LondonCalling.mobi » thoughts on all things mobile including mobile advertising, mobile location & social networking

RSS

Category Archives: opinion


 

For mobile advertising, orchestrate don’t dominate says Peggy Anne Salz

One of the industry’s sharpest minds, Peggy Anne Salz from msearchgroove has penned a simply brilliant column that looks at mobile advertising.
Her takeaway from the article is republished again below:
“Mobile advertising is at a critical juncture. Fortunately, the industry recognizes the need to speak the same language. Now it must begin to tackle the channel [...]

Mobile Europe roundtable on how to succeed in mobile advertising

Just a heads up to all London Calling readers.  Today I participated in a very lively and interesting roundtable hosted by Mobile Europe Magazine and sponsored by Gigafone on “How to succeed in mobile advertising in 2009″.
Held at the funky Wallace Space in St Pancras, I was joined by Editor Keith Dyer and some of [...]

Rory Sutherland on outsourcing media planning to the public

Over at Rory Sutherland’s blog, he has hit the nail on the head regarding social networking.
In the post, titled “a dog that doesn’t bark” he muses
…This new approach is almost the opposite of the first, “viral” approach. For, rather than using networks effects to reach a lot of people indiscriminately and cheaply, it uses network [...]

Jonathan MacDonald interviews Andrew Grill

I was honoured to be interviewed on camera by Jonathan MacDonald about mobile advertising as part of the everysingleoneofus project.
I rarely watch myself back on video but I was very pleased with the result.  On the 17 minute video below, Jonathan MacDonald and I talk about many of the issues facing mobile advertising today – [...]

Happy New Year! Welcome to the year of ….

Happy New Year to all London Calling readers and welcome to the year of ACTION!
You thought I was going to say the year of mobile didn’t you?
I’m really over people saying “20xx will be the year of mobile”, in fact when we were filming some thought leaders for an upcoming series on Every Single One of US, [...]

London Calling joins HungryMobile Opinions in Mobile initiative

I am delighted to have been invited to contribute to a new initative from HungryMobile called Opinions in Mobile.
Run by CEO Jan Rezab, Opinions in Mobile is an online platform, where top executives and leaders from the mobile services and mobile entertainment industry respond to questions related to the mobile market. A new question is [...]

Mobile industry predictions for 2009 part 1

As the year draws to a close, and as I did last year I thought I would prepare some thoughts on what might happen in the mobile industry in 2009.
Looking back at some of my 2008 predictions – for some I was pretty spot on – and for others I was woefully incorrect.
In Part 1 [...]

Ask, don’t tell – the golden rule for mobile advertising 2.0

The above cartoon by Hugh MacLeod is one of my favourites, and my friend and fellow mobile advertising evangelist, Jonathan MacDonald also uses it in his presentations (and pointed me to Hugh’s great work).
It says so much about the state of mobile advertising, and why the critics still say it is not working.  The latest [...]

Vodafone Receiver Magazine article on the future of location

I am honoured to have been asked to write an article for Vodafone Receiver Magazine about the future of location which is now live on the Vodafone Receiver website.  Vodafone Receiver is a fantastic initiative to bring a cross section of ideas about mobile to a wide audience.
Their current theme is “Space is the Place” and my [...]

Telematics update view on mobile advertising

Over at Telematics Update, Thomas Hallauer asked for my views on a recent FT article on how the credit crunch might affect spending on mobile advertising.
Hear over to Telematics Update to read my views.  Thanks Thomas for the opportunity to respond to the discussion.
In summary – the current environment presents marketers with a huge opportunity [...]

Mobile Advertising Is Broken – Who Will Fix It?

I have had a long association with Peggy Saltz from msearchgroove and she has invited me to write semi-regular guest posts on her site. The latest of these addresses the issues we currently face with mobile advertising.
Peggy gives a great introduction to the post over on msearchgroove, and Jonathan Macdonald, one of the drivers behind [...]

Mobile phone ads hit by spending curbs says the FT

A recent report in London’s Financial Times by Tim Bradshaw claims that
“The global economic downturn is set to hit advertising on mobile phones until at least 2010, when marketing agencies expect clients to increase their budgets.
Advertising agencies say clients are reining in their marketing spending and focusing on proven mediums such as mass audience television and the [...]

