TVs are starting to show signs of being more tightly integrated with mobiles as set manufacturers begin packing Wi-Fi chips into their products.

As I’ve mentioned before, I think this is the start of a new channel for mobile marketing and should be explored immediately, especially with the announcement of Android TVs.

Samsung have released a remote control application for their fancy new internet-enabled TV, available for free in the App Store. It does the usual stuff you would expect for a TV remote application but what is interesting is the game pad and gesture-based controls for changing volume and channels.

So will eventually lead to the NFC TV concept? I think it will, manufacturers of TVs are constantly looking to provide you with new excuses and buzzwords to get you to part with your money, just check out the sudden influx of 3D home displays.

[iTunes Link]

[Via Into Mobile]

Mobile banners haven’t really changed much in the last 4 years, however phones have improved beyond recognition with faster processors, 3G capabilities and better screens. However just as important is the improvement in handset targeting by advertising networks, this enables mobile websites to serve ads based on the capabilities of each phone model – so basically serving better ads to better phones.

As you know the mobile landscape is changing, Apple and Google both are now owners of the hardware, software and advertising networks. This means they completely control the mobile advertising eco-system for their handsets, free from the constraints that have handicapped creativity in this part of the industry for so long.

In the future advertising units & banners will have access to features on the phone, either through Flash, Flash Lite or HTML5. We’ve already seen Google’s ‘Near Me Now’ function on its website which directly accesses the phones GPS unit to provide shops and restaurants nearby. I think it’s only a matter of time before we see the accerometer used in the same way.

For those of you who don’t know, the accelerometer is the component in the phone which measures tilt, motion, shaking and swinging. It is responsible for sensing if the handset is portrait or landscape and switches the display accordingly. The iPhone was arguably the first real phone to ultilise it fully within its user interface and applications.

Aaaand did you know that Flash Lite 3.0 already has the power to access to data from the accelerometer on phones such as the Nokia 5800? Flash developers head here and here for example code. Oh and Flash Lite works WITHIN the browser so the following examples can be done today! (I’ll be covering this more in my next post)

Enough talking fool, show me some examples!

So what kind of unique, engaging, mobile-only experiences could you create using this technology?

Here are some examples of online banners that would fit perfectly with the accelerometer and the mobile web. These are a mixture of Flash banners and whole page takeovers, they inspired me and hopefully they’ll get your imagination and creative juices flowing about the possibilities of mobile advertising.

Wario Shake It

This is absolutely perfect for mobile, shaking your phone to set off all the elements falling. Plus Flash Lite has access to the vibration on the phone so this could shake the phone too!. Check it out here

Fiat ABS Banner

Imagine interacting with this by tilting your phone. Great Ad.

Fiat Engine Power Banner

Another great banner. Simple but effective, could be activated by tilting the phone.

Gulliver Used Car Banner

This banner advertises used car trading, hence the continuous swapping of drivers.  Imagine flipping your phone upside down to interact.

Burger King – Banner Of Doom

Probably the greatest banner of all time. As the screen begins to shake, so could the phone (this functionality is available in Flash Lite). Click here to view.

The functionality to create all this stuff is already available but nobody seems to be taking to first steps and putting cool stuff out there even at proof of concept stage. When I get some time I’ll throw together a few real life examples and get it on video to put on the site.

“Mobile Guru” Tomi Ahonen gives his speech at the PICNIC 09 – he is a bit mental and makes quite a few points that I don’t agree with. It kinda feels like he is out of touch with what’s going on, it’s the difference between just talking about mobile and actually working in mobile. I think I might start doing these speeches, looks like a good earner, all you need is a few slides with acronyms.

Tomi thinks the next big thing is MMS, not NFC, not Android, not location, not coupons, not ad-funded handsets. This is based on the BMW MMS campaign in Germany which made $45 million in revenue by targeting customers who had purchased a car in the summer, prompting them to buy winter tires. Fantastic campaign but this is the exception rather than the rule, advertisers still aren’t getting involved with MMS. Why? Because operators still charge too much bloody money per message, even at bulk rates, and this scares them off.

