Last week we wrote a bit about the Webit EXPO and I presented to you Alex Marks – head of marketing for eBay. Today I will present Anders Borde who is the Marketing Director of MORE mobile relations – a Nordic mobile marketing company aiming to fulfilling the untapped potential of mobile phones in the areas of phone marketing and creating one-on-one relationship between companies and end-users. In an interview with Elena Nikolova, Anders explains the benefits mobile advertising can offer.
Elena Nikolova
Mobile advertising is unknown in Bulgaria and pretty much in Greece. Could you explain what exactly it is?
First of all we make a distinction between mobile advertising and mobile marketing. The way we look at it is that mobile marketing is more of the way you use the mobile as a tool for dialogue and interaction. Mobile advertising is more about advertising in the traditional form, having display ads for example in mobile inventory. Mobile inventory can be mobile websites, but it can even be a part of text message, it can be displayed ads placed in mobile games or in relation to mobile TV or music. So mobile can be both, it’s a perfect tool for dialogue and interaction but it’s eyeballs in the more traditional form. That’s at least our definition of mobile advertising.
How fast do you believe mobile advertising is developing in Western Europe?
We just had some statistics from Sweden, still quite small numbers but 2009 compared to 2008 we have an 84% growth within the mobile channel. It is not the only one but it’s one of the very few channels, which are still growing during the more depressing times, which are now. So, it’s definitely picking up but it’s doing it from quite small figures.
When do you think mobile advertising will have future in Bulgaria?
First of all I have to say that I don’t know how far you are within mobile marketing in Bulgaria. I know how mobile marketing is doing in Turkey and Turks have always been a pioneer operator there, doing a lot of mobile marketing and advertising. What we see in Norway is that mobile marketing is very big and we even experience that the whole content with ringtones and logos really peaked in. I think Norway was compared to Korea and Japan in terms of how many people are consuming those services. The reason for this is because it was a very good business model, well not really a business model but it was very easy for customers to purchase these kinds of products, because it worked across all the carriers - the way of ordering them, you used the same short numbers and the prices were the same, no matter which operator you used, so it was not very complicated. But my point was that what we see in Norway is that this kind of very base utility mobile marketing services have really exploded. You can’t really go to a hairdresser without receiving a message the previous day to remind you of your appointment. Another example is that in Norway now you can confirm payments through your phone. You just click “yes” if everything is OK with the payment and it goes through. You can measure and pay your electricity through your mobile, you get messages from your post office when you have a package, etc. With this kind of utility base services I think what is good about them is that they create some kind of comfort for the channel that it can be used for something else other than only voice and peer-to-peer communication.
How would you compare advertising as we know it now with mobile advertising? What is different and what benefits can it give us?
What we can hear and see is that advertising in its tradition form is going to fade out. The way of a company having a product and then pushing out a message with the reason why you should buy this product. This is very push-based approach “here, we have this great product – come and buy”. This is advertising in its traditional form. I think the trend is that this is not the way consumers want to engage with companies and brands. It’s just too much. Rather, the company should maybe spend this advertising money into some new benefits for their products. For example one really successful case in Sweden is “Arla,” (a company behind all the milk products in Sweden). What they do is that they make these really good mobile applications, where you can have many different types of food courses. So actually they give you an application, which is useful for you. This is where mobile comes in. It is a tool for brands to give you something extra, make a service better, add some value to the actual product and not just being pushy and saying “now I’m just spamming you with a message of why you should come to the store and buy”. I don’t believe in this approach.
People have the tendency to overdo things just like online ads vs. pop-ups. Where is the thin line and can we prevent mobile marketing from becoming the mobile pop-up?
Well of course there has been a lot of bad mobile marketing even in the Nordic region. They are stopping now but there are many unserious companies within this business still. What the unserious players do is they get a hold of some kind of data base with millions of phone numbers and they go to a brand and say “you can reach one million people with a message, let’s do that!” Even the Red Cross in Norway has done that and it is just ignorance even for a brand manager to do that because you have never asked for a permission to send out this message. Even if it is from Red Cross! I haven’t asked for it, so I would be reluctant to the company. Every communication, which will reach me or you and which we will endorse and like, must have our permission prior.
And how do you actually get the permission to use all those phone numbers? How do you collect them?
What happens is that when you go to a store to shop for some clothes, for example, the salespeople ask you “would you like to receive an offer from via text message, because every Friday we have different discounts?”. And here you can say “No, I’m not interested” or “Yeah, sure” and give your phone number. And then this is a clear contract between you as a consumer and the store that you will receive a text message every Friday. And because you have agreed to it, you wait for this message and learn about the discounts and eventually go to the store. So there needs to be some contract. Building this data base is not what we as mobile marketers do. It’s not even the mobile operators. It’s the brand itself that has to build its own data base. We can help them by advising them on having some incentives but the data base of H&M, for example, is the asset of the company and they have to decide what they want to do with it. If they want to spam their customers with spam every day, then that’s their choice.
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