Latest Mobile content from Econsultancy

Domino's UK says 13% of digital sales come from tablet or smartphone

2012-02-09T11:42:00+00:00

Mobile has proved to be a hugely successful avenue for Domino’s; the company’s iPhone app alone has generated over £10m in sales in the past year and now accounts for 4.1% of all online orders.

Domino's head of commercial systems Paul Francis, says that the brand lends itself brilliantly to mobile retail.

13% of all digital sales come though a tablet or smartphone so we know that for many customers, mobile is the preferred way of ordering. We have ambitious plans for 2012 and I am delighted that we can offer this new app for the Windows Phone 7 platform. We look forward to hearing what our customers think.”

Whereas Domino’s multimedia manager Nick Dutch highlighted that this new app release, built by Vexed Digital, is a response to developing consumer trends and staying "ahead of the game".

With WP7 we see a great opportunity to get into the hands of loyal Nokia fans, who will be upgrading as WP7 launches."

Back in September we reviewed Domino’s iPad app, which to this day provides a significant advantage for the company over its main rival, Pizza Hut - which has not done anything with mobile at all (in the UK at least).

Like the iPhone version, the iPad app (developed by Somo) is well designed and intuitive to use, and the larger screen allows it to use high resolution images of its pizzas.

The brand also released a second app in the app in the US in November. Named Pizza Hero, it’s a game format that times how long it takes for you to virtually top a pizza, with points awarded for performance.

Once you've passed levels one through five, affectionately nicknamed Pizza School, other players will get a chance to rate your performance. Players can then, of course, order a real delivery through the app.

Domino's also announced today that it was reviewing its digital and direct marketing account. A large proportion of Domino's marketing budget is spent on digital advertising, with nearly half of its pizza sales now made online.

Walgreens launches new Foursquare and Twitter campaign

2012-02-08T23:50:00+00:00

This type of tweet is perfect if the person who checked in was looking for cold products. It is the flu season after all. For those who get it, and don't need Halls, they may disregard or unfollow. Those who are fervent about true engagement may dislike this approach. The only worry may be for those looking to follow Walgreens as they may be turned off if they stumble upon the Twitter feed.

As you can see from Walgreens Twitter page, it has been overtaken by two versions of an ad for Halls Warm-ups cough drops.

Twitter hides @ replies unless you follow both parties. So if you follow Walgreens, you won't see these replies in your stream unless you have that option set on Tweetdeck or are on Walgreen's page itself. For most, they'd never see the multiple tweets above.

Adam Kmiec, Walgreens director of social media, felt confident that this was a program worth implementing.

Our social media strategy is built around being real time, local, innovating and providing value. Over the past year we’ve continued to pilot several Social-Local initiatives. From cause related programs like our Flu Shot donation initiative that leveraged check-ins on foursquare to seasonal tips to this most recent initiative with Local Response, we’re constantly innovating, testing and learning.

The Local Response program was based on insights that were mined from our social monitoring and analysis platforms and a desire to learn more about the opportunities in the local-social space.

Michael Muse, Co-Founder and VP of Product & Operations for LocalReponse, had reservations at first about this type of approach on Twitter but it sooned changed as his company tested its model.

For local businesses, they have a very different voice then nationals so it works for them and can be quite personal. What's interesting is that over time is that we looked at bigger brands and thought this could work for them if it was done right.

So we customise for clients. The first step is you can't reply to people not talking to you. If the client wants to reach out to people who are shopping for certain things or only on Tuesdays, we cater to that. There is a selection bias and it focuses on people who are interested and engaged.

Every single campaign we've run has less than 2% opt-out rate. Also we provide frequency caps, rate limits, and a 2 level opt out to better serve users who do not wish to receive replies to their check-ins. No one receives more than one tweet per day from companies on the platform, one tweet per week from the same campaign and no more than one tweet a month from an advertiser.

It's all about experimenting. Advisors Muse met with told him this happens in every medium. There are potential pitfalls, you develop best practise and then you have specific guidelines you can follow.

LocalResponse has its own guidelines companies have to meet to use their service. As Muse outlines

If a campaign's goals in targeting do not meet all of our guidelines for context, we offer another product that can go broader: retargeting with banner ads as an alternative to response. This allows for broader targeting, but with banners instead of responses. The majority of our clients use this product, often in conjunction with the response product.

