I've been getting a lot of press releases in my inbox lately, but I don't have the time to review each one individually. I think the best thing to do in the future, is to publish those that sound most interesting directly, and I will obviously be commenting or doing some research as well when I have the time or when it's really worth it.
Today's is an interesting press release about the future plans of the Jumptag mobile ad network.
for mobile APPLICATION DEVELOPERS And publishers who Want to Turn traffic into dollaRS
Quick and Easy Integration into the Jumptap Mobile Ad Network Opens the Door to Hundreds of Leading Advertisers
GAME DEVELOPERS CONFERENCE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA — March 9, 2010 — Jumptap, the leading mobile advertising solutions provider, today announced a new self-service application for publishers of mobile websites and mobile applications, including iPhone and Android. Publishers can quickly and easily integrate their properties into the Jumptap mobile ad network and gain access to hundreds of leading advertisers looking to reach consumers on mobile sites and in smart phone applications.
Feel the Love
Jumptap is showing its love for new members in the network with a special time limited offer. As one of the first 100 app developers or sites to join our mobile ad network, you will get to keep 100 percent of the ad revenue for the first 100 days. Additional information can be found at www.jumptap.com/feel-the-love or visit us at the Moscone South Hall, Esplanade, exhibit number TT29.
Smarter Network Delivers More Revenue
Jumptap leverages its highly-advanced, sophisticated algorithmic engine and unique intellectual property (IP) portfolio to match the right ad to the right person at the right time. Text, banner and innovative rich media ad units enhance the user experience and engage users more effectively. Reaching mobile audiences with highly relevant and appealing ads drives increased click through rates and higher conversions. Jumptap’s technology ensures the most relevant ads are delivered, and that app developers and publishers realize the highest potential revenue from their mobile properties. Superior performance rates drive increased advertiser spend, which result in high fill rates and the highest effective yield (eCPMs) for publishers.
“Jumptap is committed to continually adding value to our network and this is a great means for app developers and site owners to take advantage of our exciting growth,” said Paran Johar, CMO of Jumptap. “Preliminary data shows in app ads are driving click through rates five times higher than online advertising, increasing demand from our brand and performance advertisers. This presents an enormous opportunity for developers to earn revenue from their applications.”
Simple and Easy to Get Started
Getting started is simple! Just sign up, install the ad code, and start making money. Our console gives you real-time reporting to monitor your revenue and enables you to control the relevance of ads that run on your properties. Get started here.
“Our Intuition: Mom’s Assistant is the top personal assistant app for moms and women on the iPhone and iPod Touch platforms,” said Greg Rose, Sr. Director Business Development at IconApps. “We are focused on bringing the best mom-focused local offers and deals to our users. Jumptap’s proven ability to reach mobile consumers with the most relevant innovative and interactive ads – and the resulting revenue potential for publishers – has made us more than eager to become a part of their mobile ad network.”
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About Jumptap
Jumptap operates the largest independent premium mobile advertising network in North America and Europe, offering the largest unique user footprint with a penetration of approximately 44 million unique visits a month in the US alone. Jumptap leverages its highly advanced, sophisticated algorithmic engine and unique IP to deliver the best ROI for advertisers and the highest monetization for publishers. The result is a network of mobile websites and applications that combine best-in-class content and services together with highly relevant advertising to create an experience that appeals to the mobile consumer. Flexible solutions offer both fixed CPM and bidded CPC campaigns. In addition, Jumptap's tapLink platform allows mobile operators to manage inventory distribution to third-party ad networks, optimize yield across such networks, and provide the best performance for advertisers. For more information, visit www.jumptap.com or follow us on twitter.com/jumptap.
It's an interesting piece, with some exciting ideas, so I'll quote him directly rather than tell you about it:
Geo-Fencing + Mobile Phones = Powerful Real Estate Marketing What if a buyer looking for a place to live didn’t have to do anything beyond choosing what features they wanted in a home? What if a buyer was automatically alerted to nearby properties that matched their needs?
This is what we’re talking about with the next generation of mobile real estate marketing.
The use of “geo-fences” surrounding properties really drives the location-based marketing engine. A geo-fence is a virtual boundary surrounding a geographic region. When a person with a mobile phone crosses a geo-fence boundary, a notification is automatically issued to that mobile phone. Traditionally, geo-fencing has been used to send alerts when users exit a certain area, instead of entering one.
Geo-fencing has been used in conjunction with GPS technology for a while now and for a variety of uses:
Tracking senior citizens with Alzheimer’s;
Ensuring mobile employees don’t travel outside of certain areas; and,
Monitoring hazardous cargo, to name a few examples.
We’re confident that someday, we’ll be able to add “Market real estate” to that list.
