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.
Random thoughts on a Friday night: when young people form groups in school, it’s as important who is in the group as who is kept out of the group.
I wonder if digital device ownership will or already has become a criteria for social interactions: John owns a Nokia and therefore hangs out with this group of people whereas Nancy owns a second-hand Blackberry given by her parents and hangs out with a completely different group of people.
Could this also possibly extend to network providers? Could Blyk become a brand that people associate with a particular mindset and serve as a social glue?
Mobile providers already have brand images that yong people recognise. Vodafone can perhaps be thought of as the “safe and grownup” network, whereas O2 and 3 are the younger-feeling brands. Could these brand “personas” become mirrors for their users not only on a personal level but also affect perception from others. Hard to tell as we don’t tend to wear our network on our sleeve, but the Blyk offering could certainly push things in that direction.
” Didn’t have to pay for tickets: You must be using Blyk ” to take a simple example. “Saw yesterday’s message of the day? Wasn’t that highlarious?” When a network starts to become a social agent, the game isn’t about how many minutes or texts you get for free, but what actual connections you create between users.
Lots of folks are unaware that multiple brands are owned by the same company (e.g., the same company owns Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy). Consumer activists often complain that this practice is deceptive because it tricks consumers into believing that there are big distinctions between brands when, often, the differences are minimal. Personally, while I’d love to see more consumer brand awareness, but I think that brand distinctions play an important role. I just wish that the tech industry would figure this out.
I’m a relatively educated consumer and I’m also one of the most brand-loyal customers out there. When it comes to food and personal care products, many of my brand decisions come down to smell and taste, even when these are completely manufactured in a lab in New Jersey to differentiate soaps, toothpastes, and other products that are chemically identical. I buy All laundry detergent and not other Unilever brands (Surf, Wisk) or P&G brands (Tide, Gain, Cheer) simply because it smells better. When it comes to clothes, fit trumps everything.
In other words, my purchasing decisions are heavily affected by “interface.” (Politics and convenience too…) When a company changes the interface, I get cranky. I’m still cranky with my favorite pretzel brand for eliminating the air bubbles in their pretzels that allowed for more salt to build up. The reason that I’m committed to most consumer brands is not because I love the company. For many products, I’m not even influenced by the lifestyle being sold. I simply love the interface. Luckily, most retail companies get that their interface matters and when they futz with it, they create a separate brand or segment the primary brand into “Original” and “New with XYZ.” In the world of retail, a brand represents its interface. There are interfaces I like, those that I don’t, and those that I’m completely ambivalent about. But the interface often matters a whole lot more than the “features.”
Why do technology companies often fail to understand branding the way retail folks do? Many think that they can change the interface at whim to spice-up their product. They approach user retention as user lock-in, rather than user satisfaction and commitment. They try to shove everyone into the same interface in a one-size-fits-all paradigm that tends to fit few. Why??
Unfortunately, I don’t think that many companies are aware of the limitations of their brands. When they’re flying high, their brands are invincible and extending it to a wide array of products seems natural. Yet, over time, tech companies’ brands get entrenched. Certain users identify with it; others don’t. New products using that brand enter into the market with both cachet and baggage. Yet, tech companies tend to hold onto their brands for dear life and assume users will forget. Foolish.
We all know that youth talk about certain products as “sooo last year.” This tends to cover a genre rather than a brand. Yet, teens also have plenty to say about the brands themselves. Yahoo! and AOL, for example, are for old people. When I asked why they use Yahoo! Mail and AOL Instant Messaging if they’re for old people, they responded by telling me that their parents made those accounts for them. Furthermore, email is for communicating with old people and AIM is “so middle school” and both are losing ground to SNS and SMS. While Microsoft is viewed in equally lame light amongst youth I spoke with, it’s at least valued as a brand for doing work. Yet, even youth who use MSN messenger think that msn.com is for old people. Why shouldn’t they? When I logged in just now, the main visual was a woman with white hair sitting on a hospital bed with the caption “10 Vital Questions to Ask Your Doctor.”
