Lollipop Local

O2, Google et al want to personalise adverts etc.

The 02 representative at the recent Google ‘Think Local’ event pointed out the importance of personalising the experience of the end users. He said the idea was to connect the customer to their passion.

O2 speak from a position of authority because they have lost customers through being a little gung ho with advertising in the past. As one of the panel on the Local Innovation Showcase pointed out, “I’m happy to receive information of an offer or an event for something I am interested in, but if I get information about something I have no interest in I don’t like it and it’s spam in effect.”

I’m sure we can concur with that sentiment. In general I detest text adverts, they are almost always spam and, for me, even when it’s the stuff I am interested in, ‘upsell’ is spam to me. For example, I get information about cheap ticket prices and events from my Football Club, Aston Villa, but as a season ticket holder I don’t need this information personally, they want me to get tickets for friends. As a result, texts from Villa tend to be ignored…

The O2 chap pointed at that, while we do indeed hate text message advertising, different forms of advertising on our phones can be well received. For instance, 77% of smart phone users in a recent survey said they wanted more after being sent a YouTube video of a TV ad, despite hating txt messaging!

Confusing, or just an artefact of people being human? A funny YouTube video is something you can show your mates while an irritating text message is likely to be simply deleted. A clear example of how different platforms can be used successfully or otherwise to get a message across. Again and again speakers spoke of experimenting and using data to focus efforts.

Interestingly, O2 have discovered that messages needn’t involve advertising per se, efforts can simply involve encouraging engagement. McDonalds encouraged involvement in a game through location based messaging and discovered that 30% bought something at a local restaurant as a result.

These types of measurements, involving GPS and data related to the use of a person’s phone allow constrained targeting to avoid annoying their customers.

While there are opportunities now, there will only be more in the future. At present, according to an Enders study under half of mobile phones are smart phones but by 2014 that number will rise to 71%, with the trend for using the features of such phones productively rising.

Now 69% of smart phone owners use features for practical reasons, with 17% killing time and 13% using them for entertainment. Further, the amount of time spent using the internet on smart phones is split as follows – 50% < 30 mins, 25% 30 – 60 mins, 25%> 60 mins.

With smart phone use increasing, whatever way you look at it, the time to get your business Mobile Internet ready is now!

Infographic from Hubspot

Originally posted 2011-10-18 10:15:19. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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Tags: Mobile Text Ads

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 10th, 2012 at 7:00 pm and is filed under Mobile Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.