m.Net Blog

Posted by Scott Johnson, Chief Marketing Officer

We continue to help educate the market about the opportunities gained from embracing mobile marketing. I will be speaking at the ADMA Forum about how including mobile in the marketing package can help enhance campaigns. I have some interesting case studies to share from our experience with leading local clients.

Please also visit our stand in the Mobile Marketing Pavilion as I will be demonstrating www.campaignmobile.com. If you would like to see how Campaign Mobile empowers agencies, web developers and brands with the capability to manage their mobile-marketing campaigns please drop by and ask for a demonstration of the platform.

To find out more about ADMA Forum follow this link www.admaforum.com

Posted by Scott Johnson, Chief Marketing Officer

The iAwards, awarded by the Australian Information Industry Association, are Australia’s ICT Awards. The 2008 iAwards recognise innovation excellence across a range of important fields including education, finance, government, media, and security.

Entries in the iAwards are judged in terms of the following criteria:

• Uniqueness, technology and innovation, trendsetting

• Market potential, accessibility and reach, transparency and impact on quality of life, market share potential, and business and financial model/strategy

• Functionality and features, user requirements, compatibility and interoperability

• Quality and application of technology, contents and standards (ISO/CMM), product stability and reliability

• Presentation, organisation and clarity of submission

We’re very happy to announce that the AIIA has recognised Campaign Mobile in the 2008 iAwards as the best communications application in South Australia. To see Campaign Mobile in action, visit www.campaignmobile.com!

Posted by Scott Johnson, Chief Marketing Officer

Earth Hour sponsor the Adelaide City Council has creatively used Campaign Mobile to promote the international energy-conservation campaign.

On the 28th of March a broadcast email was sent to South Australians directing them to a Campaign Mobile call to action on the Adelaide City Council website. The ACC Earth Hour mobile site features Earth Hour branding, written content, and links to downloadable imagery and video.

m.Net provided development support to the ACC, extending the functionality of the Campaign-Mobile-produced mobile site to enable seamless download of mobile content including Earth Hour wallpaper, video messages from the Adelaide Lord Mayor and Adelaide Football Club player Kris Massie, and an Earth Hour advertisement. Click here to view the live Campaign Mobile execution!

We are starting to see an incredible array of campaigns deployed using Campaign Mobile. Other recent executions of note include:

• Yahoo!7 is using Campaign Mobile to promote the Home and Away mobile site: http://mobile.homeandaway.com.au
• The Australian Dance Theatre is using Campaign Mobile to create and deploy a mobile site and promotion for its upcoming production of “G”: http://www.adt.org.au

Posted by Scott Johnson, Chief Marketing Officer

We are pleased to confirm that we will be exhibiting Campaign Mobile – and the rest of the m.Net product range – at the massive ad:tech Sydney show from 12-13 March at Hilton Sydney. This show is promoted as Australia’s number 1 interactive event and it’s the place to learn from the sharpest minds in the industry.

Come to Stand 236 at ad:tech to see us put Campaign Mobile through its paces. You can register for a free pass to the exhibitor hall by clicking here.

If you are attending the conference, please ensure you attend our session on Thursday 13 March entitled Tailoring content for the mobile device (more details here). In this session we explore the changing consumer landscape and mobile-marketing best practices using the ongoing relationship with have with Warner Music and award-winning country music artist Steve Forde. This session aims to inform and entertain – see you there!

Posted by Scott Johnson, Chief Marketing Officer

m.Net is now able to offer its clients Paypal Mobile as a mobile payment method, and we have already launched our first PayPal Mobile site, Warner Music’s Steve Forde artist mobile-marketing WAP site.

With over 5 million Australian PayPal users, and as the default payment method for eBay, PayPal Mobile is not a niche opportunity.

Why am I so excited about this?

• Prior to this the only viable mass market opportunity for payments was Premium SMS. The challenge for the content owner with this method was the scale of the revenue share most telecommunication carriers require for these services. With PayPal Mobile the fees are more analogous to those of a credit card which potentially means a cheaper product for the mobile consumer and more revenue to the content owner.
• Premium SMS really only worked for digital goods for the mobile (e.g. ringtones, wallpapers, games) since the product delivery was to the handset. The benefit of PayPal is that a real-world delivery address is stored for purchases, so users don’t have to attempt to type an address using predictive text and a small phone keyboard. You can pay for physical goods now via your phone using PayPal Mobile with the knowledge that they will be delivered to your preferred delivery address.

It is very early days but this is development in mobile payments is encouraging for both consumers and retailers.

Posted by Scott Johnson, Chief Marketing Officer

Today sees a really big milestone for m.Net and marks a huge leap forward for web developers and digital agencies. Today we launch the Campaign Mobile Public Beta – www.campaignmobile.com.

Campaign Mobile is a complete online mobile marketing platform for web developers and digital agencies. We have worked closely with a national group of web developers and agencies via an extensive alpha and private beta programme, and the beta launched today is the culmination of extensive market research and direct client trials.

So what makes Campaign Mobile special?

It is a completely online product easily accessible using a Web browser. Mobile marketing is now easier than ever before thanks to Campaign Mobile’s template-driven generation of mobile websites, mobile coupons, broadcast SMS campaigns, web triggers, and opt-in databases.

Mobile campaigns can be created, deployed and optimised quickly and easily. A basic web-to-mobile or SMS campaign can be created and deployed in under ten minutes. No mobile development expertise is required – so developers and agencies can focus on the important aspects of creative expression and campaign planning, confident that the technology is covered by Campaign Mobile. Our mobile device profiling technology is fully integrated into the platform, enabling campaign delivery in 170 countries and territories to over 6,500 mobile devices.

