1020 Placecast

Location, Permission, and Receptivity

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 11:33:21 -0700

The San Jose Business Journal’s recent “unscientific” study reported that significant number of their readers weren’t receptive to location-based mobile ads when the sharing of their location wasn’t voluntary. About 39% of readers “hate it,” and others prefer to be “off the radar” altogether, voicing concerns about privacy and sharing personal information without their explicit permission.

Exactly. In contrast, consumers who opt-in to services that provide them with valuable offers and information, without broadcasting their location to others, are actually comfortable sharing some of their location information. Data from studies that Placecast has done with consumers in location-based mobile programs with retail brands shows receptivity to sharing location when users have voluntarily given permission and deemed it useful. When users choose to opt-in and agree to share their location, the exchange of value becomes positive—about 80% of users we surveyed responded favorably to using their location to increase relevance for text alert offers and information.

For the full SJ Business Journal article, click here:

Few in poll like location-based mobile ads

eMarketer: Targeting Parents with Mobile Alerts

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:15:13 -0700

Last week, eMarketer presented a comprehensive look at our data related to the rising interest in mobile marketing offers among parents, and concluded that “While the mobile market will be shifting toward more sophisticated forms of advertising as smartphone penetration increases, with feature phones currently in the hands of 69% of US subscribers, according to Nielsen, SMS campaigns still have the biggest reach.” eMarketer also highlighted the increased interest in the types of coupons and promotions among parents looking to save money.

Click here to read the full article:

Targeting Parents with Mobile Alerts

Mobile Marketing Gains More Traction with Busy Parents

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 15:03:00 -0700

Following up on our recent webinar on location and mobile marketing, we released part two of our findings with Harris Interactive this week. Not surprisingly, receptivity to location-based mobile communications is scaling quickly when this type of marketing appropriated for usefulness, convenience, and relevance—most notably with consumers for whom time and resources are at a premium: parents.

Women, especially between the ages of 35-54, are rapidly embracing mobile phones as a way to organize and simplify their lives, and both moms and dads tend to be more in tune with mobile promotions, having shown a higher response in signing up for deals through sites like Groupon.

The response to queries about the importance of cell phones increased notably for users with children in a household, which means that brands not yet embracing location-based SMS marketing have opportunities to create strategic programs to deliver promotions and information to this demographic when and where this content is needed. And while apps with location components continue to grow and be helpful, text messaging scales more quickly in terms of importance to consumers and ease of use when juggling the logistics surrounding family, school, work, and activities.

For the full report, please visit our research portal.

How Mobile Text Alerts and Location Affect Consumer Retail Behavior

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 15:40:46 -0700

Placecast teamed up with Mobile Marketer this week to present How Mobile Text Alerts and Location Affect Consumer Retail Behavior, a webinar outlining our findings from the research we conducted with the Harris Poll and directly with participants in ShopAlerts programs we created for REI, Sonic, The North Face, and American Eagle Outfitters. Following up on our recent press release about our Harris Interactive Data findings, this webinar offered a forum for discussion and exchange with brands and mobile marketers around lessons learned and emerging best practices for location-based programs. We also covered location-based mobile recruitment strategies and methods for increasing the relevancy of messages and measuring purchase behavior.

With texting and mobile devices becoming a primary mode of communication across all audiences, from teens and busy parents to savvy shoppers, there is growing consumer interest in receiving specific promotions and mobile content tied to interests and location. While consumers cited special offers and promotions as most appealing, a significant percentage also noted that even if they didn’t purchase an exact item promoted in a message, text alerts served as reminders to visit the brand’s store/website for other items and content, helping to increase awareness, build brand loyalty, and stimulate engagement.

The full archived webinar can be accessed here

For a copy of the webinar deck in PDF format, email us at webinar@placecast.net

Internet Retailer: Mobile alerts get young women into stores—where some even buy

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 15:14:30 -0700

Internet Retailer’s article about Placecast’s research with Harris Interactive regarding the impact of location-based mobile marketing…

“Location-based mobile alerts have led a third of women 18 to 34 to visit a store, according to a recent survey. And 27% of that demographic said that mobile messages have impacted their decision to buy in a physical store.

The poll, conducted from May 17 to19, surveyed 2,046 U.S. adults 18 and older, including 1,710 who own a cell phone and/or a smartphone. It was conducted by Harris Interactive and commissioned by location-based ad company Placecast. It studied opt-in mobile marketing messages only….”

