Wirelessnorth.ca

This a.m. we had a chance to stop by Marketing Magazine’s Mobile Marketing Conference in Toronto to catch on the latest on marketing and selling real stuff through mobile.

The big theme so far is that a) consumers are diving in to mobile b) brands, businesses, retailers are keen (and realize they have to) follow c) no one knows exactly what they are supposed to be doing yet. Overall it feels a lot like the early days of the web, marked by some interesting success stories, and some apps that sink without a trace.

Live blogging notes thus far:

Huge discrepancy between download rates and usage rates. Most apps get used only once. That indicates that people try before they buy but also that app makers haven’t figured out compelling apps yet either. Everyone reports downloads but the real stat is monthly unique users. Always ask about usage.

Apps need to drive real utility, simply “matching luggage” experience or “store finders” not necessarily enough.

It can be hard building a mobile channel as Canadian company or brand as your scale is much smaller than the US market. On the flipside, Imatiaz Jaffer of the European agency IcomMobile explained that they have expanded to Canada because it’s a great place to build mobile. He even repeated a line we’ve heard before “Right now, Canada is a hotbed for mobile development”.

For Canadian companies, getting visibility in app stores vs big US brands and retailers can be a challenge. But you can still be successful. One panelist “for a 20k app budget you’d want to spend another 100k in promotion of the app”.

Christopher Bennett (best buy) apps can be great for “unassisted sales” items that sell well are like iPads or products where consumers know exactly what they want already. [interesting not talking about mobile for providing extended product information in store]. A great retail app that works well in mobile “so they tell me” is also the victoria’s secret app .

@Pryl gave us an excellent keynote on the benefits of native apps vs. web apps from a marketer/business’ perspective.

Advantages of apps instead of mobile web:
- Apps are buzz worthy (fewer people get excited to pas on or buzz about a web app)
- Though webkit is closing the gap, still a richer experience
- You can use hardware features (camera, mic, accelerometer etc.) beyond just location
- Apps can work offline
- Good as an extension of your brand

The problems with apps
- Fragmented platforms building for every platform could kill your whole digital budget
- Driving consumers to your apps through QR codes etc. still a kludgy tough process
- For marketers: lag time and friction of the download and install process [hadn't thought about this]
- For in-retail environments a consumer can get to a mobile web page (or SMS) much quicker than an app install which can be very important for instant gratification

Web apps
- Better standardized much easier to support many phones (though still optimizations can be a pain)
- Quicker to first engagement with a customer than an app download and install
- You can update a mobile web page anytime without having to constantly push app updates

Your WirelessNorth.ca editor just rolled out of an excellent session at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi). Maybe we were still half drunk on Texan tacos stand tacos (very specific to this location) but we managed to get down a few quick thoughts. We’re lately been skeptics around here still on the size and viability of mobile marketing as a way to monetize anything useful.

But we also know that there are a lot of mobile developers in Canada wondering how they’re going to monetize them. While a lot of ordinary Canadian businesses, brands, and entrepreneurs probably want to figure out how they might to start catching up to some other parts of the world as far as engaging with mobile.

Mobiles will be one of the primary ways that people will access the web, and so it’s important for any business that is, or could be, touched by the web to start thinking about mobile.

If you look where location based works (in Japan, in China) in marketing it’s a pull model. It’s not a direct mail/spam model, where you buy a bunch of numbers and send out sms marketing. Those models fail.

Imagine an interaction where you could send out a personal “RFP” for services and let local businesses compete.

Models will be auction based. A lot of work will be needed to figure out how to use mobile advertising. More inventory than advertisers for a while. (Translation: mobile content is still struggling to find enough advertisers).

Companies like mobile social tool Loopd are dependent on building their own adserving tools because otherwise the tools didn’t exist yet. (Google right now is apparently investing heavily in location based).

Advertising business models are still being figured out too. Pricing models could be price per pair of feet driven to a store instead of by impression or just cost per click. There is another idea/specter of the personal CPM. (someone jokes, what? am I worth only 47 cents?)

Augmented reality is where all this is going, these devices are going to get to know you really well and provide you with tons of personal/socially location specific information.

There will of course be tons of problems around privacy and location based services (a general theme at SXSW)
• Privacy there will need to be rules around times of day employers can track employees
• People what black holes, eg not tracked when at home
• Apps should be good at telling you when you are broadcasting location, and to whom and for what
• There are also passive models where, Navteq provides some free services if you share your anonymous location information, which helps them map traffic flow. In this case, they don’t have to care who you are, just how fast you are moving along a highway.
• No matter what, even *if* companies are careful with your privacy, government will always be able to track the hell out of you unless you take the battery right out of the phone

Rather than just hurling pizza coupons at mobile phone holders as the walk down the street, there’s other ways to market better/more friendly-ly. A lot of brands are releasing “helper” tools like for the iphone or blackberry (AirCanada mobile tools come to mind). The theme here is that mobile apps can add value to another product service

The lesson of sxsw is that brands have a huge learning curve to climb. (good news for you shameless mobile pundits out there, or would-be industry disruptors)