LocalMobileSearch

kgb Shows Super Bowl Ads, ChaCha Tracks Favs

kgb offered a couple of commercials (that I saw) last night during the Super Bowl. I enjoyed the sumo wrestler spot especially and thought it was effective. Unlike many commercials broadcast during the game the humor and content of the spot was directly tied to the brand and the service.  

This morning ChaCha put out a release that found the Doritos commercials were the favorites of the teen and young adult ChaCha user base:

ChaCha, the service that allows users to go online, call or text questions on mobile phones and receive free answers within minutes, says that a poll of its users, primarily teens and young adults, who asked questions during the Super Bowl last night showed that their favorite commercials were for Doritos. The ones they disliked most were for Go Daddy and the one most talked about, as measured by text traffic, was Denny's, mostly asking where was the nearest location of the restaurant to collect their free meal on Tuesday. Inquiries about the teams involved also skyrocketed with 60,000 (about 10x the norm) asked throughout Super Bowl Sunday.

Here's the kgb "I Surrender" commercial. 

In general most of the commercials last night I thought were pretty weak. "Green police" (Audi) was another commercial I liked quite a bit. 

Loopt Does Deal with Coupons Provider

Loopt has done a deal with mobile couponer Mobile Spinach to provide location-based offers to Loopt users. It's San Francisco only at this point.

On the one hand this is smart because it's a another way to monetize location but one that is largely welcome by most consumers, compared to other types of mobile ads. (We detailed in our mobile coupons webinar the value and success metrics of mobile coupons and offers.)

TechCrunch and VentureBeat both cover the "mechanics" of the deal and discuss FourSquare, etc. What's more interesting to me is to see Loopt struggle to define and redefine itself under pressure from Facebook, Yelp and LBS "games" such as FourSquare. The company started as a friend-finder/social network and then morphed into Yelp. Now it's adding coupons and local deals. 

But there are a bazillion coupon providers in mobile even at this early stage of the market's development. 

Beyond this there's a more fundamental issue about Loopt's identity and answering the question: Why should I use the service? Unless/until the company can convincingly answer that question -- and I'm not sure it can surrounded by all these larger brands and providers -- it won't have a sustainable business. 

Mobclix Adds Nielsen Segmentation Targeting

Mobile ad exchange Mobclix announced that it would add Nielsen PRIZM and Nielsen ConneXions audience segmentation data and capabilities into the Mobclix mobile exchange. According to the release, what this enables is the following:

By bringing traditional marketing techniques to mobile advertising through Mobclix Complete, ad network partners will now enable mobile advertisers to reach over 150 unique audience segments resulting in improved conversions over legacy mobile solutions. Mobile application developers and publishers will reap the benefits of 20-100 percent CPMs higher than the market . . .

Under the terms of this agreement, Mobclix will be able to resell PRIZM and ConneXions to mobile ad networks and publishers. The anonymous user data from both PRIZM and ConneXions will then be mapped and applied to Mobclix's open marketplace platform for buying and selling mobile ad inventory. Coupled with the reach of top mobile application publishers, advertisers will benefit from this comprehensive and insightful data to help find, discover, determine, learn and better market to their audiences.

These data and capabilities move beyond simple demographics into "lifestyle" segments. 1020 Placecast uses the PRIZM data as well in its mobile targeting. 

The caveat that must be stated here is that for audience slicing and dicing to be meaningful you need massive reach, which is why allowing reselling/redistribution of these capabilities is significant. The issue of providing greater mobile reach is what makes mobile exchanges and marketplaces important. 

These Nielsen data and targeting capabilities were basically created for direct mail targeting across the US by Zip and household. However, in a mobile context, if you're looking for "hipsters" (or single moms or whatever) in a certain geography (e.g., Tribeca, New York), you start to slice the audiences too thin for most large agencies and marketers today. (The objectives of LBS or SMS marketing would be different.) Brands and agencies complain today about not being able to get enough reach with mobile in general, without adding in 150 more ways to slice up audiences. 

The fact that these data/segments were tied originally to households is paradoxical somewhat because mobile users are mostly on the go (the iPad will be a bit different). You wouldn't necessarily know who mobile users are/were except by their location and expressed behavior or "needs" (e.g., search queries). Some marketers, for example, have targeted iPhone or BlackBerry users as a proxy for certain demographic characteristics in the past.

