Personalisation on a mass market scale
Shaun Gregory, managing director, O2 Media: Everyone says that 2011 is at last the year of mobile. The truth is that this is just the beginning – this will be the decade of mobile…
Personalised, relevant communications are the future of advertising, and these will be powered by intelligent messaging and operators that use customer data for the benefit of consumers and advertisers.
This week the number of people signed up to O2 More reached more than 2.4 million. That’s 2.4 million customers who are ready, willing and excited about opening up a dialogue with brands.
Recent O2 research showed that 91% of people said that they were positive about receiving 3rd party messages via O2. Meanwhile, 67% of O2 customers said they are likely to engage with a mobile offer – it’’s an expansive target market.
However, this is where personalisation becomes imperative. With such a huge target market to aim at it is essential that the industry doesn’t allow laziness to creep into its marketing techniques and resort to the tired old ideas of reach and mass market approaches.
You can’t take this positive feeling for granted and keeping customer trust and privacy is vital – if this isn’t the highest priority that positivity will quickly evaporate. We have to become clever, creative and considered in everything we do when engaging consumers.
For example, with a recent campaign we ran we targeted O2 iPhone customers who told us that they watched live premiership football matches. We identified cell sites for each of the premier league football grounds then searched for opted-in customers who visited these sites during the first two games this season. We then removed people who were in these cell sites the day before or after (to make sure we weren’t targeting the wrong people) then sent a tailored message on match day.
Without it being intelligently and creatively tailored, a campaign like this would have been at best scatter-gun, at worst hugely irritating. Personalised targeting leads to minimum wastage and customer location and call behaviour is a way of getting to the right people in the right place at the right time and in the right purchase mood.
A recent Starbucks campaign provided 93% brand recall while econometric modelling from Manning Gottleib OMD (there’s a lot of O2 research in the piece because not many more people are measuring these campaigns at the moment) showed that mobile delivered a better rate of return on investment than TV, Press, Online and Social Media.
Everyone says that 2011 is at last the year of mobile. The truth is that this is just the beginning, and this will be the decade of mobile. A time during which marketers will seize the opportunity, true personalisation really kicks in and revenue is at last distributed to those that truly command the attention of consumers.
As the author and futurist William Gibson, said: “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed”.