Waiting for the Mobile Bandwagon?

Tom Potterf — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 18:45:00 GMT

Ad Age's Alice Z. Cuneo writes this week about "Why '08 Isn't Mobile's Year -- Again" identifying five key challenges to mobile really taking off: Reach, Measurement, Complexity, Misnomer of mobile as ad medium, and No hallelujah moment. The latter being the culmination of success on the previous four resulting in a break out moment that gets everybody jumping on the mobile bandwagon. But if your audience uses mobile devices, why wait for the bandwagon to come around?

Whereas the complexity and lack of standards in implementing mobile can present some hurdles currently for some types of complex campaigns, there are hundreds of tactics that can be implemented right now, fairly easily and at relatively low cost, to explore a new marketing channel.

For many companies, reach stands out as the primary barrier to blazing a path through this new territory in interactive media. But to the fact that "just over 30 million phone users are on data plans" (from the Ad Age article), it's important to read this as "there are over 30 million phone users on data plans." Are they your customers? If so, don't let the challenges stand in the way of getting ahead on mobile. If you don't know, ask those marketing gurus you pay to find out.

Reaching the mobile audience now in simple ways, even with the workarounds that may be necessary on the back end, will get you on your customers mobile devices well before your competition. Popeyes restaurants, for one example, didn't wait. They targeted the 18-24 customer via low-cost electronic coupons sent on-demand via mobile and had a better than expected response (read more at Marketing Sherpa). Driving by an outdoor ad and texting to get a coupon is a simple execution using existing capabilities. And they are ahead of the pack for future, more sophisticated mobile campaigns.

If your customers use web-enabled mobile devices, the time to capture their attention via this medium is now.

Does your vendor A even know vendor B exists?

Tom Potterf — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 18:49:00 GMT

One for PR, One for Interactive, One for branding, One for direct mail, One for inside sales, One for…need I go on? If your organization is of a certain size, you have a lot of external agencies and vendors to manage.

From sharing knowledge and distributing strategic direction, to ownership and territorial issues, connecting and distributing knowledge and work across your vendors can be daunting. As any agency will tell you, we’re here to help you achieve your business goals. Still, when multiple vendors are involved, coordination of effort is key to being successful. Here are some tips to create a foundation for successful collaboration:

Understand and task your agencies and vendors to their expertise. Be specific and upfront about roles and responsibilities.

Get your vendors together for a brief meeting at the Account Management level every month or two. It’s not a project status meeting, those discussions should happen on the project level between the involved parties. This meeting is to discuss updates to and progress toward business goals, keep vendors up to date on new programs, discuss status of mission-critical initiatives, briefly connect on collaboration opportunities….just learned something new about the business’ direction? This is the venue to discuss it.

Get together in person from time to time. The internet is great and conference calls get the job done. But real people are better.

Create a central online location where status reports, schedules, documents and assets can be shared. If there is opportunity for communication outside of email, so much the better--who wouldn’t want to get some of those “re: re: re: re:…” messages out of their inbox?

When your vendors are on the same page on your business goals and have visibility to the activities that are supporting them, collaboration will be greatly enhanced. Your vendors will have an opportunity to add value to projects where before they were unaware and unable to contribute. And coming together as a team promotes comradrie and creates more successful partnerships across your vendors.

Oh yeah, one more tip: All involved should relish the opportunity to absorb so much information from so many experts. Enjoy that opportunity.

Tom Potterf's Blog

Waiting for the Mobile Bandwagon?

Does your vendor A even know vendor B exists?