Click here to read the full article:

Mobile alerts get young women into stores—where some even buy

The Alert Shopper II: New Harris Interactive Data on Mobile Marketing Alerts

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 09:16:00 -0700

Today Placecast announced the release of our second wave of research conducted by Harris Interactive that dives deeper into consumer receptivity to opt-in mobile marketing and the potential impact for retailers. Overall, consumer receptivity to opt-in mobile marketing is growing, as is its ability to increase intent to visit stores. One-third of Americans who currently have signed up for mobile marketing alerts indicate that such services impact their decision to go into stores and 27% report that mobile programs have impacted their decision to buy products in physical retail locations. (Please click here to request more information covered in this study).

During the summer of 2009, we conducted the first survey on location-based mobile marketing and advertising, which forms the baseline for this research. Since that first survey, we have seen that overall consumer interest in such programs increased with ‘somewhat interested’ consumers growing by 2 percent to 28% of all cell phone owners. As in the first survey, interest is most pronounced among the youngest cell phone owners: 42% of those ages 18–34 are at least somewhat interested. Interest grew 6 points to 40% among women ages 18–34 from the survey conducted in 2009. Interest levels between men and women are now about equal overall.

Consumers vote with their stomachs

Groceries (68%), national restaurant chains (64%), and fast-food items (50%) took three of the top four most popular segments for those who are at least somewhat receptive to overall opt-in mobile marketing, with a host of other categories also seeing strong interest.

Women skewed higher than men when it came to interest in offers/promotions for groceries and apparel, while men skewed higher in interest for electronics and sporting goods products:

Texting significantly more valued than app-based services

One of the most interesting data points in this study across all cell phone owners is the importance of texting: it is still an overwhelmingly popular activity on mobile vs. other activities. An average of 40% of all cell phone owners say that texting is “extremely” or “very important” to them. Even with the buzz of services like Foursquare and Gowalla, only 7% of men and 3% of women showed the same level of interest in these types of social networks.

With check-in services only available on smart phones (which comprise roughly 21% of all mobile phones in the U.S.), reach for marketers through these platforms is still a question. Furthermore, both consumers and marketers see texting as similar mechanisms to email, which has made a substantial impact on purchase behavior— both online and in brick-and-mortar stores. Incorporating location—the ability to make messages even more relevant based on where users are and when they are there—is consistently seen as a valuable service by consumers and is easy for marketers to execute at scale.

Methodology

This survey was conducted online within the United States by Harris Interactive on behalf of Placecast from May 17–19, 2010 among 2,046 U.S. adults ages 18+, of whom 1,710 own a cell phone and/or a smartphone. For complete survey methodology, including weighting variables, please contact us here.

Location and the Local Ad Market Opportunity

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 13:41:03 -0700

As check-in and other location apps and services get a lot of press, once again the possibility of successfully tapping the $23 billion local ad market using mobile is becoming a very real opportunity. Location is emerging as the key to relevance on mobile, but as both consumers and small businesses are finding, location relevance at scale is much more difficult than a simple click to check in. Just because a smartphone has a GPS on it doesn’t mean that whatever marketing a user receives on it is automatically relevant (not to mention trying to run these programs with the 193 million Americans using feature phones).

Consistently delivering location relevance at scale on mobile requires the ability to solve for several different challenges simultaneously, most notably:

•    Correct location data – as our prior post points out, this is a somewhat arcane plumbing issue, but one that is the first critical piece in being able to return relevant content and offers to a user based on place and time. And on mobile, nothing is worse than having your phone point you to something nearby, only to find that the business no longer exists or has moved.
•    Manage content attached to locations – making decisions on the fly about what relevant content or advertising to send a consumer based on place and time requires having the updated content to deliver. A robust content management system specifically focused on managing locations can pull user reviews and pictures, venue information, events nearby, discount or coupon codes tied to a specific location, check-ins and even traffic or weather to make the experience relevant.
•    Campaign management for location – for any mobile marketing program to be relevant, it must deliver authenticated geo-targeting (to ensure that a consumer doesn’t check-in from across town), frequency capping (so that a user never sees the same ad twice), and even CRM or behavioral targeting data dynamically mapped into a marketing message or ad unit (think of adding the nearest retail location or a favorite product category automatically to a message sent by a brand) – as part of each and every program.