It is refreshing to see Walgreens take a chance on a start up in conjunction with a large social media campaign. Not many large companies do.

With no background on how this campaign is being run, the efforts could be misconstrued or seen as “spammy”. By taking the whole picture into account, this may be another way brands can reach the customers interested in them.

It will be interesting to see the results of this campaign, and if they are as successful as the other campaigns run by LocalResponse so far, it may be one we may be seeing a lot of.

Marketer versus machine discussions dominate OMS 2012

2012-02-08T19:38:00+00:00

The session began with a preview of the findings of our upcoming study of marketing attribution, in partnership with Google Analytics. Attribution is a hot topic at OMS and any other marketing conference you're likely to attend, with good reason. Done properly, attribution can greatly expand marketers' knowledge of how channels work, how they work together and how different customer segments interact with marketing.

Key takeaways from the research show that organizations need to:

Prepare for change
Organizations have to be prepared for the changes that attribution should cause to media mix and budget. If compensation packages are still tied to siloed spending, there will be resistance to adopting an attribution-based model.
Be aware of the effect of change on customers
Marketing automation is another set of practices and technologies that can have a profound effect on the customer relationship. At its best it decreases the sales cycle, increases lead quality and boosts retention. It also saves marketers from busy-work.Successful automation takes people, ironically.
It requires the technical resources at the front end to ensure that the technology fits with and talks to existing systems, as well as the people with the creativity and commitment to making automation work. The strongest play is to attach compensation elements to automation goals; with so many priorities, marketers have an easy time prioritizing against their personal bottom lines.
Commit to the customer experience
Customer experience is an exploding area of interest for marketers and the many vendors serving the space. There are many facets to the 'customer experience' and marketers can choose from a wide set of methods and technologies for observing, collecting data and evaluating how customers interact with marketing assets.
The big question for organizations is how far they're committed to going in their orientation around the customer. Are they willing to reorganize around customer segments, or are they looking at measures like cross-disciplinary teams to spread the lessons of customer analysis? For those that commit deeply, the benefits include higher dollar values per customer, easier retention, and improved products/services.

We also touched on a few specific channels where we have recently conducted research including:

Mobile
The key takeaway is simple; no company has the luxury of ignoring their mobile visitors. The growth rate of visits from mobile devices is through the roof, regardless of sector. One place where companies are failing to capitalize on this growth is mobile behavior.
Only 27% of companies have some awareness of how mobile visitors' behavior differs from web visitors. They're ignoring vital information that should be informing their mobile strategy, sites and/or apps.
Email
Recently, we completed a study of email practice in conjunction with the Email Experience Council of the DMA. The interplay between social and email is on everyone's mind, but few are trying to cross pollinate between the channels.
Even though a channel like Twitter delivers a very different value and experience from email, companies aren't trying to use the content that's unique to each channel to encourage multi-channel opt-in from their subscribers. Nor are they likely to have a strategy for how social and email programs work in tandem.
Social
Social engagement ranks as the top priority for marketers responding to our Quarterly Digital Intelligence Survey conducted in partnership with Adobe. Yet, social measurement lags far behind on the list. This is especially ironic because marketers are likely to agree with the statement that social has produced more goals and programs, without generating the revenue to support them.
Our conversations with attribution marketers often turned up insight on how social was a 'helping' tactic for the sale, but without measurement, social will remain caught in a limbo between promise and performance.

Amazon wades into the US video streaming market

2012-02-08T18:34:00+00:00

Viacom's distribution list reads as a who's who of television and film. Its brands include MTV, VH1, CMT, Nickelodeon, Nick at Nite, COMEDY CENTRAL and SPIKE and their reach spans to 160 media networks with almost 700 million global subscribers.

This deal will bring the total number of Prime Instant Videos to more than 15,000 and will be viewable on over 300 different devices. For only $79 a year, the Amazon Prime membership comes in at a lower price point than Netflix or Hulu Plus. With the addition of live streaming, it far surpasses the value of Netflix, which charges a higher rate of $15.98 a month for that privilege.

