Xellular Identity - All About Mobile Content & Marketing

MobDreaming

Last night I had a nightmare: I was gun pointed and under a threat. Luckily I had my mobile in my pocket so I tried to send an SMS and ask for help (thought I don’t remember who I was sending the SMS to).

After waking up and feeling relieved it was just a bad dream, I tried to think of the meaning of my dream. I realized, that I could recognize the mobile which I was using (my new Nokia HS). Putting a little more thought into it brought up the realization that this was the first time (that I can remember) that I’ve ever dreamt of my mobile phone and about sending SMSs, even though I work in this industry… Have you dreamt of your mobile, your PDA or something like that?

I wasn’t sure about the meaning of my dream, so assuming Carl Jung's theory of images in dreams (monsters, masks, whatever) representing the same things to all people is right, I tried to search the web for the interpretation of mobile phones and SMSs in dreams. Besides the “The Interpretation of Dreams” by Sigmund Freud, I found many websites containing "dictionaries of dreams" (you can take a look at these if you're interested: dreams at maxabout.com, Dream's Central dream dictionary) but no mobile or SMS and no telephone or TV either(!).

Well, I'm sure there is already a "collective unconscious" regarding telephone, TV and even mobiles. So if you have any suggestions about the meanings of these - you're welcome to comment :)

Relevance Marketing - The Messengers

Sony Pictures is a great example of clever segmentation of target audience and a great example of leveraging segments’ needs and behavior to promote a new product; in this case, the upcoming thriller movie "The Messengers".

According to The Hollywood Reporter:

“To promote the upcoming supernatural thriller "The Messengers", Sony Pictures has included in its dossier of digital-marketing tools a ringtone only young consumers can hear.”

"The ultrasonic ringtone -- ringtones that are audible to teenagers but not adults -- are a featured aspect of the film's promotional campaign, which is geared toward a teen audience.”

Understanding youth’s need to belong to a peer group and the place the mobile phone holds in the lives of youth as a tool to make a personal statement about themselves, Sony Pictures is promoting its new movie through a ringtone that only teens can hear. Besides having a thematic relevance to the movie since “the movie's story line about a young female protagonist insisting she hears voices that her parents cannot hear”, the ringtone has huge relevance to youth’s psychological and behavioral needs.

And Sony Pictures don't settle down with just ringtones to promote the movie,

“Along with the thematically-integrated ringtones and online interactivity, Epstein [executive director, worldwide digital marketing strategy, Columbia TriStar Marketing Group] also noted a blog on the Weblog community Xanga and an eventual 1-800 number as other communicative features tied to the film's marketing efforts. The hope is that it feels like one continuous conversation with Jess [the main character in the film] -- you see her profile on a social networking site, you call her and IM her -- as she draws you into her current situation," said Epstein, noting the intent of the campaign is to have users transcend a couple of digital mediums.”

And if you're interested in more about relevance marketing and youth - here's a link and my previous thoughts about the ultrasonic ringtone.

Ringback Tone Market Challenges (Part II)

Last Tuesday I was reviewing the challenges which the ringback tones market has been coping with. If you missed it, here's the link, and in short:

On one hand:

• After a tremendous success in Asian markets, ringback tones are starting to have wide availability in other regions of the world.
• Most operators already offer a ringback tones service.
• Analysts are forecasting ringback tones market growth.

On the other hand:

• Ringback tones subscribers forget to re-purchase content.
• Operators can’t afford to promote the service on the long run.
• Ringtones’ success hasn't been leveraged.
• There is no ringback tones generic brand.
• Content providers are not “incentivised” to push ringback tones.

At Comverse we believe that this can and needs to be changed. Comverse's vision is to open the ringback tones service to the content off-deck market, i.e. content aggregators (like Jamster,Blinko, Moderati etc'), content providers (like MTV, Warner Brothers etc') and music Labels, regardless of platform vendors. The Cross network openness will enable 3rd party retailers and content providers to offer ringback tones content at their portals. The outcome will be users' ability to register and purchase content both from the operator and the content providers own portals.