Take a look at all of the major portals attempting to reach universal audiences. Now imagine yourself as a teen. Why would you even visit them? Even if you were the rare teen who cared about Autos, Careers & Jobs, Dating & Personals, Finance & Money, Health & Fitness, or Real Estate, one click in and you know that this content is not targeted at you. Even the sites that allow you to “personalize” your modules rarely let you get rid of these or make them relevant to you. To make matters worse, now that these companies are heading towards mobile, they are taking these one-size-fits-all interfaces and cluttering up the phones. Ugg! Why?
I would like to offer two bits of advice to all of the major tech companies out there: 1) Start sub-branding; and 2) Start doing real personalization.
If you’re creating a new product, launch it with a new brand. Put your flagship brand on the bottom of the page, letting people know that this is backed by you - this is not about deception. Advertise it alongside your flagship brand if you think that’ll gain you traction. But let the new product develop a life of its own and not get flattened by a universal brand. Some products should be niche, especially those targeted at youth; while youth are happy to use well-established tools, they also like to distinguish their practices from those of adults and mature into new brands. In other words, they aren’t going to fall to your lock-in for very long. If you’re buying a well-established brand, don’t flatten it, especially if it’s loved by youth. Kudos to Google wrt YouTube; boo to Yahoo! wrt Launch. Even at the coarse demographic level, people are different; don’t treat them as a universal bunch, even if your back-end serves up the same thing to different interfaces.
Personalization is more than skinning and moving modules around. Give me a blank slate and let me add modules that might be relevant to me. Alternatively, make some good initial guesses based on what you know about me and let me modify them from the getgo. Help me find the modules that are most likely to appeal to me - you already have a lot of data on what it is that I do; use it for something that helps me. This is particularly important if there are going to be a bazillion Apps or Gadgets or Widgets out there because I don’t want to comb through the crud. A targeted interface is just as important as a targeted ad.
Above all, understand that no brand is universally loved and one size does not fit all. Most of us look like idiots in XXL shirts and we don’t want our technology interfaces to be XXL. People like brands that fit them like a glove. The tech industry serves up ads this way; why doesn’t it get this when it comes to their own brand? Technology is well positioned to create sub-brands and personalize those brands from there. It’s high time for the tech industry to grow up and start doing so.
In 2005, Mimi Ito and Misa Matsuda published Personal, portable, pedestrian: Mobile phones in Japanese life. This groundbreaking work contains a collection of essays by Japanese researchers about how the mobile phone (or keitai) is transformed from a business tool to a personal device for communication and play. Much of the scholarship centers around what Japanese youth do with the mobile phone. One of the essays in this book, Misa Matsuda’s “Mobile Communication and Selective Sociality,” focuses specifically on how youth have adopted the mobile phone to build and maintain a “full-time intimate community.” Rather than being reachable by just anyone, Matsuda finds that keitai allow youth to control the flow of communication, making themselves available to “intimate friends or selected others [with whom they] want contact.” While youth may have hundreds of numbers in their addressbook, the collection of people with whom they regularly maintain contact is far smaller. From the moment they wake up to the moment they go to sleep, youth text a small group of intimate friends, building a network through ongoing chatter. While the actual substance of a particular message may not have great meaning, the aggregate helps build and sustain bonds, bringing youth into each other’s social sphere even when they are physically apart. Physical spaces often require people to socially organize around who is present, regardless of desire. School environments, for example, create social situations where people socialize with others even if their bond is not strong. What is unique about the connections built and maintained through texting is that individuals choose to maintain these ties, creating a context out of the people instead of the environment. The “full-time intimate community” that youth build is critically important to them.
Social contexts like the one that Matsuda describes have social norms and rules of decorum. For example, reciprocity is a critical component in the process of building and maintaining connections. There are understood rituals for reaching out and for signing off. While texting may not be synchronous, an apology may be necessary for responding at an interval other than what is collectively expected. Because these social contexts are extremely local to each network of friends, there are no universal norms. Yet, as is true in any medium, participating in a particular community involves sussing out the social norms and learning how to behave properly.