When any one (or more) of these pieces are missing from a solution, location relevance falls apart. And while an irrelevant Starbucks ad may simply be annoying, for a sole proprietor with a small marketing budget, the inability to correctly attach and delivery their marketing dollars to a nearby user who is interested is a non-starter.

The good news is that small businesses are more rapidly embracing location-based tools, and the potential is very real. Lots of recent data indicates that small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are crafting location-oriented offerings: more than 90% are also on Facebook and Twitter, 80% have claimed their Google Place Page, 40% use Yahoo Local, and almost 20% use Microsoft’s Bing Maps for marketing outreach. And Google has certainly taken note, rebranding its local business center as Places and offering small businesses $25 fixed price listings. Can Twitter be far behind, now that they are publishing venues with each tweet? Certainly, there is an opportunity for them to copy Google’s Place Pages and aggregate location-based inventory for both monetization and search capabilities.

From a consumer perspective, there is no doubt that that the interest level is high. Some of Yelp’s iPhone stats are astonishing when it comes to location, including half a million calls and a million point-to-point directions to local businesses generated directly from the iPhone App. A next major move we can expect to see is mobile developers aggregating continuously-updated and correct location content from many different sources to create a genuinely relevant experience for consumers. This and the tools described above create the tipping point for local marketing dollars to flow into the location-based space.

For more interesting reading on this topic, check out:

Twitter: The Local Monetization Strategy

Foursquare’s Starbucks Mistake: Five Ways Foursquare Advertising Is Getting Less Interesting

Only 10% of Businesses Would Pay for Foursquare: Survey

Yelp Stats Show iPhone App Usage Staggeringly Deeper Than Website

Location Silos and Open Databases of Places: The Buzz Around Location Data Management

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:18:06 -0700

The tech trades are beginning to fill with treatises and musings on the topic of location data. From the emerging silos between location data providers (Location 2012: Death Of The Information Silos) to calls for an Open Database of Places, what’s clear is that making the mobile experience relevant for where a consumer is and when they are there is vastly more difficult than just getting a GPS fix from a phone.

Take for example the silos problem – in essence, the creation of walled location data-gardens with no interoperability across location-based services. “Why doesn’t Plancast know that I’ve been to Starbucks on Tripit…” and other more humorous views on the topic highlight the problems that result from attempting to aggregate different location-based services into a unified consumer experience in the physical world. While it should be simple, the many different ways of expressing places in the world make this a very complicated problem.

Reviews on Yelp!, social plans on Plancast, rewards on Foursquare, my fan pages on Facebook and the folks I’m following on Twitter—all referring loosely to the same places (but with different ways of referring to those places)—should be brought together in a way that works seamlessly and is updated in real time on my phone… Yet a simple example from New York City highlights one of the many problems with location data and actually doing this: “1 Bryant Park”, “1095 Avenue of the Americas,” and “Aureole Restaurant – 135 W. 42nd Street” are all in the same building, but which one do I check-into? Alternatively, if Starbucks wants to attach a mobile coupon or offer to a store in this building, they need to associate it correctly with that store location, regardless of how it is referred to across many different applications (from Foursquare to Facebook to Plancast), which may all have a different ways of identifying this particular location.

The oft-touted solution to this problem is the creation of a universal database of places to which all LBS companies can contribute. While this altruistic approach makes sense in theory, unfortunately location data is not like open-source software: not everyone participating in the location ecosystem will benefit. Smaller companies with unique location data do not get anything out of sharing it—and the ambition of some of the larger players in our space pushing their unique ID systems is an attempt at locking developers into their content so that we all have to work through them for monetization.

So until the ideal universal database emerges, Placecast has taken a different approach. We’ve opened access to our platform to share tools for cleaning and managing location data (which solve the 1 Bryant Park and Starbucks problems described above) through our free MatchAPI solution. As part of MatchAPI, publishers and developers can share their location data with one another by simply matching their IDs—not giving away their unique content.

At the end of the day, what we should all be focused on is building great experiences and monetizing them—not hoarding location data. The way to achieve this is by reducing the friction that stands in the way of sharing location data, so that advertisers from large brands to neighborhood stores can deliver marketing to their customers on their phones. Sharing IDs is a simple first step.