It's estimated that there are five million Amazon Prime subscribers and six million Kindle Fires were sold in Q4. If you count for some proportion of overlap, over eight million people could benefit from this partnership immediately.

This does give the Kindle Fire a competitive edge in terms of the tablet market. The trend of content sellers becoming device makers is enabling companies like Amazon to have a greater advantage. As the likes of Amazon continue to partner with large scale distribution companies, it looks like they may surpass the current contenders, such as Netflix, that only provide the service and not the product.

Growing Your Digital Business

2012-02-08T11:52:05+00:00

New technologies are big value creators in the digital space – mobile currently at the fore. However, what remains unclear are the ways in which this value is being created and how businesses exist and will evolve in the value chain.

In this one day course, Andrew Thomas will be looking at how the business of mobile is developing and the ways in which companies are spawning new business models on a daily basis. In a highly practical and interactive workshop, participants will be encouraged to develop a deeper understanding of the dynamics of mobile and how it will impact upon the growth of their business in the future.

This course will focus upon three areas: the changing shape of digital and the impact of new technologies such as mobile; understanding the three key cogs of business growth and understanding and developing your business model.

Klout moves into mobile with Blockboard acquisition

2012-02-08T10:45:00+00:00

On its blog, Klout founder and CEO Joe Fernandez says that Blockboard’s: “simple, well-designed tool gives people a way to communicate with their neighbours about everything from local news and tips to lost pets and broken streetlights.”

He goes on to say that the acquisition will help Klout in its mission to unlock every person’s influence. Blockboard provides an awareness of how social media can be meaningfully woven into the fabric of a local community, as well as a "killer mobile app development team".

Blockboard says in its own post on the acquisition that Klout wants to expand its influence measurement into local communities, mobile devices, and other new contexts.

Last week we covered Net Promoter’s entrance into social media analytics, with the launch of SparkScore for brands. At the time, Klout rival Peer Index’s CEO Azeem Azhar highlighted the importance of taking influence within the context of an individual's network into account.

The acquisition will see the Blockboard team of four join the company, and bring with them an additional chunk of understanding in relation to community influence – and how that works from a mobile perspective.

It’s not a huge move, but it’s a start. As people turn to mobile more and more to share, recommend and connect, any influence measurement needs to take this into account in order to be comprehensive enough to survive. Especially as the credibility of such a metric comes under constant critcism.

Path caught storing users' unencrypted data

2012-02-08T00:53:00+00:00

Path is a 16 month old social network that acts as a personal journal and allows you to share photo, video, music, people, places, and text to a select network of 150 people. Since version 2 was released, Path has surged to just over 2 million users.

In the last few hours since Thampi posted his discovery online, Path users have been up in arms. They were never asked permission for Path to access their address book. The bigger worry? Though with most apps collected data is encrypted, it appears Path is storing the actual information so all of your contacts are now online.

Dave Morin, Co-Founder and CEO of Path, was quick to respond in the comments of Thampi's post.

We believe that this type of friend finding & matching is important to the industry and that it is important that users clearly understand it, so we proactively rolled out an opt-in for this on our Android client a few weeks ago and are rolling out the opt-in for this in 2.0.6 of our iOS Client, pending App Store approval.

When asked why an opt-in for them to collect your data wasn't included from the very beginning, Morin responded that it was industry best practice.

The App Store guidelines do not specifically discuss contact information. However we believe users need further transparency on how this works, so we've been proactively addressing this...We fundamentally believe that you as a user should always have control over your information and data and you can always email our service team and we will remove anything you'd like from our servers.

It is good to see such openness in response but it's a naive one. Apple's app store guidelines states "Apps cannot transmit data about a user without obtaining the user's prior permission." To further believe that this will all be solved in the reply section of a blog means thousands of people's details may continue to be collected before the new app roles out. The only cravat is you can email Path on service@path.com and have your data (as well as your entire account) deleted.

Path may have always been a bit tricky when it comes to 'contacts.' The last version's UX made Facebook friends look like they were on Path so you would share. If this latest finding is any indication, they weren't and ghost profiles may have been created when you signed up.

Users have already been requesting their accounts to be deleted and data purged with proof but have yet to have a reply.