Today we have kicked off a (primarily) online and mobile marketing campaign promoting our initial offer of “one month free including an initial credit of 100 SMS messages”.

This is just the beginning. We will be rolling out new features and functions based on market research and direct feedback from our customer base.

Posted by Horden Wiltshire, Chief Executive Officer

m.Net was pleased to be ranked number 5 in the Deloitte Australian Fast 50 awards announced last week and we were particularly pleased to be ranked number 1 in South Australia. To anyone thinking of joining m.Net: all I can say is we don’t expect things to slow down any time soon!

One of the interesting things to note from the awards was that of the ten fastest-growing companies in Australia three were mobile companies. The Rising Star award was also won by another mobile player (Amethon Solutions) providing further evidence of the opportunities in the mobile space.

So have we peaked and will we see the number of mobile players experiencing higher rates of growth plateau, or does the mobile industry still have a long way to run? Of course the reason we are in this business is because we think the latter but there is plenty of evidence to support this view.

If you have been following this blog you will be familiar with the concept of the off-deck tipping point. Scott, Marisa, and I have talked about the factors that impact on the ubiquitous uptake of mobile services that are outside the carrier portals. With data prices coming down, carrier portals opening up, and almost 50% of consumers now with a 3G phone in Australia the only factor remaining is user behaviour. All the signs are positive that customers are becoming more familiar with off deck services but it is still early days and we see plenty of growth over the next 3-5 years. Outside of North Asia, Australia has one of the higher adoption rates of 3G services because of the early launch of the services by “3″ in 2003 and the aggressive rollout of 3G by the country’s largest carrier, Telstra.

In my view Australia will reach the off-deck tipping point before many other countries in the world, which means we still have a few years until the global tipping point is reached. As we look to opportunities in global markets for new services we hope that there will many years in the Deloitte Fast 50 ahead!

This year Australia’s prestigious B&T Awards feature a new category of “Digital Services Company of the Year”. This category is intended to recognise the work of companies in the new media sector–including search-marketing specialists, web-build firms, and digital-design agencies. The award will recognise the winning company’s successes in the last 12 months, its contribution to growing the new media industry of Australia or New Zealand, and innovation within the market.

B&T has had a record number of entries to the awards this year… and m.Net is shortlisted in the new category. Go m.Net!

Posted by Scott Johnson, Chief Marketing Officer

Australians (unlike our US counterparts) are not known for having a coupon-clipping culture. Sure we have “shopper dockets”, some specials arrive in the mailbox from time to time for pizza, and we have been trained to keep our grocery receipts to get discount fuel… but responding to such offers is not ingrained in our behaviour.

This may be changing through new advertising products available now on mobile devices. m.Net is increasingly providing mobile coupon solutions for clients seeking to drive foot traffic in store and to close the loop on their advertising in other media.

So what is a mobile coupon? Generally it is a mobile Internet (WAP) site that is only one page in depth. It typically contains the logo of the product, some imagery and copy on the offer and where to redeem it, and in some cases a unique number or identifier. Some recent examples driven out of print executions are shown below.

So why are leading advertisers experimenting with mobile coupons?

1. In Australia this is a mass-market opportunity. Just about all consumers have a mobile phone
2. It’s personal. Advertisers depending on their opt-in database or the call to action on surrounding media can profile and target the offer to the consumer.
3. It is not intrusive. In most forms that m.Net executes for brands, the consumer requests the coupon by texting a keyword to a premium number, so the consumer is requesting this coupon.
4. For FMCG it can reduce switch selling at the point of sale. The consumer goes into the store armed with a rich photo of the product for instant identification.
5. It drives traffic in store to redeem the offer and can be tracked for campaign effectiveness.

So what is in it for consumers?

1. It is not spam or junk mail; the customer requests it by texting in for the offer.
2. It is more portable; it is always with the customer as a bookmark or a link in an SMS message.

Posted by Horden Wiltshire, Chief Executive Officer

I spoke recently at the latest in the Mobile Mondays series of events hosted by South Australia’s Mobile Entertainment Growth Alliance (mEga|SA) and the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association (AIMIA).

I spoke in an informal setting to the attendees regarding the tipping point for off-deck mobile services – those mobile services that you don’t get through your carrier’s portal. The meeting was well-supported and it’s good to see that the Adelaide mobile scene is alive and well.

The basis of the presentation was discussion of the factors that I think are required to get to the tipping point for the use of off-deck services… to get to the point where these services become ubiquitous. The factors in my opinion are:

• Data Pricing
• Carrier Access
• User Behaviour
• Uptake of 3G

Marisa Maio Mackay will provide some updates in future blog entries regarding consumer behaviour and Scott Johnson posted recently about the uptake of 3G in Australia. Scott estimates the penetration in Australia at around 22% and Marisa’s research with the AIMIA Australian Mobile Phone Lifestyle Index revealed that 30% of respondents had a 3G phone. (The discrepancy can be explained by the fact that some people have more than one phone).

I think one of the most important trends is the move towards capped data plans. If you look at the casual rates for data roaming on your phone with Australia’s two largest carriers, Telstra and Optus, users are still paying more than $15 per megabyte. However, if you look at the top plans for each of the carriers the price comes down quite dramatically.

• Vodafone: $2.99 per MB ($15 plan)
• Telstra: $0.41 per MB ($29 plan)
• Optus: $0.29 per MB ($30 plan)
• Hutchison: $0.02 per MB ($40 plan)

But what does 1MB on your phone get you? Here is a summary of some of m.Net’s client WAP sites and their sizes:

So 1 MB of data will get you 250 m.Net pages, 60 Nokia pages and 40 Home and Away pages. When you are paying 2c per MB that’s pretty close to free for each page! When all the carriers are at that price point we will indeed have reached the tipping point as far as data pricing is concerned.