Create geo-fences. Before real estate and property management companies set up their online portals, they’ll need to create geo-fences around all of their properties. This will ensure that if a qualified user crosses the geo-fence with their mobile phone, that user will be notified about that property.
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Collect buyer needs online. Real estate and property management companies can create online portals on their web sites, where prospective tenants and buyers set up notifications tailored to what they want in a property.
For example, a user could create an alert based on square footage, number of bedrooms, pet friendliness, special amenities, and zip code, to name just a few of the myriad of options available. Once they’ve entered their cell phone number and submitted those housing preferences, all they have to do is carry their phone with them to receive notifications.
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Let the notifications begin. The notifications are where this entire concept of location-based mobile marketing comes together. The geo-fences have been set up. Users have entered their housing preferences online to receive notifications. All that is left is for the users to go about their normal lives, with their GPS-enabled mobile phones, of course.
When they get close to a property that matches their wants, they’ll be automatically notified on their mobile phone. Property management software can then integrate all of these contact points with customers into their CRM system, to track the effectiveness of the messages and review properties with clients.
House hunting couldn’t get much easier than that, could it?
I like the way Chris has presented the whole concept, and combined with the illustrations he gives in his article, I believe he gives a pretty complete description of it.
If you have any comments or ideas on how mobile marketing can be used in real-estate feel free to post them either here or on Chris' article.
I came across this article during the weekend, while out for coffee in the very windy Heraklion (in Crete) but couldn't blog about it there and then. Still, I thought it was pretty interesting to share with you all so here goes.
According to the article, HitWise, an online traffic analysis company, has confirmed that Facebook has become a bigger driver of traffic, when it comes to online news, than news portals like MyYahoo or Google News.
In continuing to look at this trend, Heather Hopkins, an analyst with the traffic analysis company, dug a little bit deeper into the stats and found that there is a distinct difference between where the social network drives its traffic in comparison to Google News.
According to Hopkins, Facebook sends nearly three times as much of its downstream traffic to broadcast media websites as compared to Google News.
Hopkins breaks down the top 10 news and media websites visited from both Google News and Facebook. The Google News list reads pretty much like a roster of the old guard, leading off with The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and Reuters before finally hitting the first broadcast media outlet, CNN.com. Facebook, on the other hand, starts right off with The Weather Channel and CNN.com before getting to Yahoo! News. As a matter of fact, not one of the top 10 media and news outlets on Facebook's list are a traditional print media outlet.
This is one of those articles I like posting because they bring data that confirms general feelings I (and I'm sure many of you also) have been having -- the sort of thing your gut tells you is true already but you're missing time and resources to look into and confirm.
My guess is that as social networks take an ever growing part in our daily lives this is going to be even more and more true. We'll just wait and see...
This has little to do with the marketing side of mobile, but this is a very interesting article a friend pointed me at. It is about how Twitter has revolutionised teaching in lecture halls and boosted participation by students, surpassing the shyness barrier.
Professors who wish to engage students during large lectures face an uphill battle. Not only is it a logistical impossibility for 200+ students to actively participate in a 90 minute lecture, but the downward sloping cone-shape of a lecture hall induces a one-to-many conversation. This problem is compounded by the recent budget cuts that have squeezed ever more students into each room.
Classroom shyness is like a blackhole: Once silence takes over, it never lets go. In my own experience, in a class of hundreds, the fraction of students who speak up is small, and a still tinier fraction contribute regularly.
That’s why, Dr. Monica Rankin of the University of Texas at Dallas was pleasantly surprised when her experiment with Twitter began pulling more students into discussion. “It’s been really exciting because, in classes like this, you’ll have three people who talk about the discussion material, and so to actually have 30 or 40 people at the same time talking about it is really interesting,” said Megan Malone, Teaching Assistant to Dr. Monica Rankin’s United States history course, in the video below.
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In fact, Dr. Rankin’s colleague David Parry, Professor of Emerging Media at the University of Texas, found that Twitter chatter during class spilled over into the students’ free time.
“The first thing I noticed when the class started using Twitter was how conversations continued inside and outside of class,” Parry wrote. “Once students started Twittering I think they developed a sense of each other as people beyond the classroom space, rather than just students they saw twice a week for an hour and a half.” As a result, classroom conversation became more productive as “people were more willing to talk, and [be] more respectful of others.”
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For schools hit hard by the recession, Twitter is an inexpensive solution to the growing problem of increasing class sizes. It is a tried-and-true platform to let conversations flourish. Indeed, Dr. Parry declared that “it was the single thing that changed the classroom dynamics more than anything I’ve ever done teaching.”