For more interesting reading on this topic, check out:

Why check-ins and like buttons will change the local landscape by Tyler Bell
http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/05/check-ins-like-buttons-will-ch.html

Location 2012: Death Of The Information Silos by Robert Scoble in Techcrunch:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/03/location-2012/

It’s Time For An Open Database Of Places by Erik Schoenfeld also in Techcrunch
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/17/open-database-places/

Eddy’s Sofa And The Nightmare Of A Single Global Places Register posted by Gary Gale
http://opengeodata.org/eddys-sofa-and-the-nightmare-of-a-single-glob

Placecast’s ShopAlerts Picks Up Fifth Award Distinction of the Year: Official Honoree of 2010 Webby Awards

Tue, 04 May 2010 12:22:50 -0700

Placecast is excited to announce that the company has been named a Webby Award Official Honoree. The 14th Annual Webby Awards received nearly 10,000 entries from all 50 states and over 60 countries worldwide. The Webby Awards are considered the Internet’s most respected symbol of success. As an Honoree in the “Best Use of GPS or Location Technology” category, Placecast remains a leader in the field, a company whose work has included creating the concept and phrase “geo-fence marketing.”

Webby Award winners are chosen by the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences, a global organization whose members include David Bowie, Harvey Weinstein, Arianna Huffington, Matt Groening, Internet inventor Vinton Cerf, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Virgin Group Chairman Richard Branson, and R/GA Chairman and CEO Bob Greenberg.

Past Webby Award Winners have included industry leaders such as Amazon.com, eBay, Yahoo!, iTunes, Google, FedEx, BBC News, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, NPR, Salon Magazine, Facebook, Meetup, Wikipedia, Flickr, ESPN, Comedy Central, PBS and The Onion News Network.

“Retailers are looking for innovative ways to use emerging forms of technology to drive in-store traffic. Our ShopAlerts service is an excellent example of mobile marketing and advertising driving ROI in an innovative and relevant way for consumers and the brands they love,” says Alistair Goodman, CEO of Placecast.

Being named a Webby Award Official Honoree is the fifth award distinction that Placecast has won this year.

The company won The BIG Minute of Innovation, led by the San Francisco Bay Area Interactive Group (SFBIG), a non-profit professional association dedicated to championing innovation in digital marketing, and sponsored by dmg world media. Placecast was selected as number one out of fifteen companies presenting for their location-based mobile marketing service.

Placecast’s ShopAlerts service took home the top prize for innovation given by the National Retail Federation, the 2010 RACie award, as the company showed that consumers and brands like the North Face, Sonic and American Eagle are embracing opt-in location-based mobile marketing.

Additionally, ShopAlerts was selected as a finalist in the 2010 Global Mobile Awards announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain earlier this year. Most recently, Placecast was named a CTIA E-Tech Award finalist in the category of Enterprise & Vertical Market Solution – Mobile Marketing or Advertising.

Research Report: Retail Goes Mobile

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 15:10:52 -0700

Today, we announced the release of a report titled “Retail Goes Mobile: Finding New Consumer Connections Through Mobile Devices” by Kathryn Koegel, President of Primary Impact Research. The report focuses on the latest research on mobile marketing within the retail sector.

This report reflects the next installment of our research, focused on helping marketers navigate the mobile landscape and develop strategies for connecting with consumers. This report which pulls together a cross-section of insights from the Harris Poll, Nielsen, comScore and TNS, as well as research from our own mobile programs, paints an exciting picture about the opportunity for mobile marketing in 2010.

With Apple’s recent announcements of the iPad and iAd, marketers everywhere are now more focused than ever on mobile. For retailers in particular, 2010 is clearly the year that they are universally testing this medium because of the uniquely personal, always on characteristics of the phone. From location-based SMS, WAP banners and text links, branded apps or ads in applications, retailers are now recognizing the power that the mobile device can have in driving traffic into physical stores.

We’ve been learning through our experience with brands and our consumer research, that place and time are a powerful predictor of consumer intent. As consumers, where we are and when we’re there says a lot about what we are interested in. Combining mobile and location can enable marketers to deliver a message when the consumer is in the mindset to take action: in research we conducted through the holiday season with three brands, 65% of consumers that opted-in to follow a brand made a purchase as a result of receiving messages based on place and time. In essence, location and time are the physical manifestation of purchase intent.