Mobile advertising debate summary from netimperitive roundtable

I was invited to a very interesting roundtable organised by Netimperitive, sponsored by Reactor Mobile and held at the offices of Blyk on Tuesday in London.
The attendee list below is a who’s who of the mobile advertising ecosystem, and as such some very healthy and lively debate ensued.
The most common theme of the debate was “why [...]

Retail marketing analytics need to leverage mobile as a channel

I attended a very interesting evening at the Institute of Directors in London on Monday on marketing analytics.
Speaking was Robert Diamond who is MD of Emnos, who run Europe’s largest loyalty program, and are competitors to Dunnhumby in the marketing analytics space.
In Robert’s excellent 50 minute presentation, he did not mention mobile once!  A mobile icon [...]

The impedance effect of the mobile industry

I’m an Engineer from way back, so for me the concept of impedance refers to
“the effective resistance to an alternating electric current arising from the combined effect of ohmic resistance and reactance“.
Translated – it means things and people getting in the way.
As some of you know, I present at conferences and speak to people [...]

Where have all the ethical Marketing Managers gone?

I was horrified to read a Financial Times article about a survey that mentioned that an alarming percentage of marketing managers would provide personal information held on customers to 3rd parties without their consent.
The survey, commissioned by StrongMail Systems, an e-mail security company covered 900 data security and marketing professionals, found that 7 per cent [...]

Is your site mobile friendly?

Following on from my earlier post mobile advertising – walking the talk, I thought I’d check out how “mobile ready” a number of well known blogs and sites are that talk about mobile advertising.
Luckily, many are already mobile friendly, in that viewing them from a mobile handset presents the mobile version or optimised sites. Andy Moore left a comment [...]

mobile advertising – walking the talk

image credit: Michael Smetham
Many people are writing about mobile advertising – who’s getting it right, who will win and what the forecasts for 20XX will be – but are these people also using mobile advertising? In this post, I want to highlight the difference in the mobile advertising industry between those who do and those [...]

The geography of power – how communication has become a global currency and what it means for mobile advertising

I found a fascinating article in a recent edition of Newsweek called Emotional Connections. The article describes an installation at the New York Museum of Modern Art called New York Talk Exchange. Here, MIT have been provided with real time phone records from AT&T and they have a live map of the different connections happening [...]

The Davos Effect – Google CEO Eric Schmidt expects mobile to be big – is he right and what has to happen to prove him right?

Much has been written on the “Davos Effect”, where the musings at this annual event from senior executives of large companies such as Google and Sony actually become true, or at least offer a window into the current thinking or focus of a particular company or industry segment.
By now, many of you will have read the summary [...]

It’s not just privacy concerns preventing mobile advertising from taking off

A recent article from the Associated Press “Privacy Delays Ad Targeting on Phones”, and widely circulated on the news wires caught my eye as it highlights some of the current issues facing mobile advertising and in particular location based advertising.
The Media often write about how location can be easily combined with other demographic and customer [...]

STOP PRESS: Customers with unlimited data plans use more data than those charged up to £4 per megabyte!

We all know that the time leading up to Christmas and New Year is a very slow news period, but many mobile commentators including myself had a quiet chuckle when they read the story on the front page of the UK’s Financial Times on Christmas Eve 2007 – iPhone users raise network hopes.

Quoting the story from [...]

Predictions for the mobile industry in 2008

As the year comes to a close, I thought I would offer my predictons for the mobile industry in 2008.

• Two words – Mobile Internet – by the end of 2008, operators will be offering flat rate mobile internet.  The “trials” of £10/month for 3GB data etc will have proved extremely successful and everyone will be [...]

“convenience, not convergence”

At this week’s Financial Times World Telecoms Conference in London, I raised an interesting issue at the end of a panel session on “convergence”.  As an industry we pride ourselves in TLA (three letter acronyms) and buzzwords, but the whole session was talking about convergence this etc.

I suggested to the panel (as I have been saying [...]

Are traditional publishers finally getting the web?

I was amused to see in the classified motoring section of my local newspaper the Sydney Morning Herald an advertisement that offered a “New” service – allowing you to link the classified ad to the online version at drive.com.au . This is not NEW!
In 2001, when I was running propertylook.com.au, we launched our look-up key [...]