Ilicco Elia, Head of Mobile at LBi, doesn't think this is good enough.

I think they should delete all the data immediately but they will try to play it down. I shouldn't have to email to ask them to delete data they took without my knowledge.

I can understand companies innocently trying to make things easy for users, but what would happen if they were hacked and someone got access to my complete address book. People store personal notes in there.

I read "they are planning to hash the data" i.e. encrypt it which leads me to believe it is currently unencrypted on their server. And that to me is unacceptable. On my phone my information is protected behind a pin. On their server it is not.

Google’s use of private data has been under scrutiny in the US for years and Facebook, with their "run fast and break things" model, has equally played fast and loose with users data. But both have been brought to task in the past and the US and Europe is already looking to tighten laws around tracking users online. With such big players being called out over privacy issues, why did Path not protect itself and its users from this?

With the rise of mobile and m-commerce, what are the lessons for marketers and developers when considering future projects?

"Just because you know that you wouldn't 'do anything bad' with the data doesn't mean you are free to use it," continued Elia. "And if you must store my data on your server it had better be securely stored & encrypted because no matter how slowly you drive your car, there are always other people on the road who are reckless drivers i.e. you could get hacked and lose my info, through no fault of my own."

What do you think Path should do? Will they lose their growing user base due to this gaff so early in the game?

We have emailed Path with further questions but are still waiting for a reply or an official press release. Perhaps they are too busy deleting accounts.

UPDATE: Dave Morin has released an official apology and Path have deleted all the stored data they held. The updated apps are rolling out so you can opt-in (or out) of sharing your details.

*This image is entirely from the imagination of Kosso K

How brands lost the Super Bowl race for the second screen

2012-02-07T20:16:00+00:00

Monday’s industry blogs have been suggesting that brands should be praised for not ‘drinking the social media cool-aid.’ Hashtags represent a waste of time said Drew Olandoff from The Next Web; “…there’s absolutely no way I’m going to ask millions of people to use a hashtag. There’s just no context to be had there and nothing to be gained”

But what the commentators are missing is that a successful social media strategy does not begin and end with Facebook and Twitter. Rather it manifests itself most effectively when embedded in the behaviour that the brand exhibits. When used effectively as part of a well integrated plan it’s about being useful or entertaining. They need to create a compelling reason why people absolutely have to right now this minute reach over their chicken wings and beers and reach for their second screen to call up or act on that ad they’ve just seen.

According to research done by the Altimeter Group, although most ads promoted an online destination of some sort- only 16% of them promoted a call to action in what could be described as a social media space and a third had no online call to action whatsoever.

The real point here is not whether or not the TV spots drove people online –it’s about what value proposition did or didn’t await them there. Most of the TV ads that featured any online call to action at all simply encouraged people to go to the corporate website, but what would be in it for the viewers if they did? There’s been plenty of debate over who had the best or worst ad, but the point is why go out and splash $3.5 million on your 30 second spot without using social media to amplify its effect?

One of the best examples of a wasted opportunity came in the form of Budweiser commercial from Anomaly – an agency usually vaunted for its clever thinking. The ad featured a mashup of the Cult’s 1985 rock classic She Sells Sanctuary with Flo Rida’s track Good Feeling. Unfortunately the agency failed to score as there was no meaningful integration with an online strategy. Of the hundreds of millions watching, you can bet a fair few would’ve head to Google to locate the song, feet still tapping. Yet what they would have found was digital tumbleweed.

Apart from a few Cult fanzine sites, several weeks old, that announced that the ad was going to be aired, there appeared to be no strategy for using the creative assets to their full potential. What came as a big surprise was there was no corporate presence against any of the relevant searches from Budweiser – no ‘official version’ of the song or even a teaser announcing its forthcoming release. There was no iTunes link and not so much as a mention of the remixer who’s thought to combine these two tracks. They could have created something that had further reach and would drive consumers back to their own online space. As of today, they still haven't capitalised on that.