Unless it miraculously comes down to the cost of SMS I don’t see MMS advertising being ‘the next big thing’, especially on the back of one campaign.

Other points:

• Tomi says you can’t have a Augmented Reality browser on a laptop – why not? My laptop has a webcam built-in, Layar could easily exist for laptops and netbooks.
• He confuses the popularity of peer to peer SMS with advertising SMS. These are not the same. Yes SMS is addictive, but not when it’s from advertisers.
• The bit where he pretends to spit on the floor showing his dislike for location based services compared with measuring movement is just daft.

Add all that with a few sexist comments and it makes for interesting viewing. The stuff about mobile in developing countries is worth listening to.

Samsung have started adding Wi-Fi to their LED range of televisions. Not only can you use Twitter and Flickr from the on-screen widgets but you can also watch YouTube (which brings up questions about the future of traditional broadcasting just by itself).

The reason why this is important is because the TV can now send and receive information via the internet.  Add a NFC chip onto the television/remote control it then becomes a portal of unlimited opportunities.

Compare the adverts you sit through on TV to on the internet, I barely notice the ones online but on TV brands have the chance to really grab my attention. My attention is on the screen, I’ve probably got a packet of Pickled Onion Monster Munch in hand (get in), I ain’t moving. Then…wow the new Adidas Predator advert comes on, jeez I sure would like a pair of them, move my phone over the remote and BEEP BEEP > coupons, nearest store, catalogues, competitions, apps, the list could go on. The same applies during programs.

NFC is the technology for the true couch potato.

We’re currently at the very beginning of NFC, the technology will start being seen in a few half-decent phones this year, even Apple might dip their toe in one day according to this patent (that will be when it goes crazy). And just like anything, as time goes on the technology will become cheaper and more common.

Two weeks ago, O2 launched their very own SMS advertising network called O2 More. The opt-in program aims to “deliver highly personalised campaigns for advertisers and give customers access to a wide range of exclusive and relevant offers from over 50 leading brands.”

It works by the O2 customer signing up and filling out their age and interests online (picture below), O2 will also use their location and usage data:

What other information will be used for O2 More?

Only things we know about how you use your phone since you’ve been on O2. For example, if we know you download music to your phone, we may send you details of a music offer. We want to make the messages you receive from us as relevant as possible.

I dug around and found the O2 Sim card I used for the AQA vs 118188 test and signed up for O2 More. Check out the registration screen below (click to enlarge).

This is the first time one of the big four operators has opened up their customer data to brands and it’s probably long overdue. There’s no reason this couldn’t have been done years ago so why now? Are brands and consumer attitudes changing?

Shaun Gregory, managing director of O2 Media said in a statement:

“Mobile advertising has been slow to deliver on its promise. Much of that has been down to a lack of understanding, limited opportunities and no real accountability or measurement. O2 More is about to change all that and will spearhead the UK’s first truly personalized media business.”

Why Now?

I personally think that operators are seeing power shift over to manufacturers and are making (slightly vain) attempts to combat this. For a long time operators have been holding all the cards for targeted mobile advertising, they have your location, personal details (when you sign the contract) and even your browsing habits. But now everything has changed, advances in technology means that the handset can do all of this and more, putting the manufacturers in pole position.

Phones can use GPS for your location, online accounts for your personal information (like Facebook, Google etc) and can track your browsing habits just as well as the operators. This poses a problem for mobile networks because they are moving out of the profit loop.

But the most important thing to remember is that manufacturers control the user interface and experience. This means that advertising doesn’t just have appear in the browser or Applications, completely new ad-units can be created. Imagine the things you could do if you got the chance to start mobile advertising from scratch, on your own terms. Imagine the brains behind Apple and Google creating new ways to advertise that aren’t restricted to SMS or banners.

In the past operators took a cut of your profits if you wanted to make some money using things like premium rate SMS, LBS lookups or reverse billing. These days you can take payments from within a iPhone/Android/Blackberry App and the operator doesn’t get a penny. Imagine the amount of money that goes around the iPhone eco-system without O2 getting a sniff.