With 224 million mobile users engaged in texting, SMS has emerged as “the only form of mobile marketing to reach the entire mobile universe.” According to a Harris Poll consumer survey conducted on behalf of Placecast, 45% of 18-34 year-olds and 35% of 35-44 year olds were interested in receiving opt-in mobile alerts.

“Mobile phones now have consumer penetration rates that surpass the Internet, and marketers need to grasp the implications of ‘go-anywhere media,’ which is what mobile phones represent,” says Kathryn Koegel, who lead this research project. “Consumers use their phones to do everything from research products to check competitor retail pricing – even from within store locations,” she continues.

The full “Retail Goes Mobile” report is available here.

Opening the Placecast Match API

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 11:32:14 -0700

April 1, 2010

Placecast has spent nearly five years building a platform that resolves the problems of delivering location-based programs at scale, and introducing ways to monetize them. Yesterday we opened up some of that functionality for free to the LBS ecosystem - our MatchAPI - in the hopes that everyone working on the challenges of location-based offerings can focus on generating revenue from location-based services as we will all benefit from attracting marketing spend to the space.

The explosive adoption of smartphones over the past year (Thank you, Steve Jobs) has kicked-off a wave of innovation in the area of location-based offerings, specifically in mobile. We are so excited at the prospects for everyone in the ecosystem to bring new products and services to consumers and brands – 2010 really is “The year of mobile…” in that we are finally seeing mainstream adoption by marketers, even if it is still in its infancy.

One of the first building blocks – part of the plumbing – of generating revenue from location-based offerings is the ability for everyone in the ecosystem to seamlessly identify places on the planet. While on the surface this appears to be a pretty straightforward exercise, when you dig deeper, you discover (as many of the LBS start-ups are learning) that it can actually be a frustrating, time-consuming problem because there are so many different ways to refer to a place.

One approach to solving this problem is to try and establish a standard referencing scheme. At Placecast, we took a different approach, realizing that standards are hard to achieve in a newly emerging industry. The reality is that different companies will want to keep their different ways of referencing locations – and that should be OK.

The Placecast Match API is a free tool that enables location content providers and location-based application developers to refer to a location in any number of ways, and validate that those references resolve to one true location on the planet. It resolves two basic problems of working with large location-based data sets:

First, it disambiguates addresses - identifying all of the different ways to express the address of a location, and verifying that those different expressions refer to the same place on the planet. So a social check-in app, for example, can de-duplicate the many different ways their users might refer to the places where they are spending time.

Second, it maps all the relevant IDs from different content providers to that same place on the planet, so that it is always referred to correctly by any other system. Here, a content provider aggregating from many different sources can reconcile the different references to the same places in their system.

Best of all, LBS companies do not need to adopt a new location referencing system – they can keep whatever they have. We’ve been using this system for over a year now and pressure-tested it with millions of records worldwide. We hope anyone who uses it will find this a valuable contribution towards the goal of all of us monetizing our location-based offerings.

Retail Goes Mobile: Finding New Consumer Connections through Mobile Devices

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:17:40 -0700

March 18, 2010

Today, Kathryn Koegel, President of Primary Impact Research, presented the latest research on mobile marketing within the retail sector. The webinar, hosted by Placecast, gives insights into purchase behavior, media consumption, and consumer receptivity to retailers currently leveraging the always-on mobile device. The session also includes a location-based mobile case study providing data and key learning for retailers seeking to drive in-store foot traffic and sales.

View the webinar:

Retail Goes Mobile: Finding New Consumer Connections through Mobile Devices

“Retail Goes Mobile: Finding New Consumer Connections through Mobile Devices,” Free Webinar Hosted by Placecast

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:00:19 -0800

March 10, 2010

Retailers are constantly looking for ways to leverage the unprecedented access they have through an always-on device and Placecast is proud to host Kathryn Koegel, President of Primary Impact Research, as she shares valuable perspectives on how marketers can increase brand loyalty and sales with innovative mobile solutions thought a webinar open to the public.

The webinar, entitled “Retail Goes Mobile: Finding New Consumer Connections Through Mobile Devices,” focuses on the latest research on mobile marketing within the retail sector. The Placecast-hosted event is aimed at further educating retailers on how to drive in-store foot traffic and sales through mobile marketing.