It is a well-known fact that there's much less shyness in the online world, and also that students are often shy about participating in large lecture halls, so credit to those lecturers for making the link between the two and introducing Twitter as a teaching aid.
Given the ever-growing ubiquity of internet-enabled mobile phones, I expect this is something that has the potential to explode -- as long as lecturers are willing to make the effort. It's a good thing there's at least a few that are..
The past has shown us that practically every single move that Apple makes is at least well-planned and serves a purpose, though it may not always be so clear at first why.
The same I guess will be the case with this. Apple has decided to ban in-app location-based advertising for its most popular platform, the iPhone/iPod Touch. Given how much of the market the iPhone currently holds, and how much it is set to affect the the market in the future, I'm sure this is a move we will remember. Here's more from the article:
The company announced that it is blocking applications that use location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user's location. Industry analysts are speculating whether that decision could have something to do with its pending acquisition of mobile ad network Quattro Wireless.
“Apple is acting like they normally do—they want to control the experience and the use of their devices and applications,” said Neil Strother, Kirkland, WA-based practice director at ABI Research. “This a way for them to make sure the end user isn’t getting spam and controlling what goes into iPhone applications.
Here is the 'advice' given to iPhone developers, on the Developer Connection section of its website, regarding location-based advertising in iPhone apps:
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.
You can learn more about using Core Location by reading the CLLocationManager Class Reference and downloading the LocateMe sample code available in the iPhone OS Reference Library.
I'm looking forward to seeing how this turns out, but I'm sure the Quattro acquisition by Apple has everything to do with this move -- it's pretty evident Apple wants full control over the advertising that goes on in its platform. That's where the big bucks are, and the fact that both Google (who recently bought AdMob) and Apple are so actively looking to take a big piece of the mobile marketing market shows just how true that is.
Buying bulk quantities of SMS Messages can save you big bucks. I guess this is obvious, but a look at the prices on your favourite bulk SMS provider will confirm how true this is -- so think before you buy..
If you're going to be sending SMS messages to small groups, but regularly, buy in bulk. Think of your overall SMS needs for, say, 3 or 6 months or maybe even a year, if you're serious about SMS marketing, in order to cut costs dramatically.
Tip #2: Be careful about the encoding
The SMS protocol has support for different SMS message encodings. The most common is GSM , but there is also UCS-2 support.. In short, GSM contains only a number of characters, while UCS-2 supports practically every language out there.
If GSM doesn't cover your needs, beware because the character limit drops in UCS-2 from 160 characters per SMS to 70 characters per SMS!
So make sure you're informed - or you might end up getting charged for double the amount of SMS messages you meant to send!
Tip #3: Did you know what 'concatenation' is?
Concatenation is an option some Bulk SMS providers offer -- others don't, and others have it set as default.
Without it, if you send an SMS that's over 160 chars (if it's on the GSM encoding) your 'one' SMS will get delivered as two separate SMS messages on the consumers mobile phone. Be sure your bulk SMS provider offers this option, if you will often be sending messages that exceed the limit.
Tip #4: Remember to include contact details
Given the nature of my profession, I register my mobile phone number in all sorts of places. As a result I get sent loads of texts from various SMS marketing campaigns. Once in a while there's a text that I find interesting, so at that point I need a way to participate, either by sending an SMS, or by calling a number.
The problem is I have seen too many of these texts without full contact details so I can choose what suits me best.
This is really important when the SMS being sent is a call-to-action, or if the consumer might have a question or require clarifications.
For example, restaurants often send me promotional SMS messages, but in case I want to participate I want more than just the phone number they usually give me. Why not also have the website, so I can visit it directly from my phone, or also have the ability to text back to participate/book a table/etc ?
Tip #5: Get your date and time right
Another common pitfall clients often make are (small) mistakes in the date and time for events in their SMS messages. It's very unfortunate because the whole point of their SMS is to promote the event, and they get that wrong.
I know it sounds silly, but I see it happen... They focus too much on the rest of the SMS message, so much so, that they neglect to check their dates are right.
Tip #6: Don't send at inappropriate times
How annoying is it when your phone rings just as you're dozing off? Well, believe it or not (or should I say admit it or not!?), there's marketers out there that make the mistake of sending out their promotional SMS at times when their audience would rather not be disturned.
Ok, I know that when dealing with a wide audience, for which you don't know all that much, it might be difficult to come to a safe conclusion about the most appropriate time to communicate with them. Still, there are some general rules to follow about times that apply to the general public.
In general, don't contact them:
while they're at work -- unless if your message is work related, when the opposite applies.
when it's likely they're sleeping (this include early mornings or late nights -- not everyone gets up or goes to sleep the same time you do!)
too early before your event, e.g. there's no point telling them about a concert next month (unless you're going to remind them again, or if tickets are running out)
last minute -- unless you give them some extra incentive to make the effort required for a last-minute change of plans.