By doing so, it increases mobile subscribers’ exposure and hence awareness to the ringback tones service and contributes to generate substantial additional revenues for both operators and content B2C players, thanks to more ringback tones users and more ringback tones downloads. In other words, all players need to join hands to promote the ringback tones content.

Youth Mobile Trends Summary

Hi everyone,

Many have asked me to summarize the very interesting and value-added knowledge resource published here during November; so here are the links to the mobileYouth interviews:

• Nick Wright on: What is Mobile Youth?
• Jan Kuczynkli on: Mobile Music and Youth
• Savka Andic on: Mobile Marketing and Youth
• Nick Wright on: Mobile Services and Youth

Enjoy! :)

Happy Holidays

Hi everyone,

Have a Safe and Happy Holiday Season, and best wishes for a wonderful New Year! 

And a personal note - Happy Birthday Dad!  :)

View the animated card online

Phil Taylor on Mobile TV (Part II)

Thursday is here together with the second part of the interview about mobile TV with Phil Taylor, a director at Strategy Analytics, an analyst and a regular speaker at industry conferences.

Let's welcome Phil :)

Hi Phil, thank you for visiting Xellular Identity :) How are you?
I’m great thanks.

Who are the mobile TV consumers? What is their buying motivation?
At the moment, mobile TV consumers are mostly classic early adopters between the ages of 18-30 and male. In Italy, where DVB-H services were launched in time for the World Cup Tre claimed to have signed up 111,000 customers to DVB-H services in the first six weeks of operation with the demographic primarily men, aged between 25 to 54. The chief executive of 3 was reported in the International Herald Tribune as having said "We didn't expect the numbers to be this high, and we also didn't expect the strong growth trend to continue even after the conclusion of the World Cup.” The buying motivation is largely novelty driven, but the idea that the service can be used to fill so called ‘dead time’, spent waiting around between other activities is the primary value seen in the service.

What do consumers think about current mobile TV offering?
We conducted an end user focus group in London during October 2006, which asked participants to test and compare the mobile TV services offered by Virgin (using DAB) and Vodafone (using 3G simulcast). Virgin Mobile TV achieved the highest rating of services. With an overall score of 71/100, Virgin Mobile TV was rated 21 points ahead of Vodafone Live! (50/100) confirming the expectation of dramatically improved overall user experience on a broadcast solution. Around half the participants said they would consider buying the Virgin Mobile TV service based upon their experiences. However users voiced concerns that the Virgin service is only available on one device, and a pretty ugly one at that!

We have also been comparing, contrasting and testing the DVB-H services in Italy. In an effort that is no doubt designed to put pressure on Tre’s pricing and ROI schedule, TIM has gone cheap. Access to its DVB-H service (albeit with fewer channels available) costs only €5 per month, 6 times less than Tre plans to charge from the end of November 06.

You don’t have to be retailing genius to suggest that, for a service as reliant on novelty value and transient viewing as mobile TV, a price point of €29 per month sounds on the high side. No surprises therefore, that our end user survey work also bears this out with fewer than 4% of survey respondents in Italy stating that they would be willing to pay more than €10 per month for access to mobile TV.  Overall though, the quality of TV offered over DVB-H in Milan was pretty impressive and demonstrably superior to the rather scratchy 3G based simulcast services to be found in most European markets currently. As we had expected, coverage issues do need to be addressed to improve the proposition. Weak signals and resulting pauses in transmissions were sometimes experienced either when trying to access mobile TV in-building, or while in built up areas close to tall buildings. Overall however, coverage in the city was satisfactory, although providing access in subways would greatly enhance the value proposition for commuters.

But, despite what we felt was a fairly impressive technical performance given the time since launch, our 36 member focus group panellists were a harder audience to please! The majority felt that Mobile TV would be useful only when travelling and that low levels of monthly usage would not justify the costs. The 6 members of the panel that had subscribed to TuaTV services had done so on the basis of casual daily use rather than the more expensive weekly or monthly plans. On a more positive note, our group did agree that the broadcast services easily beat the 3G based ‘TIM download’ service on almost all satisfaction criteria tested.