“Mobile phones now have consumer penetration rates that surpass the Internet – the media force that revolutionized retail behavior in the last decade,” says Koegel. “Marketers need to grasp the implications of ‘go-anywhere media,’ which is what mobile phones represent. Consumers are using their phones to do everything from research products to check competitor retail pricing – even from within store locations,” continued Koegel. “New techniques have been developed that enable retailers to use location to increase the relevance of marketing communications. But this is also the most permission-based of all marketing disciplines, and marketers need to learn mobile best practices to ensure ongoing consumer engagement.”

“Retail Goes Mobile: Finding New Consumer Connections through Mobile Devices” will cover:

• Consumer Purchase Behavior Trends
• Media Consumption Changes: The growing shift from print to digital media with wireless access
• The Mobile Device Revolution: Is it a smartphone or a multi-media device?
• Reaching Key Demographics Through Mobile
• The Implication of Anywhere Media Driving Retail Results through Location- based Mobile Tactics

Kathryn Koegel is a noted expert in digital marketing, and has created work accepted and published by The ARF and ESOMAR. Her company, Primary Impact Research, focuses on data insight development for agencies and marketers. She is currently at work on a whitepaper called The State of Mobile Marketing: Benchmarks & Best Practices, which will be published in May.

The webinar will take place on March 18th at 12noon ET/9 am PT. Learn more at http://www.placecastwebinar.com/

Placecast Announced as Global Mobile Awards Nominee

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:16:00 -0800

January 27, 2010

Unless you have been living under a rock, you most likely know that the Mobile World Congress is happening in Barcelona next month. This congress is the forum for mobile leaders to gather, collaborate, conduct business and learn about the most cutting edge innovations of our industry. Placecast is honoured to be a part of this year’s event and we proudly announce that the SONICsignals™ program has made the shortlist in the Best Mobile Location Based Advertising Campaign category with our partner Alcatel-Lucent.

The SONICsignals™ program is a location-based mobile program powered by Placecast’s location-triggered messaging platform in conjunction with Alcatel-Lucent’s geo-fencing technology. The program enables customers to opt in to follow SONIC® and receive mobile alters containing valuable information when they are near a point of interest for the brand or an actual SONIC® location. Combining location and geo-fencing technologies with marketing intelligence creates a 1:1 relationship with customers and builds context relevancy between place and time.

The winners will be announced at the Mobile Word Congress in Barcelona, on Tuesday February 16 and we appreciate the sentiments of Rob Conway, CEO and Memeber of the Board of the GSMA:

“Our congratulations to all nominees for the Global Mobile Awards 2010. Competition for these awards is fierce, with more than 500 entries - including many of an exceptional standard - and a highly discerning independent judging panel to impress; to be shortlisted is quite and achievement. We look forward to the unveiling of the winners at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month.”

Placecast Webinar: “Innovations in Retail: Using Mobile Technology to Drive Foot Traffic and Sales”

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 16:08:00 -0800

December 18, 2009

On Tuesday December 15, Placecast hosted a webinar aimed at finding new approaches that are working for retailers to increase brand affinity and drive repeat traffic into their stores. Moderate by Janye O’Donnell, the retail reporter for USA Today and co-author of the book, Gen BuY: How Tweens, Teens and Twenty-somethings are Revolutionizing Retail, the discussion provided insights for retail marketers, agencies and mobile vendors alike.

It’s fairly safe to say that the “year of mobile” was slated to be 2007/2008/2009 and now, we’re looking to 2010. Outside of the ever-changing forecast, it remains that mobile is becoming increasingly important and to frame the discussion of the webinar, panelists where asked: WHY? Jeff Montgomery, Chief Revenue Officer of 1020 Placecast, notes that retailers want to know how they can leverage the unprecedented access they have with consumers via the mobile device. One of the general themes throughout the discussion is the power in the relationship based and medium that such a personal deceive holds.

As for how do consumers view mobile marketing and what appeals vs. detracts from the experience, Kathryn Koegel, President of Primary Impact Research, shared some of her extensive research on the subject. Koegel’s observations have found that consumers are open to mobile marketing as long as two key elements are present: relevancy and opt-in. A powerful way to create relevancy is by combining the concept of location to the mix, as pointed out by Dustin Jacobsen, Technical Director for Barkley.

One of the issues with tying the power of location to mobile is scale. When asked what mobile marketing options are working at scale for retailers, right now SMS is the only channel that is doing this effectively. The cost effective medium allows you to, as Jacobsen mentioned, “start basic and utilize key learnings (that can be rolled out to additional initiatives); test, test, test!”

