Big Brand Conference Provided Learnings For SMBs

There were just as many lessons for SMBs as megabrands at the recent CEO/CMO Summit http://www.mmaglobal.com/events/ceosummit/2014/agenda staged by the Mobile Marketing Association.

Sure, there was discussion that was irrelevant to small businesses, such as Hilton’s mission of trying six mobile tactics over the course of a year knowing that “three or four things will work. One will be OK. One will be a learning.”

I don’t know even one SMB that is doing six things in mobile. And that's a good thing.

Andrew Flack, Hilton Worldwide’s Vice President Product Marketing & Customer Insights made a comment about mobile that is true for businesses of all sizes -- “be prepared to not be perfect.” Rather, savvy SMBs are integrating mobile to make their operations more efficient.

Manish Gupta, Executive Vice President and General Manager, OPEN Products at American Express, said that SMBs should focus on “incremental benefits” that mobile brings to their businesses. An example was a photo-taking tool that enables SMBs to save time by easily building expense reports tied to QuickBooks.

Gupta reminded the audience that some small business owners are slow to adopt, and that it’s important to “think of consumer behavior and not just do mobile for mobile’s sake.” While computer penetration is short of 100 percent, 98 percent of SMBs use some sort of mobile technology.

“Almost two-thirds think of it as an imperative,” he remarked. These companies view mobile as an “equalizer”, and a “traffic driver”, even when employing the least “sexy” mobile product – text messaging.

Two companies, Perry Ellis and Cosi, spoke of the success of SMS programs. In fact, Perry Ellis believe so much in building a database via text that it has sales associates proactively going down store aisles to ask shoppers to opt-in for offers and other information.

Justin Roisman, Head of Mobile Strategies, Perry Ellis, said that it often takes 8-10 emails for a customer to convert.

“It’s a much shorter time with text,” he told the audience.

Cosi, primarily a sandwich shop, uses SMS to get people to come into the locations at times when business is slow, including mid-afternoons.

Marc Lapides, Cosi Director of Marketing, shared that the next phase of growth is in segmentation. When applied, Lapides said that Cosi would no longer send an SMS offer to a consumer who already was going to buy lunch there. Instead, deals would go to those who are visit infrequently.

SMBs have all sorts of ways to get into text messaging. Often the easiest is to work with a radio station to reach listeners and to use the station’s short code which saves them time and money. As mobile evolves, the adaption of mobile practices, particularly for SMBs, expands with it. 

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This post was brought to you by IBM for Midsize Business and opinions are my own. To read more on this topic, visit  IBM's Midsize Insider. Dedicated to providing businesses with expertise, solutions and tools that are specific to small and midsized companies, the Midsize Business program provides businesses with the materials and knowledge they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - Why Giving Your Spouse A Certain Fitness Band Can Get You In Trouble

A fitness band "that publicly shames the slacking user", huh? Here's my advice - don't give the Pavlok to your spouse or significant other.

A New York ice cream shop sees 5% of sales via mobile payments. And growth isn’t dripping in.

A study finds that half of Verizon customers are paying more than $100 a month with 14% above $200.

The first Instagram photo, posted four years ago this month, was of a happy dog. Then the service got legs.

Meanwhile, the inspiration for Pinterest was a collection of bugs.

eBay says that it sells 12,000-15,000 autos per week via mobile.

8:06 AM is when the majority of log-ins to mobile banking occur, as people start their day with a check of account balances.

Sandwich shop Cosi spends 30-40% of its marketing dollars on mobile, primarily to “solve problems” including traffic beyond the lunch hour.

Hilton has formed a Suggests Team of front line and other employees empowered to interact with consumers in real time.

Some Hilton properties view customer feedback via mobile as “terrifying”, according to an executive who spoke at the CEO/CMO Summit.

Hilton spends 6% of its marketing dollars on mobile, well above the norm.

An ad says that you can get Gogo Internet for the price of a coffee. Lies now?

Engagement, not ‪mobile bookings, is supposedly most important to ‪Priceline. Of course, one should lead to the other.

AT&T’s emerging devices head says to expect ‘fully independent’ wearables this year. Likely, but the carriers will push bundles hard.

Theme park visitors are ditching maps for apps? What's a map?

Google has reportedly banned this question in interviews: explain a database in three sentences to your 8-yr-old nephew? I know marketers who can't handle this one.

Steve Jobs supposedly recruited a hardware designer with this -- "Everything you've done in your life is sh*t”. The guy went to work for Jobs at Apple.

When Closeness Via Mobile Is Too Close

In a subway car or on a mobile device, there is getting close. And there’s getting too close.

It didn’t have the stench or uneasy feeling of that “Close Encounter of the D Train” kind, but a moment at this week’s CEO/CMO Summit put on by the Mobile Marketing Association had even the hardened of marketers turning up their noses.

xAd took to the stage to unveil a new product that gets marketers to “the intersection of places and people.” Within Footprints, we can see a real-time map showing where consumers are. An example used showed how a toothpaste brand can serve up an ad to someone that it knows at the dentist’s office.

There was significant pushback during the presentation and afterward with several noting that a dentist’s visit is off limits for brands even if the technology is there to reach out to a mobile user before, during or after a deep clean or root canal. 

The topics of privacy, permission and personalization led if you gauged the 2 ½ day conference in Hilton Head on time spent.

Already a leader in mobile interaction, ESPN sought answers as to whether it could – or should – seek to opt fans in for the short term when they enter a ballpark. Benefits could include access to exclusive content, upgrades to seats, and meet and greets with announcers, among other things. This one seemed easy to answer – why not?