What should operators do to overcome barriers to users’ adoption?
Our test experiences have confirmed that DVB-H can provide a compelling usage experience compared with 3G, but that even early adopter consumers are still a long way from being convinced of the merits of the value proposition. This problem seems likely to be compounded (at least in Italy) by that age old challenge, namely weak operator promotions and sales techniques. Mystery shopping around Milan revealed the staff in operator-branded retail outlets to be poorly informed about mobile TV and largely unable to communicate the available offers. Improving here would go along way to helping operators sell more services.

Any examples of marketing best practices?
While Tre seems to be off to a flying start, we believe that the ARPU numbers underlying its user metrics will be less satisfactory. We predict that slow take-up at current prices and the entry of Vodafone will help drive down prices in the coming year and are estimating ARPUs down to €7 per month by 2011. This will certainly place pressure on Hutchison’s ROI schedule for its investment in DVB-H. As TIM’s CEO is supposed to have said recently, "There are reasons to be worried when a Chinese operator starts buying frequencies in our domestic market being ready to lose billions without any business model"! Time will tell.

Thank you Phil for this interview :)

Ringback Tones Market Challenges (Part I)

After a tremendous success in Asian markets, Ringback Tones are starting to have wide availability in other regions of the world, such as Europe and North America. The ringback tones market is also driven by the disposable incomes rising in China, India and Indonesia. Overall, today, most operators already have a ringback tones service and main mobile industry’s analysts are forecasting that ringback tones global demand will continue to increase in the coming 5 years.

However, Mobile operators, persistently looking for new sources of revenues and ways to increase their subscribers’ loyalty, are constantly launching new services and applications. As a result, in many cases, after launching new applications, operators are finding it challenging to focus on the promotion of the service in the long run. Therefore, operators might face scenarios in which the service reaches stagnation penetration wise but also and especially in terms of usage.

On the same time, with an increasing amount of the Value Added Services (VAS) markets moving off portal, different players in the content value chain (content aggregators, content providers and music labels) have taken over both, the responsibility of marketing services to users and as a consequence, part of the revenues they generate. So far, due to technological constrains, this has not been the case in the ringback tones market.

Taking a look at the ringback tones users, there is relatively low consumer awareness to the ringback tones service, partly because there is no ringback tone generic brand. Many subscribers forget to re-purchase content and need to be constantly reminded about their ringback tones since they never hear it. The more ringback tones will be advertised and its access simplified, the more the number of users registering to the service will grow and the more purchasing ringback tones will become a frequent habit. But operators can’t afford to promote the service on the long run.

Taking a look on its older brother, the ringtone market has had a huge success but so far this success hasn't been leveraged to push the ringback tones service. Unlike the ringtones market, content providers are not “incentivised” to push ringback tones.

Comverse's vision for the future of the ringback tones market is to implement the lesson of the ringtones market success, to promote the ringback tones market. I'm sure you're all curious about what it really means and how it can be done - so tune in next Tuesday for that :)

South Korea To Introduce Rules To Limit Teenagers' Mobile Phone Use

According to the AFP, South Korea will introduce new regulations to limit teenagers' use of mobile phones because mounting bills are becoming a common problem for many Korean households. Starting next year, teen's mobile contract will be different, it will contain a recommendation that teenagers and their parents join an existing bill ceiling system under which teenagers cannot spend more than the equivalent of 40 dollars a month. The contract will also advise teenagers and their parents on how to prevent the excessive use of services and more detailed information about the services they use.

""I think this is the first system in the world aimed at guiding teenagers to use their cell phones responsibly," said Hong Sung-Wan, of the telecommunications ministry. The new regulations are aimed at providing the parents with means to put tabs on their children's use of mobile services and control it," he said.

According to government statistics, more than four million of the country's six million teenagers have their own mobile phones. "The number of teenagers who are aged between 13 and 18 and are charged more than 100,000 won (108 dollars) every month is 100,000," Hong told AFP, adding that favourite services include online games and text messages."