To hear the entire discussion, including topics such as how mobile fits into your overall marketing mix as well as what retailers are doing this well today, listen in by downloading the recording here.

Final Installment of the Alert Shopper Series 6

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 14:08:07 -0800

December 1, 2009

Timed with the official kickoff of the retail industry’s most critical period and the climax of holiday season offerings, this week marks the wrap-up of our six-part investigative series.

With our Alert Shopper in-person interviews and third-party studies, we pioneered research in retail as it relates to understanding the role of mobile in commerce and mobile advertising. Over the last few months, you met Karyn M., 52-year-old mother who depends on a few select stores to make finding same-day sales and deals easy; Anthony C., 39-year-old early adopter who researches gadget specs online before making purchases; Garrick L., 16-year-old student who doesn’t mind being interrupted to receive messages about a good sale going on; and Joni, 46-year-old mother who brings her phone with her while she’s out shopping and checks her messages throughout the shopping trip.

Our final video clip will highlight significant trends uncovered throughout our interview series: mobile devices are an integral part of consumers’ daily lifestyle, not only for everyday communication, but for research on sales and deals at stores like Levi’s, Jamba Juice, Target and Best Buy.

We also underscore precedential data from our recent Harris Interactive survey. After surveying more than 2,000 consumers, we learned there is a high interest in receiving mobile messages from consumers’ favorite establishments, especially among young consumers, ages 18 – 44. We also learned there is a strong interest among both men and women to receive opt-in mobile alerts from consumers’ favorite establishments. Among these establishments, food, entertainment and fashion top the list.

This comes as no surprise to the National Retail Federation, who reported shoppers’ destination of choice as department stores, with nearly half of shoppers over the Black Friday weekend visiting at least one department store, an approximate 13 percent increase from 2008. Electronics was a popular category this last weekend, with Best Buy reporting an increase in foot traffic over last year. Overall, 195 million consumers visited stores and websites over the weekend, 23 million more shoppers than last year.

Indeed, economic recovery is on the rise, as the four-day weekend totaled $41.2 billion, up slightly from $41 billion last year. These figures show why some retailers such as J. Crew are noticing improving demand heading into their holiday shopping season. J.Crew reported higher profit on a 14% sales increase for Q3 and American Eagle recently posted a higher quarterly profit.

A recent survey conducted by Deloitte shows mobile devices will be used more than ever this holiday shopping season. Fifty-five percent of consumers plan to use their mobile phones to search store locations; 45 percent will use their phone to research prices; 40 percent will use their phone to locate product information; and 32 percent will find discounts and coupons on their mobile phone this holiday season. Among young consumers, ages 18 to 29, mobile usage for shopping is expected to increase even more, with 4 out of 10 (39 percent) planning to use their mobile phone for holiday shopping.

Now that we know mobile devices improve consumers’ shopping experience, do consumers feel their cell phones will become even more important to them in the future? This is what we’ll explore in our final video here:

As illustrated throughout our Alert Shopper series, location and relevancy tied to place and time are become increasingly important to consumers. Mobile marketing as a service rather than an intrusion can connect consumers with the brands they love. Stay tuned for Placecast powered ShopAlerts, a service coming soon to your phone…and stores near you.

The Alert Shopper Series #5 - Teens and Mobile Marketing

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:05:13 -0800

November 3, 2009

According to a new report from Pew Internet and American Life Project, mobile phone use has climbed steadily among teens. From 2004 to 2006, mobile phone use grew from 45% to 63%, and up to 71% in early 2008. Our Alert Shopper Series #5 examines this demographic.

Our in-person interviews provide insight into teen mobile usage, receptivity to message alerts and the increasingly important role the mobile phone will play in the future for this group. The teens we surveyed depend on their mobile phones throughout the day for a variety of functions, and find themselves checking text messages or phone calls frequently.

According to a recent comScore report, the most popular mobile activity for teens is texting (74%) and instant messaging (13%). Our video interviews highlight how essential this device is to teens, and that they welcome relevant text messages and monitor for messages throughout the day. Check out Oriana, a 19-year-old who checks her text messages while she’s out shopping, and Nick, a 16-year-old who doesn’t mind being interrupted to receive a message about a good sale going on.