Choose alphanumeric originator with your brand name
Most Mass SMS Providers allow you to set the originator of your message (usually up to 11 latin characters, or 16 digits). Do look for this and -- obviously -- choose your brand name here.
Only set your own name if it is important for your campaign that the message feels more personal - e.g. politicians usually do this.
Tip #7: Time-critical SMS/Guaranteed delivery options
If your messages MUST reach their recipient, or if it is essential they are delivered within seconds, you can buy this sort of Quality of Service from most SMS providers.
Beware though; this comes at a cost. This type of SMS messages is quite expensive when compared to normal SMS, and that's not all.
Guaranteed delivery, might imply that some of your recipients will receive their SMS more than once. This is because of the approach (most) SMS providers take. If the SMS is delayed for some reason (e.g. poor signal), they will re-send the message, until they get back a delivery report saying it's been delivered.
In short, guaranteed delivery will ensure your SMS is delivered, just as long as you don't mind some of your recipients getting it twice.
Think what's more important, because some of them might complain about this sort of thing... but then again others might complain if they don't get it! If you don't want to have to choose try to find a bulk SMS provider that will guarantee you both (in writing ;) )..
Tip #8: Run your SMS text through a spell checker
This is, again, simple, yet sometimes overlooked. Quickly pass your text through a spell checker to ensure you don't get any embarassing comments, because this sort of thing can hurt your campaign and your own (or your business) image. Do you really want a politician who either can't spell or just isn't bothered to pass the SMS through a spell checker? (the second's far far worse for me cause it shows poor professionalism, while making spelling mistakes isn't that big a deal for me)
Tip #9: Send a test SMS
Once you've prepared your SMS in your favourite Bulk SMS software, or website, and you're ready to press that big red 'SEND' button... STOP!
Now is the time to take a second and send the message to your own mobile phone first, to make sure it comes up ok. Then, because, to be honest, we're not very fair judges of our own work, send it to a friend or colleague who hasn't seen it yet, and see how they react / ask them what they think.
When you get the green light from them, you're good to go!
Tip #10: Check delivery reports to remove consistently failing numbers
Most websites that do bulk SMS, offer delivery reports, so that you are able to tell which of your recipients your SMS has been delivered to. Obviously this is a great feature in itself, but you should put it to use as well.
Don't just look at the list and think cool, most of my messages are getting delivered... Keep a separate list of the failing recipients over a couple of iterations and erase them from your list, so that you save yourself the extra credit.
Sounds trivial, I know, but I wouldn't be bringing it up if I didn't know some of you don't do it.
Cosmote, one of the network providers here in Greece, has recently released a very successful tv ad with a very catchy tune and a video that's become very popular here.
Various people started doing their own versions of the video, which they published on TV / YouTube / Facebook, etc. so it was clear the ad was a big hit.
The ad agency then took the opportunity and took it to a whole new level, which is where it gets interesting for us..
They brought out a new version of the ad with a call-to-action, asking consumers to participate by visiting a website where they can create their own version of the video:
"Think you can do it better?" -- was the question posed, so that consumers can then create their own version of the video hit either 'proper' or comical.
What happens next is pretty cool because the way the do it is they call you on your mobile phone, and playback the music on their end, recording the whole phone call which they then publish on their website, so that others can then vote on the best ones.
I know this is the second post in a row for greek mobile marketing campaigns but I thought this was a really really clever way to interact with the consumer using a variety of mediums (tv, website, mobile) all really well designed and implemented, so please bare with me if it's all greek to you... :)
My congrats, if I am one to judge, to the ad agency behind this (OgilvyOne Athens) for a job very well done.
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location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user's location. Industry analysts are speculating whether that decision could have something to do with its pending acquisition of mobile ad network Quattro Wireless.
Buying bulk quantities of SMS Messages can save you big bucks. I guess this is obvious, but a look at the prices on your favourite bulk SMS provider will confirm how true this is -- so think before you buy..
The SMS protocol has support for different SMS message encodings. The most common is 
Concatenation is an option some 
Given the nature of my profession, I register my mobile phone number in all sorts of places. As a result I get sent loads of texts from various 
Another 
This is, again, simple, yet sometimes overlooked. Quickly pass your text through a spell checker to ensure you don't get any embarassing comments, because this sort of thing can hurt your campaign and your own (or your business) image. Do you really want a politician who either can't spell or just isn't bothered to pass the SMS through a spell checker? (the second's far far worse for me cause it shows poor professionalism, while making spelling mistakes isn't that big a deal for me)
