Dave Squires on Mobile Marketing

Mobile Marketing has probably been talked about for the last ten years, and it’s only within the last year that it's started to come about. Things such as Sky Mobile on your TV is fantastic, and the apps they’ve got are brilliant, but I think we’re still a little bit behind the curve here. We will get on board with it when things such as Facebook places and Facebook deals really start to kick off. If users are out and about somewhere, they are able to use this to check into a location and get a voucher for where they are on their mobile, straight away.

A brand that is particularly good at this kind of thing is Starbucks, which has something like 20 million fans on Facebook. It is particularly good at mobile marketing. In the States, this is much more how things are done than they are over here at the moment. The difficulties you’ve got are making sure you have a network for fulfilment. So, for example, if you’re doing a deal for your customers, you have to make sure you have a national network of places that can be fulfilled. Starbucks is easy as there’s one on every corner, but how do you do a mobile campaign if you’re a small chain? How do you target it so that you’re really going to be talking to people in your outlets? There are mechanisms to do that, but you need to make sure that’s covered off before you begin blasting out great big messages to people.

An example of how this could work, and something we’ve been looking at over the last few weeks, is checking-in within our Sky Ride campaign. The idea is that you take part in a bike trip around a particular city, and participants can ‘check-in’ at various destinations and stop-off points around the route. Once you arrive, you might get some content to your phone, saying, ‘thank you for checking-in, you now have VIP access to the picnic in Hyde Park’, or something along those lines. So, once you've checked-in along the route, you’ll get various deals or certain access or exclusive stuff for doing so. That’s a kind of work in progress example of how we’re thinking of using mobile and location-based marketing.

On a broader mobile basis, the thing that really isn’t in place yet is that about 50% of UK companies haven’t repurposed their website for mobile use. This means they’ve only built their websites to work on computers, so when you log on to it using your mobile, the website appears only as a tiny version. In terms of making mobile marketing appealing, I think as long as there’s a value exchange, consumers will be willing to give their number to a brand. You have to incentivise data capture in this way, otherwise consumers will not be willing to hand over their details.