A new report on Nielsen Wire shows that teens are now out-pacing the growth of the total mobile online audience, and texting outpaces calls by a factor of 10x among 13 – 17 year olds. One thing is for sure: teens have their phone next to them every waking hour of the day. Check out Rashane, an 18-year-old who has her phone with her all day, even beside her bed and in the shower!

Another common thread among the teens we interviewed is their phone will become even more of an important communication tool for them in the future. Teens rely on their mobile device to stay connected and are most embracing of technological advancements – they even welcome mobile ads. According to a recent Nielsen Global Devices Insights Report, the teenage demographic group is the most accepting of mobile advertising; the acceptance rate declines as age increases.

But don’t take our word for it – see for yourself in the video below:

The Alert Shopper Series #4 - Men and Mobile

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:03:42 -0700

October 26, 2009

According to recent data released by Nielsen in 2009, close to 60 million consumers accessed the web via mobile devices in July 2009, up from 42.5 million last year. Specifically, the male mobile audience grew 26 percent of that period. Our Alert Shopper Series #4 examines this segment.

Interviews we conducted offer a window into male shopping habits, brand loyalty and how men research their purchases. Whether they’re shopping at Best Buy, Jamba Juice, Target or Levi’s, interviewees are quite savvy when it comes to combining online and mobile research into the purchase process.

It’s no surprise that many of the men we spoke to exhibit purpose driven shopping habits. Check out Travis - a 30-year old who sifts through Craigslist, eBay and used items online to find the best deals, and even researches deals on his mobile phone while he’s out shopping. Then there’s Kevin, age 23, who mentions he has a solid handle on sales and deals in stores before he goes shopping. 39-year-old Anthony bought a camera from Target after researching its specs online.

Some of those surveyed admit that occasionally, other priorities get in the way of conducting online product research. Joseph, age 31, admits that he sometimes gets backlogged on emails and this prevents him from thoroughly researching products he’d like to buy. For the busy man, a quick mobile search in store is very valuable.

In fact, according to Alert Shopper #3 and our Harris Survey on consumer preferences for mobile marketing, 51% of men ages 18 to 34 expressed some interest in receiving alerts on their phones on new deals and promotions at their favorite establishments, which is significantly higher than interest among females of the same age group (34%).

Brand loyalty also appears to be a consistent theme among the men highlighted in our series. Kevin considers himself a pretty loyal Best Buy shopper, and reports shopping there about three times a month, while Anthony admits he shops at Target about once a week.

More interesting detail can be noted in the video above.

CNBC Features Results from The Alert Shopper

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:28:39 -0700

October 19, 2009

Last week, CNBC did a story on mobile devices and shopping. It’s exciting to see much of the findings of our Harris survey included within this piece.

Click Here to read the full article.

The Alert Shopper #3 - Exclusive Harris Interactive Survey

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:49:00 -0700

October 14, 2009

Today we announced our study with Harris Interactive on Americans and location-based shopping.

The survey, which was conducted online from July 20 to July 22, 2009 among 2,029 adults ages 18 and older, measured consumer sentiment towards using mobile devices as it relates to shopping, sales promotions and impulse purchases.

Some of our key findings included:

Consumers are interested in receiving alerts on their mobile phones from brands that they care about, provided they can opt-in and the messages are relevant. The responses indicate that 42% of 18 to 34 year olds and 33% of 35 to 44 year olds expressed some interest in receiving opt-in alerts on their cell phones from their favorite establishments.

9-in-10 U.S. adults have made an impulse purchase when they were out shopping in a store based on a sale or special going on around where they were. There is an opportunity to influence impulse purchases using a mobile phone: nearly a quarter of adults owning cell phones (22%) make this type of impulse purchase at least once per week or more often. Among women with cell phones ages 18 to 44, 27% report making at least one impulse purchase a week; among men 18 - 34, this number rises to 31%.

About 2-in-5 of these adults would like to receive alerts about sales for:

-Movie/event tickets (43%)

-Weather information (39%)

-Clearance or liquidation sales (37%)

About another 3-in-10 of these adults would want to be alerted about:

-Pizza (31%)

-Clothes (30%)

-Fast food (27%)

About one quarter would want to be notified about:

-Electronics (25%)

-Music (24%)

-Happy hour specials or bar and night club offers (21%)

If you are interested in learning more about this report, please contact cynthia.levitt@placecast.net