Marketers and politicians are trying to become actors in these networks. Typically, they want to leverage the networks that people build to engage directly with consumers. Yet, all too often they come barreling in with their own norms and expectations like a bully or a narcissistic princess. By broadcasting instead of engaging, they demand attention. By pushing their agenda, they rupture the social context. To combat this, they are typically ignored or ostracized, treated like a pariah unless they volunteer to give something back. When having them in the network serves a functional purpose, they are tolerated, but not loved.
There are exceptions and those are intriguing case studies. Consider the symbiotic relationship between bands and fans that emerged on MySpace. Bands needed fans to friend them so that they would be validated for promotional purposes and they wanted a mechanism by which to disseminate information to fans. Fans loved bands and wanted a way to show their affiliation and get validated from those bands. The MySpace friendship between bands and fans initially supported both groups, especially when bands solidified the relationship through a comment that would enhance the individual’s identity in front of their friends. (It should be noted that the rise of “band spam” and the lecherous nature of the labels disturbed this dynamic.)
So herein lies an interesting question… What does it take for brand, politician, or institution to sit meaningfully at the table in the mobile world of the “full-time intimate community”? Blyk is betting that consumers will tolerate these groups’ presence in return for free connectivity. Is this mutually parasitic relationship the only tenable one or are other mutually beneficial relationships possible? If so, what might those look like?
Blyk is an invite-only free mobile network. Once you’re on the network you can invite your friends to join. To seed the network we have street teams working at colleges, universities and gigs, talking with people about Blyk and signing them up. We have also put keywords at the end of several videos that are making the rounds on the Internet, like this one by Elin Svensson (you can text WHISPER to 82595 to get your code to join Blyk):
Many people have asked me about these videos and about the design of the Blyk brand identity. Here’s some background on what we’re doing and why.
When we started designing the Blyk brand we took a deliberately “open code” approach. By “open code” I mean, much like in open source software, that there is an initial hard core - the kernel of the operating system if you like - and that we allow and even encourage variation, iteration and interpretation of the brand identity. Our goal is to create the Blyk brand together with our members, to invite them to take part. I believe this is the best way for us to compete with the traditional “pay-for” mobile networks and to build a real emotional tie with our audience. This idea is carried into the illustrative style used in our launch visuals.
The first step was the logo. This consists of an abstract mobile screen containing a typographical symbol called a caret. You’ll see this above the 6 on your keyboard, it means “insert here”, symbolising the fact that Blyk relies on its members’ willingness to participate. Because on Blyk, in terms of relevance, you get out what you put in. The name “Blyk” itself is deliberately recessive; you’ll usually see it somewhere near the logo in a web address, or as part of an illustration, but we won’t be too uptight about it.
With the logo in place we had to generate a visual identity for the brand. Blyk is an “open code” brand, not a “control brand.” I believe that most important brands these days are built on conversation rather than control. Rather than trying to create a brand that was representative of the youth market, the idea was to allow members to represent themselves. It was time for us to hand the brand over to the audience. Our dozen launch brand visuals were created by young artists, chosen through a competition from the London College of Communications, interpreting the logo in their own way.
Since, at this stage, the business model was still a secret, entrants in the competition were given a brief consisting of the logo, the words “play”, “mobile” and “free”. The response was excellent, with enough work to fill a gallery space in Soho. The Blyk team then judged the work democratically and a dozen winners were chosen. This is not a brand identity that will be ever be finished, but one that was designed to evolve and develop over time. So, as well as a cash prize, all the winners began what was to be an ongoing relationship with the brand.
The animations are just the most recent fruits of these relationships, which Blyk sees as integral to its youth credentials. They were produced by the illustrators, with our extended team providing whatever level of assistance was needed to take their concepts to finished animations.
To summarize, the Blyk brand has a few necessarily fixed parts, the logo and the tone of voice for instance. Beyond that, it has a loose recognisable aesthetic. You could describe it as optimistic. You don’t get this by holding three-day long marketing team meetings and having a hundred people policing the brand. What you do have to do is get young creatives together, share with them the hard core and the brand values, give them proper resources and pay them properly, and let them go.