And what about ad serving? It’s allowed developers and publishers to turn over millions in revenue by pulling ads into their apps/mobile sites without any profits going to the networks. After Google paid $750 million for Admob, a business that relies on advertising on mobile networks, I wonder if operators wondered why they weren’t getting a more of the pie.

This is blatantly obvious with app stores. Vodafone and Orange have just launched their own. Why? What do they believe they can offer the marketplace that the manufacturers cannot? The answer is – not much, apart from confusing consumers. It’s totally ‘me too!’ behaviour with the purpose of slowing domination by manufacturers.

Anyway back to O2 More, one thing O2 does have is reach, they can target people who have low end phones just as well as the super duper ones because everything is reliant on the network rather than phone hardware. But when recent studies show that iPhone users spend more money you often wonder where you’re likely to get a higher ROI.

I’ve been signed up for O2 More for 3 weeks and I have yet to receive a promotion. Not really a good start.

Shaun Gregory, head of O2 Media, said: ‘It’s not about bombarding customers; it’s about providing true relevancy. If we have [an offer you'll enjoy] we’ll send it. If we don’t, we won’t.’ Gregory also swears you won’t receive more than one a day”

Maybe the ad inventory doesn’t match up to my personal preferences yet? One I get a SMS ad i’ll screen grab it and post it on the blog.

Here are some of my thoughts for the next 12 months.

Enjoy and discuss.

Aside from doing the mobile marketing campaign stuff, I also spend a lot of time designing WAP sites and mobile banners for various promotions that require landing pages/advertising across different publisher sites. I’ve been making mobile banners since 2006 when I was at Enpocket and even though mobile has come a long way to become cemented in advertising and brand strategy, some things are still exactly the same as they were 3 years ago…there is a serious lack of love for the mobile banner.

If you work in advertising/creative in any shape or form you will have no doubt come across brand guidelines before, these are the documents provided to agencies, partners and freelancers to ensure that the company is represented clearly and consistently both inside and outside the organisation. This includes rules for print, outdoor and online, such as size of logo, spacing between elements, colours, tone of voice etc. The guidelines often need to followed to the letter otherwise any designs you’ve done will get thrown out during the brands internal sign off process. This is where the trouble begins…

I’ve made hundreds mobile banners and WAP sites, in that time I’ve seen brand guidelines include specifications for mobile just once - both for regular advertisers and those dipping their toes in. Instead you’re expected to apply the same rules and assets for online to any mobile designs. This causes a number of problems because in many cases, it’s impossible to do on mobile.

Mobile screens are small and banners are even smaller (as well as being highly restricted but more on that later). Meaning that any logos, graphics and mandatory slogans/copy often become illegible as they scale down. You would assume this allows you some leeway with getting designs approved, after all if you can’t make out half the things in the advert it’s pretty pointless.

Often the only way to fit something into a banner is by re-working some of the assets, such as making a portrait logo into landscape by moving the elements side by side or removing some copy heavy slogans. Nothing radical. But exceptions are rarely made by brand teams, partly because they don’t understand the limitations of mobile or have anything other than online to reference it against. This means they would rather let barely legible creative through the approval process than something that is clearer, more effective and likely to get a click. Once brand team sign-off the creative it usually goes live without anyone from the company checking it over again as responsibility is delegated. In the end you’re left with a banner that leaves you wondering “who is actually going to click on this thing?”.

Check out this logo I picked completely at random as an example:

The static banners above show the difference it makes by adapting for mobile. Would you rather have your advert unrecognisable but adhere to the guidelines? Or work on getting the best out of your money by considering how to adapt for the medium?

Some brands have logos, slogans and assets that luckily already work well for mobile but those who don’t can count the cost in a number of ways including:

• The ad campaign doesn’t perform well, wasting money and affecting the brands confidence in spending money on mobile advertising again in the future.
• The poor quality creative has a direct effect on the consumers perception of the brand, which is kinda ironic after the brand team signs it off.
• The brands Competitors DO create mobile brand guidelines, making their ads look considerably better to the consumer.

