Jon Swartz of USA Today published a nice little reminder of the great opportunities and potential LBS offers:
Such services are part of a rising wave in mobile advertising, which is expected to soar in the U.S. to $3.1 billion in 2013 from $320 million in 2009, according to market researcher BIA/Kelsey.
Driving the growth are smartphone sales, which are expected to account for a majority of phones in the U.S. by the end of 2011, market researcher Nielsen says. About 5% of the more than 225,000 iPhone apps have location services.
Analysts say the appeal of location-based services goes far beyond game-playing and seeing where your friends are. “Location is such an important tool for local merchants and marketers to more deeply connect with customers,” says Michael Boland, an analyst at BIA/Kelsey.
It was bound to happen:
A federal district court in Chicago recently held that SMS messages that are sent to consumers without their consent could violate the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.
The decision echoes many of the conclusions in a previous Ninth Circuit opinion and underscores the importance of getting express consent from consumers before sending SMS messages.
I’m glad to see this, particularly because as a very personal medium mobile phones present uniquely valuable opportunities, but at the same time it must be respected. Not only are unwanted messages annoying and a great way to turn off a target audience, they also cost consumers money. Most credible mobile solution providers have been following the Mobile Marketing Association’s Guidelines when it comes to opt-in practices, but as the market has expanded and technology has evolved, complaints about abuses of mobile phones for marketing purposes has been on a noticeable rise. Just take a look at the examples on the Complaints Board. The most common gripe is regarding unsolicited premium and text messages.
The Mobile Marketer article mentions “one company agreed to pay $7 million to settle accusations of sending unsolicited text messages.” While that’s certainly costly, nothing compares to the damage a company’s reputation suffers when it does something offensive to consumers. Once you shatter confidence and trust in your brand, it’s pretty hard to recover.
It always amazes me how large broadcasters and other media outlets will complain that ad and other profit sources are down, but then they don’t embrace new, proven revenue streams. This came through loud and clear with NBC’s coverage of the Olympics in Vancouver. As reported by Reuters:
NBC, which paid a record $2.2 billion for U.S. broadcast rights to the Beijing and Vancouver Olympics, has said it will lose money on the winter Games.
NBC said on Tuesday that half of all Americans had watched at least some of its Olympic coverage.
But NBC online coverage of the Vancouver Winter Olympics drew just 33 million viewers. Alan Wurtzel, president of research at NBC Universal, said TV was “still king.”
“Multiplatform consumption is emerging and going to become extraordinarily important. But the mothership is — and will remain for a very long time — television,” he said.
Emerging? It’s already here and important! Timo Lumme, head of TV and marketing for the International Olympic Committee weighs in:
“…non-traditional media” had already matched the 20,000 hours from traditional broadcasters so far these Games, in Reuters’ words, “contributing to a total audience he expects to reach 3.5 billion — or half the world’s population.”
Lumme told a news conference that “we now have the same amount of hours covered globally on digital media — Internet, mobile — as we have on the old media broadcasting, and a quarter of that is mobile.”
The message couldn’t be any more obvious: mobile is here and traditional media giants needs to get onboard or risk further obsolescence when it comes to attracting both advertisers and consumers. NBC did offer a great iPhone app for the Olympicas which I used, but there was so much more they could have done. I hope they’ll look to integrate more mobile initiatives in future large-scale events.
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