New
research sensation
Over 400 people turned out in London yesterday to
see Comscore and the GSMA launch Mobile Media Metrics - research that users operators data to see what people
really do on mobile. We see this as a huge step forward for mobile – which is
now the best researched medium in the UK – and the research will roll out
around the world in coming months.
Our favourite quote – “Whilst smartphone users represent just 29 per cent of the UK total
mobile Internet audience, they accounted for 47 per cent of total page views,
and 51 per cent of the total time spent online in December 2009.”
Closely followed by the fact 5 million people in
the UK access Facebook on their mobile!
http://www.mobile-ecosystem.org/?p=1521
Are QR codes finally going
mainstream?
With publishers now testing QR or 2D codes and
Google using them for their favourite places we think widespread adoption of
these codes is imminent. The key thing holding them back seems to be a lack of
a true standard – too many vendors are pushing proprietory codes and readers are
of varying quality. In (unscientific) testing we found QuickMark (http://bit.ly/c48EC1)
to be the best iphone QR reader. Any other suggestions?
Is
it all about touch?
Some good new thinking
around the idea that the real step change with smartphones is touch – and that
the debate around apps vs browser is really about touch vs mouse
Mobile
to pass PC as the main way to access the web – by 2013?
New Gartner data is
even more aggressive that Morgan Stanly about the switch from PC to mobile.
With other data suggesting smartphone sales soared by 30% on q4 last year that
doesn’t seem outlandish.
Innovating
in mobile
With all the evidence
that the mobile media is big enough to warrant serious investment from brands
we should remember that much of the advertising tools are pretty rubbish. The
formats are drawn from the PC web and don’t work. So we see a major role for us
over the coming years is to innovate in terms of formats and how mobile is used
as a marketing medium. This article has some good commentary on what the
vendors are doing (registration required)
Touch is undoubtedly important but what we found in our Brandheld research (link in the url over my name)was that it is the location based features that have the strongest correlation with interest and likelihood to adopt. They offer real, differentiated benefit over activities that can be done on a computer. Just under a third of people were even willing to opt in to receiving information about nearby offers or discounts to them - certainly more valuable to both users and advertisers than standard display!
Simon Kendrick, Essential Research
Posted by: Simon Kendrick | February 06, 2010 at 12:53 PM