Mobile Marketing and the Myth of Linear Progression
January 10th, 2008 by Hugh Kennedy
We’ve been talking these days about mobile marketing and mobile search. We’ve all got a mobile device (okay, my younger sister is holding out, but that’s mostly an Emersonian thing she has about simplicity and hidden fees), and we all know that someday we’ll be getting real-time cardiovascular advice based on feedback sensors built into our PDAs and mobiles, but what happens in between?
The results thus far seem to be: no one’s sure because the ecosystem isn’t there yet. eMarketer reported earlier this week that meaningful mobile brand marketing is still on the horizon, the same extremely promising horizon it was on a few months ago. Two-thirds of agency execs won’t be moving a dime of their online marketing budgets to mobile during 2008. The other third say it depends on the client, and the final 1% are already heavily invested in mobile. And much of that already-moving segment is serving youth-centric BtoC, Sprite being a good example of a company that’s pushing into mobile.
And what is going on there? In The Yard on the Sprite site, you can register to get the Yard applet on your phone (standard fees apply; maybe my sister is on to something), then enter a code under found under each cap of each bottle of the nutritious carbonated health drink and be eligible to win…content. Unspecified content, but purported to be quite cool. Perhaps a Sprite ringtone.
Somehow this model seems a bit nascent for BtoB markets, though it’s mildly amusing to consider a CIO looking under his new blade server for a special code he can text in to get a free white paper.
At the moment, PJA comes down squarely in the ‘it depends on the client’ category. We’re thinking about applications and mobile search, but in many cases the technology just hasn’t caught up to the complexity of material needed to support the decision process. That’s not to say that a certain colleague who slipped off to Vegas this week won’t come back with an idea that will perfectly align with a security or open source company on our roster.
As Kuhn said 40 years ago in debunking the myth of linear progression in scientific advancements, a breakthrough or two ought to erase all the gradualism and sideline chatter we’re hearing now.