Some in attendance lamented the lack of cookies in mobile. Cameron Clayton of The Weather Company (formerly The Weather Channel) said that location is “like a mobile cookie”. But he admitted that many consumers appreciate the absence of cookies and don’t believe that giving up one’s location to get local weather gives license to advertisers. The company gets thousands of complaints a day from those offended by ads tied to location.

Martin Cooper, called “the father of mobile” for his invention of the first cellphone, said that we’re headed for the ultimate in personalization.

“In health care, instead of curing disease, we should be preventing disease,” Cooper told us. “The annual physical exam is essentially worthless because there is no baseline. Soon we’ll be able to have a physical examination every minute and anticipate a disease before it happen.

“In a few years, we’ll be able to sense a few cancer cells in the body and zap them before the cancer spreads. Every disease will be curable.”

Whether that personalization comes through wearables remains to be seen.

Earlier at the event, Pebble’s head of partnerships and business development made an unconvincing argument for the need for wearables today.

Said Asad Iqbal: “You cannot expect consumers to always be engaged on their mobile device.”

That was a head-scratch for me given smartphone stats and consumer behavior. Pebble’s premise for a wearable came off as a luxury, giving users redundant access and speed when it may not be needed.

On Twitter, a reaction to Iqbal’s comments was that wearables don’t, at least for now, solve a problem.

The MMA opened the conference by teasing the notion that a 16% share of the marketing spend for mobile could bring companies like Coca-Cola an additional $1 billion in market cap. Most brands spend in the single digits and have yet to be convinced that more is justified.

Still, we learned lots from major brand marketers.

Addressing questions about the ROI on mobile, Andrew Flack, Hilton Worldwide’s Vice President - Product Marketing & Customer Insights, said that just as Hilton knew when it was time to put TV’s and air conditioning in rooms, it knows that “now is the time for mobile.”

Flack’s advice? “Be prepared to not be perfect. In a year, three or four things will work. One will be OK. One will be a learning.”

Also, contrary to what one might expect, there was extensive talk about success through text messaging (Perry Ellis and Cosi were the most vocal) and nary a mention of beacons.

While not smelling like a rose, mobile’s future seemed brighter than when we got on planes traveling to Hilton Head.

(article first appeared on Mobile Marketer - http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/opinion/columns/18245.html)

Tackling The Real Problems

The courageous woman who escaped oppressive China to revolutionize 3D printing for the good of mankind and the surfer-looking gentleman who runs Not Impossible Labs and puts arms on children’s war-torn bodies are the ones who are changing the world.

What about the rest of us, who attended this week’s CEO/CMO Summit put on by the Mobile Marketing Association?

We’re tackling “problems” such as scale, attribution, privacy and the marketing spend mix.

Talk about a reality check.

Sure, what we’re doing is important. Billions, eventually trillions, of dollars hang in the balance. As marketers, we need to get this mobile thing right.

But we are not Ping Fu, who co-founded Geomagic, a revolutionary 3D software company. Ping knows a level of resilience that is off the charts. Nor are we Mick Ebeling, who won’t leave a room until a seemingly insurmountable challenge is solved — like creating affordable and nearly instant prosthetics for kids.

The talks by Ping and Ebeling hushed a room of more than 200 marketers, publishers and others. Their stories are etched in our minds.

Around them, we batted around ways to get “closer to the consumer” via mobile.

Here’s some of what I found interesting:

- My belief going into the conference is that we’re in the first inning of one-to-one marketing. At best, we are doing one-to-a-list of opt-ins. Same offer to everyone. But what if I don’t like meatball sandwiches and realize that you don’t know or care about me if you send me deals on those.

Where personal got off the track at the event in Hilton Head is when xAd showed a new tool that can tell marketers when a mobile user is at the dentist. The idea is to be able to send a toothpaste ad at the right time and place. Even the more hardened marketers in the room were taken aback by the perceived invasion of privacy.

- On a similar note, we lamented the lack of cookies in mobile. Cameron Clayton of The Weather Company (formerly The Weather Channel) said that location is “like a mobile cookie.”.But he admitted that many consumers appreciate the absence of cookies and don’t believe that giving up one’s location to get local weather gives license to advertisers. The company gets thousands of complaints a day from those offended by ads tied to location.

- The MMA opened the conference by teasing the notion that a 16% share of marketing spend for mobile could bring companies like Coca-Cola an additional $1 billion in market cap. Most brands spend in the single digits and have yet to be convinced that more is justified.

- Addressing questions about the ROI on mobile, Andrew Flack, Hilton Worldwide’s vice president - product marketing and customer insights, said that just as Hilton knew when it was time to put TVs and air conditioning in rooms, it knows that “now is the time for mobile.” Flack’s advice? “Be prepared to not be perfect. In a year, three or four things will work. One will be OK. One will be a learning.”

- Contrary to what you might expect, there was extensive talk about success through text messaging (Perry Ellis and Cosi were the most vocal) and nary a mention of beacons.

- Long considered a hot sector, it was brought up investment banker Tim Kawaja of Luma Partners that only seven of the last 110 mobile acquisitions were deals of  $100 million or more: “It has been a horrific investment category — a disaster.” Kawaja brought frowns to the mobile ad crowd in the audience by saying that marketing and content, not advertising on the small screen, is what’s meaningful.

Despite Kawaja’s words — it’s not the first time that many of us have heard sobering comments from a banker — no one left the event feeling defeated. Ping and Ebeling equipped us with lessons that while nothing is easy, anything is possible.

(article first appeared on MediaPost - http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/230109/tackling-the-real-problems.html?edition=74483)