[via AFP]

From consumers' perspective this is a positive governmental intervention providing parents more tools to manage their teenagers' monthly mobile spendings. However, from the mobile operators' point of view this actually means kissing goodbye to ~$6,800,000 every month(!) if all youth subscribers will join the bill ceiling system under of $40 a month. Will mobile operators let this happen without a fight?

Phil Taylor on Mobile TV

Continuing our talk about mobile content, Phil Taylor, a director at Strategy Analytics, an analyst and a regular speaker at industry conferences will answer questions about the mobile TV!

Let's welcome Phil :)

Hi Phil, thank you for visiting Xellular Identity :) How are you?
I’m great thanks.

What are the market size estimates for mobile TV?
We estimate that end users will spend close to $18 billion on mobile TV products and services globally in 2011.

What’s available today?
Well, just as in the world of big screen television, we have various different categories of ‘televisual’ content now viewable on mobile. If you include only professionally produced video programming (i.e leaving out user created sites such as YouTube), then you have video on demand where the user downloads clips from a catalog, video on demand where the user streams (placeshifts) video files over the cell network from their PVR (e.g. using Slingbox). And finally, services which are more like classic TV, in which the user experiences a linear schedule of video programming either via simulcasting or broadcasting. So lots of stuff going on and supply of services is growing fast. We estimate that around 55% of cellular operators in Western Europe now offer simulcast TV services with video on demand (from a catalog of clips) at around 80%. The other services are rarer, but Hutchison’s X-Series announcement has upped the ante around place shifting as a result of its allowing applications from Orb Networks and Sling Media to be used with a flat rate access plan. Mobile broadcast services have been live in Europe since May 06, with services in Germany, Italy and the UK.

When will mobile television penetrate the mass consumer market?
Prices will have to come down first. We estimate that penetration of TV services will push above 30% in Western Europe in the 2012-2014 time frame.

Thank you Phil for being here today :)

Due to the length this interview will be published in 2 parts, so next week we'll cover mobile TV from the users' perspective. Don't miss it next Thursday. Have a great weekend everyone!

Holiday’s Specials (part II) - Special Events to Promote Ringback Tones

the iPod, accompanied by portable music devices and music accessories were and still are among the most popular Christmas presents. No wonder why Microsoft chose this timing to launch its new Zune

Other players in the music industry have realized that the holiday season in the best timing to increase users’ usage -- You got that one right -- mobile operators. Many mobile operators offer one of my favorite ringback tones features which is the ringback tone gift. This feature enables a subscriber to purchase a content item for any other subscriber and send it as a gift. The gift content item will be included in the personal play list (gallery) of the recipient subscriber and an appropriate notification will be sent to both the sender and the recipient announcing the successful delivery of the gift. If the receiver of the gift hasn’t been subscribed to the ringback tone service he\she will need to activate his\her subscription to the service in order to use the given ringback tone.

At Comverse, we know that about 45% of ringback tone gifts recipients choose to receive the ringback tone gift and activate the service. One of the strongest motivations of this behavior is the trust users have in their friends. In other words, the difference between accepting a gift from a friend and accepting a gift from a commercial entity is confidence.

Having said that, there is one challenge for operators (after acquiring the ringback tone gift feature). The challenge is to educate their users to buy and send ringback tones as gifts, since this feature increases users’ usage of the ringback tones service.

Understanding Mobile 2.0

An excellent piece written by a friend and mobilist Rudy De Waele of m-trends.org titled Understanding Mobile 2.0 at Richard MacManus' Read and Write Web :

"Mobile 2.0 is not "the Future." it is services that already exist all around us. These services are maturing at an amazing rate and what they are doing is effectively knitting together Web 2.0 with the mobile platform to create something new: a new class of services that leverage mobility but are as easy to use and ubiquitous as the Web is today. These services point the way forward for the mobile data industry."

Greece: Mobile Phones in Schools are Banned

The BBC reports that

"Greece's education ministry has banned children from using mobile phones while at school. The education ministry says that children will no longer be able to bring their phones into schools even if they are switched off.