Working on the ad-serving team at Nokia, I got to see how major ad campaigns were doing and it’s no surprise that click through rates have a direct correlation to the quality of creative. If I would have had all the banner creatives on the screen and hidden the results, you could have easily guessed which ones got the best CTR just by looking at the graphics. Obviously there are other elements involved in attracting the user to make that click but in my opinion the creative is the most important. If it wasn’t then everyone would just run text ads right? In Google’s own words, “Text is often useful, but sometimes videos and pictures are a more effective way to receive information.”

The banners might be small however the money spent on them is anything but, it’s common to see anywhere between £10,000 to £100,000 on buying up impressions for a single campaign across various operator portals and publisher sites. It’s big business and Google paying $750 million for Admob is a clear indication of how seriously mobile ad-serving is being taken. It’s not sexy but serving banner ads is always gonna be where the big moneyz will be made in mobile.

So isn’t it extraordinary that with all this money being spent, one of the most important parts of the eco-system is being massively overlooked? It’s a bit of a contradiction to the recent talk of how brands are leading the way with mobile.

The solution is pretty simple – if brands are investing in mobile advertising, they need to work with a good mobile agencies, using their experience and knowledge to help develop mobile sections in their guidelines. It shouldn’t just cover banners but also how copy is used too. There doesn’t seem to be much understanding that you can only fit a small number of words onto mobile graphics, they need to be punchy with a clear CTA. I don’t see why a copy writer is used for things like email newsletters but not for a mobile ad campaign costing upwards of £10,000.

Including mobile into brand guidelines will be a good investment, it can be built up over time to include all areas of mobile marketing (applications etc) continuously evolving…just like guidelines should.

The MMA

The Mobile Marketing Assocation is the non-profit industry trade group that represents agencies, advertisers, device manufacturers and wireless operators. Every year they produce mobile advertising guidelines in an attempt to educate the marketplace and establish industry-wide best practices. These range from recommendations for SMS marketing to file sizes for banners. The recommendations are then (supposedly) taken on by advertising networks who target mobile users by serving the ads across hundreds of different mobile sites. (Links to guidelines for 2007, 2008, 2009)

The problem is that the MMA haven’t changed the specification for static banner ads in 3 years. In 2008 they added just 1-2KB to animated banners only, in 2009 there was no change at all. It’s basically like the industry handicapping itself. One year in mobile is equivalent to a year on the Internet, things move at such a rapid rate and the MMA need to reflect this. The dimensions of the banner sizes haven’t changed, which I totally understand because even though you have iPhones and Androids, the majority of phones on the market are still made up by the four sizes below.

My question is why are the file size constraints still the same? The market has changed so much in 3 years, not just technology but also standard operator tariffs.

Here are some of the historical reasons for not changing the file size limits:

Slower 2.5G phones – A large part of the market still have 2.5G phones, so the you would think it makes sense to work to the lowest common denominator and keep the file sizes low. No user wants pages taking longer to load because of ads. However the MMA seem to forget that 2.5G phones get quicker at rendering wap pages every year because of faster processors and software. On top of this sites are often optimised to load content first, and then load the ads. This means that worrying about increased loading times for the end user over an extra 5-6KB isn’t warranted.

Data costs for the consumer – A few years back operators were charging data by the megabyte but now it’s capped at a daily rate for PAYG and contract tariffs in the UK and much of Europe, meaning that larger banners aren’t going to cost the consumer more.

Extra load on advertising servers – Come on now, really?

I’m a big on user experience and I wouldn’t be suggesting increasing the file size of advertising if it meant the consumer lost out. It will allow animated banners to have more frames and better animation, photography will look more recognisable and so will text. The end result will be something more visually engaging and informative or the consumer, and more valuable for the advertiser as it encourages more clicks.

Here are some examples:

Standard 7.48KB MMA Sized Animated Banner:

Here is a banner at 50% MORE than the MMA standard:

14.5KB Animated Banner

So what does the above banner look like under the MMA limit…..

7.27KB MMA sized Animated Banner:

Pretty grim hey?

