Skip to content

App or wap? Both thanks.

AdAge recorded an interesting viewpoint from Major League Baseball about whether a brand (or media property) should have an app or a wap site. The answer is you need to have both.  From MLBs perspective, they felt that one of the advantages of an app is that you can charge for it, while the wap site needs to be free.  MLB offers this insight:

* 400k users use the paid application every day
* 350k users use their free app every day
* 750k users access the wap site every day

What is notable though, is that on the wap site they have 25m page views with 4m unique users every day, which far exceeds what they have in terms of page views on the app.  This should hardly come as a surprise given the number of handsets which can access their site vs what the app can do.  Brands and media companies need to employ a different strategy for app and wap, where wap is information focused (which probably in MLBs case has to do with checking scores and stats, etc) and apps are more entertainment focused, and include richer media.

They feel apps will “catch up” with wap, but in this case I am not so sure.  For one, data plans will become common on lower end handsets, eradicating some of the economic advantages phones like the iPhone have today – and is sure to make wap browsing more attractive. Also, while there are still a lot of horrifically designed wap sites out there, the level of understanding in terms of what it takes to design a good wap experience is continuing to improve.  And while apps work well on the one-stop-shop that is the eco system of the iPhone, it does not work as well on other platforms in terms of features, ability to upgrade, etc.   The question is not iPhone vs wap – it is app vs wap, which means from an app perspective you should support Symbian, Windows, BlackBerry, Palm, Android, J2ME – which from a development perspective still means major headaches. In this regard, Wap seems quite attractive as the platform of choice.

Posted in Mobile Entertainment, The Business of Mobile.

Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Comments Off on App or wap? Both thanks.

Social campaigns need to engage

A recent survey by Lightspeed Research found that creating a social media campaign needs to go “beyond the basics” in order to engage consumers.  If your agency is telling you that all you need to do is to set up a fan page on Facebook, have some of your staff start sending Tweets and start sponsoring some chat/blog hot spots, the you need to understand the statistics from this survey, as only:

* 8% of Aussies said their image of a brand would improve if the brand sponsored a blog
* 7% of Aussies and 9% of Japanese said their image of a brand would improve if the brand wanted to be their friend
* 13% said the image would improve if the brand created an online video, and 10% would view the brand more favorably if they sponsored a music download

Who are the real followers?

It is quite clear, that a social campaign for a brand needs to be built around engagement, and that engagement goes far beyond outbound messaging and begging for friends. To achieve true engagement, there has to be an incentive for the user to interact with your brand (and no, “saving” $1.99 on a song you probably would not have downloaded anyway is not an incentive).  Furthermore, assuming your goal is to make the campaign viral, you have to create it in such a way that people want to engage their friends, and that those friends field that they are not being spammed by their friends for being solicited to join. Naturally, the basis of which you want to engage the user also needs to be relevant – both to the user and your brand – you cannot rely on the incentive alone.

This is not an easy task, and few brands get  it right. This is precisely why Storyz was built to allow for these criteria to be fulfilled in an engaging campaign. Check out this campaign example to see what I mean.

Posted in Social Media Marketing.

Tagged with , , , , , , , .

Comments Off on Social campaigns need to engage

Expectations to mobile campaigns becoming realistic

I was delighted to read an article from the Mobile Ad Summit that still heralds mobile marketing as an extremely efficient channel in terms of response rates, but that now seem to provide expectations that are more in line with the truth:

“In certain applications we’re seeing double the response rates we see from online”, says Phil Armstrong, SVP of Digital Media for Bank of America.

This is a far cry from the 7-10% click through rates that have been claimed by many players.  I have been a victim of this myself, when in early 2008 (ages ago, when the market was really nascent), a leading mobile operator based ad network sent me a presentation with case studies with CTRs ranging from 3.6 to 7%. I am sure they achieved this at launch, when there were practically no banners and users clicked out of pure curiosity (or perhaps because the rest of the content on the portal was terrible), but it was in no way representative of the average at the time and just simply set customers up for a fall.  Not a good strategy when you want someone to try a new product.

Needless to say, mobile provides an excellent advertising opportunity due to a higher ability to target and contextualize, and there will hopefully always be less clutter than online. But while I am sure there are a lot of successful campaigns, it makes more sense to try and set realistic expectations than to focus on sky high CTRs which most campaigns simply will not achieve. Unfortunately you still see these types of articles (see for instance here, here or here), and I have recently been a recipient of a pitch from a publisher claiming these types of responses and wanting CPMs at a 50x premium to online.  Needless to say no deal was made, but if they keep selling this to brands that are just getting their feet wet in mobile, the uptake of mobile advertising will be a lot slower than it should be.

Posted in Mobile Marketing.

Tagged with , , , , , , , , , .

Comments Off on Expectations to mobile campaigns becoming realistic