The ruling follows the rape of a 16-year-old girl during a school sit-in which was reportedly videoed by fellow pupils on their mobiles. Senior school students who repeatedly ignore the new ruling face the prospect of expulsion.

[mobile phones] are mainly used for listening to music, sending text messages and playing games but the gang rape of a 16-year-old Bulgarian girl on the island of Evia has convinced the education ministry that children will have to do without their precious status symbols.
The rape was reportedly videoed by some of the girls' female classmates using their mobile phones. This detail, highlighting callous disregard for the victim's plight, horrified Greece.

There has also been a rise in "happy-slapping" incidents where violent assaults by bullies are captured on video and circulated. Teachers and psychologists have concluded that the video taping of bad behaviour encourages further disorder as well as competition amongst pupils to create increasingly shocking images."

[via BBC]

According to the mobileYouth 2005 report, usually parents initiate mobile ownership amongst the younger demographic. The main reasons are safety and the need for increased contact compensating for their busy lifestyles. They probably have never thought that the mobile phone itself encourages malbehavior or even danger. Greece's education ministry outlawed mobile phones while at school - but what will parents say about the new ruling? What would you say as parents?

Vote for Being Five

My friend George Sfarnas, who was interviewed here not so long ago,  just told me that Being Five has been chosen as a finalist in The 2006 Weblog Awards, under the category of Best Comic Strip. Way to go!!

If you wish to help sweet Georgie win this, click here to vote daily for Being Five, till Dec. 15 2006.

Thank you :)

Phil Taylor on The Mobile Music Market

After getting a few email inquiries I decided that the Mobile Content arena could be a great topic for December's coverage. Searching for industry experts I got to know Phil Taylor, a director at Strategy Analytics, an analyst and a regular speaker at industry conferences. Phil will be visiting Xellular Identity and will talk about the mobile content market every Thursday during December (each week on a different service). You don't want to miss it!

Let's welcome Phil :)

Hi Phil, thank you for visiting Xellular Identity :) How are you?
I’m great thanks. Too busy to feel very festive yet, but certainly looking forward to the Christmas break ;)

What got you interested in mobile?
I started off in general telecoms research and gravitated towards the area with the coolest gadgets! Even though a lot of analysis is very technical and/ or business oriented, almost everyone is interested in mobile phones, what they can do and how much they are paying. I like being in a field of research where developments are taking place so rapidly. Although keeping ontop of it all can be a major challenge.

What takes up your time other than mobile?
I like to spend time in the great outdoors. Not always easy when you’re living in central London. I particularly like rock climbing and mountaineering and wish I had more time for them.

Something interesting to share with the world about you?I share my name with the World’s best darts player, Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor. I’m thinking of changing my middle name to ‘The Power’ as well. I kind of like it!

Mobile Music

What are the market size estimates for mobile music?
We think that the market for music services that are distributed over the cell network will be worth roughly $2.6 billion globally in 2010. This doesn’t include personalization products like ringtones or ringback tones however.

A lot of 3G music services have come to market that focus on over the air delivery. Although there are a few exceptions, most of these are struggling to drive sales volumes due to the price differential with online music stores and poor relative usability.

What are the latest developments in the mobile music market?
A couple of developments are taking place. Price competition is taking place, with operator stores starting to drop track prices from €1.50 down to €0.99, or bundling tracks into music oriented subscription packs. At these kinds of track prices, over the air (OTA) music delivery is a zero profit margin service and many carriers are accepting that offering music is less about profit than about branding, providing a use case for 3G, providing value to customers and (hopefully) attracting some customers from other networks.

Who are the mobile music consumers? What is their buying motivation?
People that buy music OTA are certainly not price sensitive, or if they are then their sensitivity is being overridden by a must have now element to their purchase. We think that OTA track downloads are primarily a substitute for spend on CD singles with sales being driven by younger age groups.

What are they dissatisfied with?
Usability of services remains a problem, particularly for services that have not taken a client based UI approach to delivery. High prices, relatively low on-board memory of phones relative to dedicated MP3 players and restrictive DRM are other problems that we hear consumers mention a lot.

