Mobile Media

With increasing pressure on media budgets, growing consumer time famine and accelerating message clutter - isn’t it time marketers rode the mobile tiger?

South African mobile phone penetration, measured by the number of activated sim cards, has been projected to reach saturation at 85% this year. This shows continued growth up from the 60 - 70% of South Africans who owned mobile phones in 2007. Vodacom, the 58% mobile phone customer market leader has 24.8-million subscribers, with no indication of slowing acquisition. All this before the government’s announcement of a fourth mobile phone operator licence berth!

Mobile phone message functionality has rapidly morphed through SMS, WAP, MMS and Bluetooth to an array of internet enabled features. Handsets and mobile phone operator network capacity has improved to the point where the mobile phone is superceding both digital cameras and MP3 players in terms of screen quality and sound reproduction. Vodafone Live! handsets account for 18% of Vodacom’s customer handsets. It’s no wonder then that Vodacom entered the pay-TV space. We are in the future that Maurice Levy, CEO Publicis, pondered where “… most of the information you share, most of the adverting you read, most of the messages you send, most of the music you listen to will transit through your cell phone”.

In a recent mobile phone usage study (Exposure, Orange Home UK plc, Nov 2007), mobile breached radio and television dominance by being the most accessed medium between 12pm to 6pm. Half of all mobile media occasions happen when with friends, family and colleagues and 65% of these activities occur in a communal setting at work, travelling or in other locations. Far from being a solitary pursuit, mobile telephony is at the heart of social networking. As importantly, there is growing consumer acceptance for mobile advertising thanks to the internet. Sponsorship and banner advertising formats as well as direct response messages are well understood. In the future, expect more personally relevant ads, thanks to location based advertising and improved ad performance metrics.

If you missed Rick Joubert’s presentation at the second Annual New Media Conference, here’s a quick primer on why mobile marketing should be in your marketing toolkit. Mobile media marketing delivers:

 • Reach – internet enabled handset penetration continues to grow as customers upgrade at the end of their contract cycles. Usage is on the up with the increasing handset functionality. Data delivery immediacy provides advertiser flexibility.

• Frequency – intelligent ad serving brings ad capping to this platform, preventing message wear out. This opens up completely new terrain for one-to-one marketing dialogue.

• Targeting – improved database design has unlocked demographic segmentation, usage pattern recognition and the prospects of true location based messaging.

• Response – with immediacy comes accurate reporting data and improved return on marketing investment metrics.

In the 2007 e-Marketer Survey, nearly one third of marketers planned to spend in excess of 10% of marketing spend in mobile media. Of the surveyed brands, 89% planned to use mobile marketing by 2008. With our current economic outlook, it may be time for that leap of faith... go on, try mobile marketing.

By: Donald Liphoko, Associate Media Director, The MediaShop