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Little known fact: In his farewell address, President George Washington predicted that 1797 would be “the year of mobile.” Every year since, pundits have been telling us that mobile’s big-time debutante cotillion is definitely next year.
OK, so some of that isn’t true. But for about the last 5-7 years, people have been promising that the year of mobile is only months away. And every year they have been wrong. Mobile marketing is just getting rolling. In short, the data show growing interest, but that perhaps we are short of the proverbial “tipping point.” The same eMarketer report predicted the following mobile marketing revenues for the next several years:
So mobile is just beginning to cook. Or so says me. Some define 2007 as the “year of mobile.” In other words that it already happened. I am not poo-pooing the observations of these visionaries. But by my definition we are still waiting for mobile marketing to truly go mainstream. True, some big brands did try mobile in 2007. And that is a significant development. ACNielsen reported that 23% of mobile users (58,000,000) saw a mobile advertisement in March 2008, which is surely significant.
I define the “year of mobile” as the one in which we see “big-time” activity. Not the odd SMS program, not an SMS CRM adjunct to an email program, not a small ad buy. But by mobile actually being used by lots of big brands who view it as a real tool rather than as an experiment. When a packaged good reports that they can attribute 80,000 cases to mobile, or an automaker reports 8 points of improvement in awareness and purchase intent, that will be the year of mobile for me.
Are You Ready?
Why isn’t mobile marketing bigger? People point to a lack of common standards across phones. To the prevalence of old phones being used – phones with limited data functionalities. To limited usage of data services like SMS among people outside their Teens. And a bunch of other things.
What’s interesting about these “reasons” is that a lot of them just aren’t true. Sure, there are systemic issues – draconian carrier approval processes, and a lack of cross carrier interstate standards. But there’s a lot more good news for mobile than bad. A little later I’ll outline the data, but the fact is that most Americans 18+ have a cell phone, and more than half do something other than make calls on it. And mobile technology adoption appears to be more abrupt than gradual. American Idol got Teens in America texting in a single season. My business partner Cory Treffiletti calls it a pop culture moment, and the history of mobile globally has shown that pop culture moments are the engines that spur immediate adoption of new data technologies. iPhone and its clones are doing the same thing to Internet access via a phone.
So, in short, I reject the idea that the consumer isn’t ready for major mobile market efforts. The problem is that most of us – us mainstream marketers, people who don’t know what CDMA stands for without visiting Wikipedia – don’t know what to do with mobile. What might work. How it really fits into the lives of our non-13 year old consumers.
Bad Evangelism
And like many technologies, its evangelists haven’t succeeded in finding easy ways to dimensionalize the potential impact of mobile marketing yet. I want to emphasize that I am indicting myself here as much as anyone else, but digital people as a group positively suck at explaining the marketing import of things.
Look how we explain a simple thing like RSS:
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content including, but not limited to, blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts.[2] An RSS document (which is called a "feed" or "web feed" [3] or "channel") contains either a summary of content from an associated Web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with Web sites in an automated manner that can be piped into special programs or filtered displays.
In short, we explain one technology by referring to other confusing ones, and focus on the first tiny efforts instead of using big programs as our case studies. By the time the big brands are doing things, most of us have moved on to the next thing.
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