We are now at a stage where the MMA should increase banner limits by at least 30-50% per size. Of course ad networks don’t have to pay any attention to the MMA guidelines and many don’t, but this needs to start from the top and filter down. There are some promising signs from networks in Europe where file size limits are a max of 15KB for every size, hopefully this will become more common.

Well that’s my view from the ground, I would love to hear some other opinions from within the industry.

Japenese singer/songwriter JuJu released the song “Sunao Ni Naretara” (wish I could be true to myself)  at the beginning of 2009 and was heavily pushed via mobile.

With mobile videos being one of the most popular ways to consume music in Japan, record label Sony decided to use streamed music videos in an effort to target females in their teens and twenties.

I know what you’re thinking..”but aren’t streamed videos on mobile really small and low quality?” Well advertising agency Dentsu have the answer..how about placing TWO small mobile screens together to create one slighly larger low quality movie!

The ‘technology’ behind this is called Pair Movie and was developed by Mobile Art Lab.

The way it works is that you sit next to the person you want to watch the movie with. Then you both head over to the same mobile Internet page where there will be two links, one for the left video and one for the right. You both hit the links at the same time to get each side streamed to create one long movie across two screens.

Check out the video explaining the campaign, it’s worth watching just to hear the voice-over. Some of the points they make are quite comical. How does putting two phones together make mobile videos less degraded?

The music video was made into a series of five 90-second drama shows which could be streamed for free from the campaign site. You can view them here.

The Pair Movie site doesn’t say if any other technology is used to ensure both videos play exactly at the same time. At first I thought it might use Infra-red but then I saw that phones could be placed vertically or horizontally so that would rule it out. So if I have a slow connection and you have fast one, what happens to the experience if they play out of sync?

It received some really good results, the Pair Movie was played 320,000 times in the first month. The total number of downloads is now 2,200,000 and still growing. More than 150,000 copies of the song were sold and the song Sunao Ni Naretara became JuJu’s biggest hit.

This campaign recently won a Gold Lion at the Cannes Advertising Festival

Check out this great video from Touch showing the possibilities of using RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags inside of physical objects to control media playback.

It gives you some fantastic insight on the tools brands, agencies and advertisers will have at their disposal in the future. That is of course providing NFC enabled phones actually take off, but all it takes is a handset like the iPhone to step in with it and change the market. According to this patent application by Apple, that might just happen.

The even bigger picture is using your phone to interact with everyday objects and devices (also the basis for my NFC concept). Explained simply in the picture below.

What is even more excitin is the exploration not only about the phone reacting as output for an object but also as the input.

Imagine waiting for a bus and the shelter has a digital displaying showing a advert your not interesting in. You simply swipe your phone over the display and it automatically sends your pre-set interests to the screen to show something that you are more likely to be interested in. Minority Report styyleee!

Ok more realistically imagine planning your route on Google Maps mobile then simply touching your car with the phone once you get in to input the journey into its satellite navigation system. Or maybe it could transfer over your Spotify playlist to be played over your in car entertainment system.

The possibilities are endless.

The social news site Digg has recently launched an innovative advertising system where users vote on adverts to make them more popular.

If you haven’t heard of Digg, it’s basically a news portal where the community votes on stories and content from around the Internet. The more popular the story the higher it appears on Digg until eventually it appears on the front page. Imagine the BBC website with all the stories on the front page there because viewers voted on them. Alternatively if Digg users dislike a story they can ‘bury’ it, making it go further down the pages.

The same principle applies to ads now appearing on Digg. If the community likes the ad more people will see it, if not, it gets buried and no one sees it. Essentially your recommending it to your fellow users by voting it positive.

This is really interesting because you’re immediately challenging the advertiser to create an engaging ad campaign for the audience. If the brand goes in half hearted then not only will they lose money but the attitude of 2 million plus Digg members could take a negative turn against the product/company.

I think this probably works best for viral types of advertising, I can’t imagine people voting up the launch of a new breakfast cereal or shampoo. Viral ads like the Nike ‘Ronaldinho R10‘ or John West ‘Bear Fight‘ video could be the way to conquer it. I would certainly hire one of the most active Digg users to consult on my ad.