Carriers also have this type of data about their customers and I suspect that they'll make much more of it available to marketers soon. JumpTap accesses carrier demographic information for some of its ad targeting. However, there are potential privacy issues and concerns that will be the subject of debate; but that's a much longer discussion. 

This slicing of audiences begins to be meaningful once they become larger (as they are becoming) and perhaps once you've got cross-platform buying between online and mobile, as Mobclix is starting to do with AOL's Advertising.com and Tribal Fusion-Greystripe. Then you can have an agency make a demographically targeted buy across online and mobile simultaneously. That's when this will start to shine potentially. 

There's also the branding and direct response divide; though digital obiously bridges that somewhat. A "brand" ad can have DR elements (e.g., sign up to receive alerts; find the nearest dealer, etc). The cross-platform scenario I'm describing is more likely a big brand play (with DR elements as suggested) than one aimed at getting people to take specific action now (i.e., an LBS promotion). However, a movie studio targeting a specific audience for a film could use this system quite effectively as one example.

The capabilities that these data and targeting capabilities represent are somewhat ahead of the market in my view. The market will eventually catch up but it's not yet this sophisticated.  

Aardvark: Mobile Users More Active

We've been writing about Aardvark since before its launch. I originally characterized it as an "answer community," but the company recently adopted the moniker "social search engine," which is a bit more familiar and something of an established "category" of search engines.

Last week Aardvark co-founder Damon Horowitz (one of the architects of its algorithm) and Sepandar Kamvar (who was behind Google's personalized search and now teaches at Stanford) wrote a research paper called “Anatomy of a Large Scale Social Search Engine." The document is something of an homage to an earlier paper written by then Stanford grad students Sergey Brin and Larry Page "Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine."

The paper goes into how queries are analyzed and routed among people and offers a great deal of interesting information and data that I won't summarize here. You can get the report and take a look if you're interested. What I'm going to highlight is the distribution of queries:

Source/image: Aardvark

A substantial portion of these fall into the traditional "local" (offline) categories as one might expect. But the range of queries is quite broad: people looking for advice and general information from "experts." Furthermore, here's what the paper says about mobile usage of Aardvark:

Mobile users had an average of 3.6322 sessions per month, which is surprising on two levels. First, mobile users of Aardvark are more active than desktop users. (As a point of comparison, on Google, desktop users are almost 3 times as active as mobile users.) Second, mobile users of Aardvark are almost as active in absolute terms as mobile users of Google (who have on average 5.68 mobile sessions per month). This is quite surprising for a service that has only been available for 6 months.

We believe this is for two reasons. First, browsing through traditional web search results on a phone is unwieldy. On a phone, it’s more useful to get a single short answer that’s crafted exactly to your query. Second, people are used to using natural language with phones, and so Aardvark’s query model feels natural in that context. These considerations (and early experiments) also suggest that Aardvark mobile users will be similarly active with voice-based search.

Mobile usage is more active than PC usage; this makes sense given the many information sources on the PC (alternatives to Aardvark), as well as the challenges of using conventional search on mobile devices (notwithstanding voice search). 

Aardvark, kgb and ChaCha exist along a continuum in a broadly similar category of peer-to-peer search -- a kind of DA 2.0. The three have different business models and different degrees of usage and penetration. Aardvark, similar to Siri, ultimately seeks to make money from affiliate referrals (but may develop a premium version for certain segments of users). ChaCha is entirely ad supported; kgb uses a more traditional per query consumer-pays model.

Mobile Ads: Best of Times, Worst of Times

Brands, agencies and marketers of all stripes are increasingly interested in mobile advertising (or so surveys reflect), especially in the last six months. However "a fragmented landscape of different devices, operating systems and application storefronts" is confusing to many: What should we buy and how?

Companies such as Velti, Amobee and others aim to simply mobile advertising with "end-to-end" solutions. But confusion remains. 

Meanwhile the data continue to show that mobile outperforms online by almost 5X in terms of most brand performance metrics. Those that get in now will reap the benefits while others remain on the sidelines whining and scratching their heads. 