What is the future of the mobile music market?
We think that mobile phones are increasingly well positioned to act as media/ music players but that the cell network is not necessarily going to be the mechanism of choice for getting tracks onto the device. Operators need to add allow users the choice of OTA or delivery to the PC and then upload to their mobile from there. This is what Verizon Wireless is now doing with its V Cast Music service in the US and we believe that this approach positions operators best to drive sales volumes and ultimately give consumers what they want.

What are the challenges operators need to face with in this market?

Mobility is not going to command the premium that operators are asking for. Users don’t appreciate that the transport costs and premium charges are tied together in these price points of €1.50 plus per track, they just compare it with the €0.99 they know they can buy the track for on iTunes or from other online music retailers. I think that operators will ultimately have to separate the transport and premium charges again and use this as a means of up selling users onto flat rate price plans or transport plans that are priced specifically for use with music services. In Canada for example, Rogers Wireless is making a podcasting service available. No premium charges are imposed but a $5 per month flat transport charge is required to consume this bandwidth hungry application. The X-Series announcement from 3 last week is a similar example of operators trying to set flat rate transport plans against specific services. Minimizing their exposure to potentially high backhaul/ bandwidth costs then becomes the challenge.

Any examples of marketing best practices?
I’ve already mentioned that we think that V Cast Music is a good example of an operator that’s taking a different distribution and pricing approach to the majority of carrier music download services. It provides choice for its consumers, who can upload tracks from the V Cast catalog to their mobile via PC or via the cell network. What is just as important is that the price for access via PC is competitive with other online retailers, with tracks sold at $0.99. Over the air delivery is more expensive, and rightly so.

Thank you Phil for being here today!

Don't forget to tune in next Thursday for the second part of the mobile content coverage. Have a great weekend!

Holiday’s Specials (part I) - Holidays' Offers

With the holiday’s season in sight, this month I’m going to cover a few case studies of mobile operators’ success in leveraging the holiday season to promote their ringback tones services.

The holiday season has always been a great time for operators to promote their mobile services and mass activate them. Today, I want to bring 3 examples of ‘holiday’s special ringback tones offers’ which leverage the holiday spirit to promote the ringback tone service.

This Christmas, the American operator Cingular gave its users 3 free Christmas ringback tones (Answer Tones). Giving a free trial is one of the best ways to expose users to new services; However, Cingular provided its users with 3 ringback tones. -Why 3 ringback tones? -First because 3 different ringback tones made sure that users would find at least one suitable ringback tone for then and adopt the new service. Second, because Cingular hopes that users will download the 3 items and later on, after the holiday season is over, the need to change the ringback tone will become relevant for all the subscribers and all 3 items(!).

Amena (Orange Spain) distributed cards at points of sale and hot spots which promote local theme tones during special events and public holidays (like Fallas in Valencia, Feria de Abril in Sevilla etc’). Users just needed to send an SMS to get the free ringback tone (DiverTONO). You can see the pics here.

 

And, in order to get the New Years Eve special holidays’ ringback tone (of 2006), T-mobile Slovakia’s users were asked to send an SMS to the number ‘2006’. That was a very easy number to remember!

All three operators mentioned here understood the importance of timing, i.e. the holiday’s season, to massively promote their ringback tone service with a suiting holiday tune (which later will be needed to replace hastly).

Carnival of Mobilists at MOpocket

This week's Carnival of Mobilists is hosted by Justin Oberman, a dear friend and one of the best bloggers covering the mobile arena. Head over for the BEST posts on mobile of this week! :)

Don't Do This, Boys

The story of Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen made the headlines even here in Israel. According to Reuters,

"Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen, dubbed Finland's sexiest man, broke up by text message with the girlfriend he had met on the Internet, she said in a magazine interview.

"Matti dumped me in a text message, where he said 'that's it'," Susan Kuronen told the magazine Me Naiset (Us Women) in an interview published on Friday."

[via Reuters]

Maybe in Finland, the land of Nokia and mobile phones, there's a different interpersonal mobile etiquette; To me it seems very rude and inappropriate... Maybe it's a new trend where politician prove to be tech savvy?!