of usability guru, Jacob Nielsen). With mobile phones, however, there’s less space and, in most, less processing power to play with, plus a sensitivity to cost that is largely absent from computer use. Indeed the whole context for use differs dramatically from the computer. So people’s acceptance of formats that don’t suit their actual use of the phone may be limited.
So much of acceptance depends on the right implementation for the device being used and the context of use, as a quote from John Strand, attending this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, highlights
“One thing is to come out with an announcement. The next is to deliver. At the end of the day, the user decides who is the winner and who is the loser. The winner is the one who can give the best experience.”
Thanks to Richard Linington for pointing out the CBS Mobile/Loopt announcement.
February 12th, 2008
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