As a contrast, look at Sony’s Bravia TV launch in 2005. Their campaign went beyond their colourful ‘bouncing balls’ commercial. It featured a fully integrated microsite which had the Jose Gonzalez track freely available for download as well as a host of other goodies such as a screensaver and behind-the-scenes footage of the ad’s filming. So effective was this approach that it generated a vast amount of online buzz and huge volume of inbound links to the site which contributed to them ranking number 1 in Google for the term “advert”. The only shame is that they didn’t keep the microsite live or even better create it on a subdomain of the main Sony site, so only the wayback machine can show us a hint of what they did.

Above all, what this lack of integration shows is that there’s still a divide between Madison Avenue and Mountain View. Both agencies and advertisers were too cautious to try and mix things up, or more likely too stuck in their old planning models. This is bizarre because despite the fact that the event itself broke a new record for the number of tweets per second, very few brands actually capitalized on the second screen opportunity that presented itself better than Eli Manning’s pass to his wide receiver in the fourth quarter.

Perhaps like the New England Patriots’ quarterback, Tom Brady, the brand managers and CMOs will come to rue missed opportunities to get the most from this uniquely old fashioned spend-fest. In hindsight we can all see ways things can be improved and as the old adage goes it’s certainly easier to critique than create, but surely it wouldn’t have taken much to link a well designed digital experience to the TV spots?

Econsultancy’s JUMP (Joined Up Marketing Perspectives) conference launches in New York on May 23, 2012. If you want to learn how to create more integrated campaigns and build connected brands, come join us at JUMP. We might even buy you a Budweiser...

Experience an augmented Valentine's Day with Starbucks

2012-02-07T17:29:00+00:00

While in the app, you can create a virtual AR valentine which can only be seen if the recipient scans the Valentine's Day Starbucks cup. On top of that you can send an Starbucks Card eGift through the app and schedule it to arrive on Valentine's.

This limited campaign goes beyond Starbuck's own app and integrates other social platforms including Twitter and Instagram. It all revolves around the cup itself so either way, Starbucks could see an increase in purchase during February 6 - 16 when the campaign is being run.

This is Starbucks latest offering as it further expands into mobile. Their first experiment with the Starbucks Cup Magic app came during the 2011 holiday season. In 2011, Starbucks expanded its mobile payment program to more than 9,000 US locations and rolled out the ability to send Starbucks Card eGifts.

It is a small wonder Starbucks are continuing to push into the mobile and interactive space. Last year, there were 26 million mobile transactions with $110.5 million reloaded onto Starbucks Cards directly through the mobile app. There has also been increased adoption in the mobile space by Starbuck’s customers. Mobile transactions have doubled when comparing the first 9 weeks of January when they launched and a 9 week period only 9 months later. The first quarter of 2012 also saw an increase of 11% in the US over Q1 in 2011. This is primarily due to a 9% increase in comparable store sales. Though Starbucks haven't detailed how much of that is due to mobile, it is easy to assume it is a contributing factor.

Of course, this type of campaign only works for those customers who notice they can interact with the cup itself. As this is still new territory for consumers in the US, it will take time for them to expect this interactivity with packaging. In any case, Starbucks is ahead of the game in the mobile retail space and will only gain to benefit when other retailers follow suit.

Vodafone implements TagMan's technology to create "unstoppable digital"

2012-02-07T16:00:17+00:00

 Vodafone online and telesales marketing manager Gareth Davies said that the company can now track all campaigns in one place, and view how they combine to result in sales.

We truly know how paid search, natural search, email, display affiliates and such interact and support each other.”

Davies added that using new providers would offer better value for money since TagMan will enable it to add new tags to its web pages in minutes rather than months.

Vodafone affiliate and performance marketing manager James Talbot added that the collaboration will help to generate further savings through the optimisation of the company's de-duplication model.

TagMan’s announced a partnership with call tracking specialist AdInsight back in December that combines online with offline analytics.

The companies, both of which have previously won Econsultancy Innovation Awards, said that this would connect the dots between customers’ entire online journey and any phone calls to a business by housing AdInsight’s tracking inside the TagMan tag management system. 

At the time, the companies were investigating their client bases to develop a joint trial programme of the integration., which Vodafone would seem to be a perfect candidate for.

With successful implementation of TagMan’s offering under its belt, it seems only a matter of time before the mobile operator joins the dots even further to include phone tracking as well.