Mobile Fix: The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed

Whilst the pace of change of GAFA and their huge scale remains a key issue for any brand, it’s still worth looking around the world to see how people are using mobile and social in a simpler way.

The geeks amongst you will recognise the William Gibson quote in the title – and nowhere is it truer than in mobile.

Take the Unilever campaign for Wheel detergent in India. Promoted on radio and by outbound calls, people were encouraged to call an 0800 number, then hang up. They were called back and heard an entertaining clip from a well-known comedian and his endorsement of the product. 16 million calls drove higher brands awareness and a spike in sales. Watch this video for the full story.

Still in India, Intuit has developed a new mobile service for farmers that gives free advice and information on agricultural issues by SMS. For example: helping the farmer to make more money by telling them the crop prices at local markets so they can go and see which one is paying more – and Intuit make money by selling advertising on the service.

In Africa IBM are using mobile data (looking at where SMS messages are sent from) to map bus services and look for ways of improving the routes. A similar service in the West is Waze where 47 million drivers share their location and traffic news – and it seems Facebook are about to buy them.

Back in India, an IT company called Mastek have taken the traffic idea one step further. To help make the company buses that pick up employees more efficient, they developed a feature phone app so the driver of each bus has their phone on the dashboard.

This means that their system can poll the app for exact location of the bus at any time and send a SMS to the employees waiting for it, when it is 10 minutes away then five minutes away.

There is a big opportunity in apps that work on feature phones, but this tends to be overlooked as developers focus on smartphones.

Back in 2005 we worked on the market entry of Refresh Mobile – now better known as Mippin – and did a lot with java apps. There is a lot of friction in developing for phones with small memories and requiring lots of accepts to install etc, but it can be done.

Of course GAFA is active in these emerging markets. Facebook has a team focused on partnerships with operators to encourage Facebook usage, whatever sort of device you have. Google is pushing NFC payments in Kenya and its very interesting Trader platform – where you can buy and sell just about anything – works on SMS in Uganda, Nigeria and Ghana.

Around the world, brands are learning that they must deliver value if they are to earn consumers’ attention. But if you can get this right there are new business models to be had. And mobile and social are the ideal vehicles for this new approach.

“It’s the medium of future and the future has already arrived”

Eric Schmidt has caused a bit of controversy this week by implying that YouTube has already crushed regular TV. We’re not sure he actually said that; and we do have some experience of journalists misquoting you to make their story hang together better – especially when Google is involved.

For us, the two key quotes were from Eric Schmidt:

“It’s not a replacement for something that we know… It’s a new thing that we have to think about, to program, to curate and build new platforms.”

And Jeffrey Katzenberg of Dreamworks:

“This is a whole new form of content, content delivery and content consumption… It’s the medium of the future and the future has already arrived.”

This NYT video on the video upfronts shows how seriously people like AOL, Yahoo and Hulu etc take this.

OK, Sarah Jessica Parker presenting a series on ballet isn’t much of a threat to the Village or Broadchurch but it compares well to the typical programming of those channels not on the first page of the Sky EPG. The key thing with all these new opportunities is can they get the scale advertisers like?

The Head of Fox this week agreed that things are changing and the broadcasters need to adapt;

“…broadcast TV remained “the dominant form of event television” but was stuck with “historical practices” such as creating hundreds of pilots for series which never air.

“Broadcasters needed to target investments to fewer shows.”

As Amazon have entered the world of Pilots, it is clear that everyone now sees the web as a video medium rather than the text one we have grown accustomed to, because of bandwidth restrictions. The LA Times puts it well:

“…what makes the Amazon pilots impressive is not that they create something radically new but that they do “real TV” so well. Their true message is that there are new Big Guns in town, and that, just as broadcast TV lost much of its market share to cable, both are going to have to make room for the major players of digital television – not the diffuse, if sometimes brilliant voices of the medium’s shoestring pioneer age, but rather highly professional ones, well-funded and well-positioned to own the Web-based future.”

The VC community also gets this opportunity. Mark Suster – who just hired the former head of Endemol – summarises the argument:

– People watch 5.3 hours of TV per day. They read less than 30 minutes. You can’t change media consumption patterns easily. The future of the Internet is video.
– Production costs have fallen more than 90%. Distribution costs have too. These are classic ‘Innovator’s Dilemma’ market conditions.
– My estimate is that the top five YouTube networks will do more than $200 million net revenues in 2013 (after Google’s share).
– These same top networks – Maker, Machinima, Zefr, FullScreen, BigFrame – and the likes have create nearly 1,000 new tech / media jobs in LA in the past three years alone.

The ad industry already gets this to some extent through paid and organic views – just look at the YouTube leader board where ads are getting tens of millions of views.

And an event we spoke at last week, organised by Brainient, underscored just how well developed the ecosystem is for video on both the desktop and mobile – although the creative community have yet to really step up.

Mobile & OOH

After a recent big consultancy project around this topic we were very interested in the excellent MediaTel event on this subject this week. It is clear there is a real synergy here. We think that things like the ClearChannel 10,000 bus shelters across the UK with NFC and QR built in should drive innovation in this space.

But we believe the real opportunity with mobile and digital OOH is the ability to create campaigns that match supermarket catchment areas. Few brands are stocked in all supermarkets – and even within, say, Tesco products may be in a limited set of stores. The ability to target people who can actually buy the brand advertised should be a big boost.

But we wonder whether the big retailers could play a part in making this happen. As Tesco, Amazon and others start to play in content and start to use their customer data to help brands reach consumers, the game changes.

Tesco want the advertising on their developing media platform to drive sales in Tesco – and they will start to expect brands that want to be stocked to invest in these new opportunities. But given it will take some time to build their own audience, why wouldn’t they buy digital OOH around their stores and resell it to brands – with mobile geo fencing as well?

Sound farfetched? Well how about Target building a tool with Facebook to offer deals that can only be redeemed instore.

We will see retailers collaborate with all sorts of media owners to better drive sales. Interesting times for SoLoMo and for retail.