THE NOOC BLOGS

Posts Tagged ‘Mobile’

Technology is being developed to be able to identify the specific geographic location, within 5 to 10 yards, of the telephone. This allows the opportunity to send highly targeted location-based advertising to the device. This opens up a whole new range of opportunities for marketers. We’ve been hearing for years about the scenario where you will be walking by Starbucks when your cell phone will vibrate. When you review your mobile device screen, you see that there’s a two-for-one special for Starbucks that has been sent to you.

Another technology we understand is coming is the bar code reader attachment for the telephone. Every item for sale in the world has a bar code. You’ll be able to scan an item and, using your mobile device, go to the Internet to find where the best deal is on that particular item within whatever
radius you define.

Location-based services will change the way we do lots of things. In speaking about this at conferences, I jokingly recommend that if the boss has provided
you with a cell phone or mobile device and you’re going golfing on Friday afternoon, leave the boss’s device at the office and set it to call forward to your own device. If you’re looking for brownie points, leave it there for the weekend.

With mobile devices we can do all kinds of things—check our flight schedule, transfer money from one account to another, pay our credit card bill, make a hotel reservation, check our investment portfolio, take and send a picture, watch a video, check the score of the baseball game, check the weather in Topeka. With the new 3G devices we can do even more, faster.

The mobile marketplace is significant. There are over 1.8 billion people out there with a mobile device capable of voice, text, image, and Internet communication. This number is increasing at a rapid pace as less-developed countries like China and India are going straight to wireless for their phones. We are seeing swift and wide acceptance with over 350 billion text messages exchanged over the world’s mobile networks each month. The Yankee Group tells us that over 15 percent of these messages are classified as commercial or marketing messages, telling me that there are 52.5 billion marketing messages currently being exchanged monthly.

Mobile marketing is a marketer’s dream. It allows direct, personal communication in real time with the opportunity for immediate, direct response. There are a number of mobile marketing opportunities—instant messaging, location-based services, profile-specific advertising, subscribed content, SMS (short messaging service), MMS (multimedia messaging service), and mobile blogging.