Here are recent data from a broad survey of Insight Express-monitored and measured campaigns:

Here's what the press materials said about these metrics:

The study used norms developed in online ad testing as a benchmark to draw conclusions around the performance of advertising on mobile devices. InsightExpress compared the two using InsightNorms, the company’s normative database containing over one thousand online ad effectiveness campaigns and over one hundred mobile ad effectiveness campaigns . . .

InsightExpress found mobile campaign norms were 4.5 to 5 times higher than online norms against measures of unaided awareness, aided awareness, ad awareness, message association, brand favorability and purchase intent.  “Online campaigns continue to offer exceptional reach, flexibility and variety,” said Joy Liuzzo, Senior Director of Marketing & Mobile Research at InsightExpress.  “However, the high levels of engagement, the explosion in technical capabilities, low levels of clutter and the novelty of mobile advertising all likely contribute to increased brand impact.”
 
A comparison of three different mobile media types (Mobile Internet, SMS and Mobile video) revealed that Mobile Internet is the current powerhouse. Mobile Internet campaigns resulted in increases of 9 percentage points for unaided awareness, 9 percentage points for aided awareness and 24 percentage points for ad awareness . . . SMS campaigns generated increases of 5 percentage points for unaided awareness, 10 percentage points for aided awareness and 18 percentage points for ad awareness.    

SMS offers the greatest reach, followed by mobile Web and then apps and video. 

Is Apple Hoarding LBS Advertising?

Here's the much discussed statement from Apple to iPhone developers about location-based advertising:

The Core Location framework allows you to build applications which know where your users are and can deliver information based on their location, such as local weather, nearby restaurants, ATMs, and other location-based information.

If you build your application with features based on a user's location, make sure these features provide beneficial information. If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user's location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store.

Here's the prevailing interpretation of this directive:

"Looks like Apple is going to keep location-based advertising to themselves"

The speculation then proceeds that Quattro will be the sole provider of LBS ads to iPhone apps. I believe the above reading is incorrect. Instead I would argue that Apple is saying "don't just use location for ads alone":

make sure these features provide beneficial information. If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user's location, your app will be returned to you . . .

Here "beneficial information" is non-advertising content and services. At a time when Apple needs to court and retain developers it would alienate them (even more) to compell use of only Quattro advertising or otherwise preclude developers from serving LBS ads. 

IDC Contradicts Nokia's Smartphone Claims

IDC has released its smartphone numbers and marketshare data for Q4 and FY 2009. After last week's discussion about whether Android had "tarnished" or slowed Apple's iPhone, these IDC numbers show strength for the Apple handset (growth outpaces competitors). Nokia remains number one followed by RIM and then Apple.

Here's what Nokia said about its own estimated marketshare in its most recent earnings release:

• Nokia estimated mobile device market share of 39% in Q4 2009, up from an estimated 37% in Q4 2008 and 38% in Q3 2009. The full year 2009 estimated market share was 38%, down from 39% in 2008.
• Nokia grew its converged device market share to an estimated 40%, from an estimated 35% in Q3 2009.

IDC contradicts that assertion with its own data and estimates, saying that the device maker's smartphone share is 38.9%, down from 40% a year ago. Here they are:

The smartest thing that Nokia can do in the near term to restore growth is to cut prices, which it is doing. It has also made its Navteq-supported mapping and navigation software free, prompting a huge number of downloads (one per second) since the announcement.

Shape of Things to Come: Scan QR Code on TV to Download Android App

This is fascinating and in keeping with our recent discussion about opportunities in connecting mobile and traditional media, the weather channel is promoting downloads of its Android app by showing a 2D barcode that users can scan right from the TV.  Scan the image on the TV and get taken to the Android market to download the Weather Channel app.

Now you have an even more "intimate" relationship with that user and extend your brand into his/her pocket -- together with corresponding advertising opportunities. 

It's not very hard to imagine this idea broadly expanded to brands, restaurant chains, retailers and many other scenarios and use cases. It's very similar to including a short code in a traditional ad, but a bit more direct in the case of an app. Yet the "output" doesn't have to be an app; it can be a mobile website or landing page with an offer, etc. This is something that will become more and more widely used in the next few years.

In addition to extending the broadcast or media buy and acquiring a customer (or maintaining one) you also measure the effectiveness of the campaign or promotion via mobile. This could also be done (if the screen is near enough) in digital OOH as well. 

Here's a video of the presentation of the barcode: 

(via AndroidTapp)