Big Picture Advertising

Mobile marketing at its best

This D&AD winner is a perfect example of how new marketing works. The video explains the idea in full and is a must watch.
There is more good background at Wireless Watch Japan and Communities dominate Brands

The inexorable rise of social media

Mary Meeker has produced another of her killer decks on internet trends. It's all worth reading but this chart sums up so much.
What did everyone do before Facebook, MySpace et al?

End of advertising as we know it

The final report from IBM on the End of Advertising is now available - building on previous reports and drawing data from all the usual sources, there are few surprises. But it is still interesting reading and reminds us all that we're living in interesting times.
This chart shows that all the future growth in advertising is coming from  "new" channels.
It highlights our belief that new media is the wrong description - this is all about Now Media

End of Advertising as we know it - IBM research

Following on from their end of TV research IBM have released some more interesting research - which is going to be part of their End of Advertising as we know it report to be published this autumn.

The research covers the US, Japan, Germany, Australia and the UK. Again well worth digging through - we were struck by just how dominant social networking and User Generated Content is in the all the markets other than Japan. There UGC is big, but social networks are not so popular - yet.

In the Motherhood

Our latest branded entertainment project In the Motherhood has got off to a great start in the US - lots of submissions from consumers and lots of traffic.
This interview with David Lang of MindShare Entertainment gives some background to the project and some of our past successes.

7 Cs of mobile

Tomi Ahonen has written a must read post on the 7 C's of mobile;

• Communication
• Consumption
• Creation
• Commerce
• Community
• Commercials
• Control

Its quite a long post, but it's very well thought through and has a wealth of useful facts to support the arguments.

Google phone?

This is a couple of weeks old but there is lots of speculation that Google are planning to launch a phone.
We still think a Google MVNO is a goer.
One way or another Google intend to be a major player in mobile

Ad funded SMS

SMS has become a standard means of communicating - as these figures show, huge number of people now use it.

Now Amobee - one of our favourite mobile start ups - has announced a way of delivering ad funded subscriber originated SMS messages.

What that means is, that if someone signs up to the service, all the SMS messages they send will be free - with an ad at the end of the message.

I saw a demo of this a year ago when Amobee were first funded, and remain fascinated by the concept - the service will be fully launched at GSM next week and through our relationship with Amobee we hope to be able to trial the service (once they recruit an operator). We're already involved in their trials of ad supported games and (soon) music.

You can read more about the news here.

SMS Marketing - still lots of potential

This data from m:metrics shows the opportunity for SMS permission marketing - but it also shows the potential downside.

We know operators enjoy great success with SMS as a way of talking with their consumers - and they also use MMS very effectively too.

But the number of brands using permission based SMS to build a dialogue is low whilst spam continues to grow.

Like any marketing these days, permission based SMS has to be relevant and either useful or entertaining ( or even both). And brands have to find a way of reminding consumers that they did request the messaging. We're investing in our capabilities in this space (as we are with email marketing) and see it as an ideal continuation of a marketing campaign.

Whilst lots of the talk is (rightly) about the potential for mobile advertising, more traditional mobile marketing still has a big role to play.

Interview with Google head of product management

Very interesting interview with Deep Nishar of Google talking about their mobile plans.

One key quote reminds me of our fascination with branded utility;

When I show friends and family the things you can do with Google Maps, like live traffic updates, they are like, "Wow." We need to make sure more people have these "aha" moments.

We're still betting on the Google mvno