I read a very interesting review yesterday about mobile marketing in Ireland. It was kinda strange cause the weather was very Irish and I was sitting at a Starbucks in Crete, Greece, by the seaside, where the weather is almost always nothing like that. I have yet to decide whether me reading the report had anything to do with that... some people claim it could.

Anyway, some very interesting numbers about mobile uptake in Ireland, and especially about how people use their mobile phones.

Mobile ownership remains – with death and taxes – on the list of certainties for Irish consumers, with penetration at 120 per cent. The penetration of mobile broadband grew by 400 per cent in the year to June 2008, with 220,000 Irish people now signed up.

‘‘It changes the view of a handset from being a communications device to being a media tool,” Moore said. A Universal McCann survey of 9,500 mobile phone users in 21 markets showed that only 47 per cent of handset time was for phone calls.

The survey certainly covers a large number of mobile users, and the percentage of phone call time from the time spent using the mobile phone is certainly not something I expected. Of course it doesn't cover text messaging, but still..

I agree with Michael Cullen, who wrote the article, that if mobile marketing is really to take off, better user profiles are needed , but I also think that apart from the mobile operators, these can be built or provided by large proximity marketing networks, that can be established and then sold as marketing space to advertisers.


However, I just read another article in the Marketing Magazine that looks at adoption and use of mobile phones from a slightly different angle. It claims that 80% of mobile phone features is not regularly used by their users, and only 20% are features used regularly.

“For the most part, users struggled to list more than half a dozen services featured on their current mobile phone,” says Doug Overton, Vice President of Consulting and Analysis at WDSGlobal. “Regular usage was largely confined to voice, text messaging, address book, camera and alarm clock. Users do dip into additional services, such as the music player, Internet and games, but we found that a large proportion of features remained completely undiscovered.”

Obviously the second study is more confined regarding the number of users, but it's interesting to see there's a different second opinion.