Another problem is relevancy. Ads that appear are based on other peoples votes which could lead to hugely inaccurate results for the end user.

However assuming some funky algorithm is involved and I only get shown ads from people who are my friends and those who have voted on the same types as story as me (Sports, Technology, Gaming etc) it could be positive or negative. Just because you and me vote up the same type of news stories/online content doesn’t mean we like consuming the same things. Even if I myself voted on video about a basketball player scoring from the halfway line on the buzzer. It doesn’t mean I want to be sold the latest basketball gear. I don’t even like basketball, I could have just appreciated the shot.

I think socially recommended ads can be great, I’ve found through research in consumer testing that things to buy that are recommended by friends are much more trusted than those recommended by sites like Amazon. Check out the example below, which products would you be more likely to click on? (privacy considerations aside)

Of course there is the case of Facebook Beacon which was famously hated by more or less everyone in the world. The Beacon advertising system published onto your friends newsfeeds websites that you had been visiting, what products you purchased, rated and flights or hotels booked etc.

One huge problem with Beacon was that it opted you in automatically which is insane especially on a site like Facebook where there are so many privacy controls. Even if most people don’t use half of the privacy options there are benefits of having them there including an overall sense of trust in the site.

Opting people in automatically is such a dangerous move, allowing users the choice would have been far more sensible. The Beacon saga would have been a whole different story if the control would have been in the users hands.

People have a major desire for control when privacy is a factor even if they will never  exercise using it. Another recent example is when Facebook made a change to the terms of service, millions of users joined groups (the largest had 2.5 million) demanding the TOS be changed back. When Facebook finally said ‘OK, we’ll let the users vote on the TOS’, guess how many users out of 200 million actually voted? only 600,000. Once Facebook gave the option of control via the vote people calmed down and got less involved and how many times have you actually read a TOS document anyway? The moral of the story is conrtol, control, control.

In the case of Digg I think it would work better on a traditional social network with people who actually know you. I’m not sure how it would work but maybe combining friends who go to the same events as you with ones who communicate with you the most could work. If one of these friends clicks on a ad that same can be shown to you automatically or have a ‘share’ button on a ad.

Using Voting On Advertising To Make It More Relevant

I’m a big fan of using the feature of being able to vote on advertising to make it more targeted and relevant for yourself. This not only creates a better experience for you but it also saves the advertisers money by not wasting impressions.

The idea is that when you vote negatively (thumbs down, minus sign whatever) against an ad it will not get shown to you again, if you vote negatively again to more ads in the same category then that category will not get shown to you again. Make sense right?

When you vote positively on a ad then the opposite happens, you see more from that company or of that category of ad. Your friends could also be shown ads which you have rated positively.

Facebook is currently using a voting system on its sidebar ads. If you vote the ad thumbs down you’ll get asked to rate the ad either:

Misleading
Offensive
Pornographic
Uninteresting
Irrelevant
Repetitive
Other

Once you pick one of these I’m assuming that you should not see this type of ad again. However I’ve noticed it doesn’t really work, could it be that Facebook doesn’t have enough ad inventory to support these ratings? That could answer why when I rate negatively I still see the same type of crap ads.

However it’s a step in the right direction if the feedback goes to the advertiser as well as Facebook. It means that everyone works harder to make things better.

On Facebook the feature probably doesn’t get used much as users have the luxury of ads not being very intrusive and many people have ad blindness online. But on services like Spotify it could really improve your overall experience and even become beneficial. This model would work even better on mobile where screen environment is much smaller and ads become more in your face.

The question is will people bother to vote at all? After reading the responses to Facebook launching the feature it seems that many people online either a) haven’t notice the feature at all because they don’t notice the ads or b) won’t rate ads because they don’t want to waste there time or do the hard work for Facebook.

At the end of the day the ads are going to be there regardless, if it’s a free service it needs to generate revenue. Wouldn’t you rather the ads occupying the space were of interest to you?