Mobile Fix – Google; Facebook Places; and integration

In the latest Mobile Fix, Simon Andrews, founder of the full service mobile agency addictive!, talks Google and display ads; the importance of location and search; linking mobile with TV and press; and finally M&S mobile commerce…

Eric talks up mobile – again

Google’s laser focus on mobile has been covered here plenty of times, so there is not too much new in the speech this week by CEO Eric Schmidt – although he did point out that searches for Android devices tripled in the first 6 months of 2010. He reiterated their belief that mobile will be big – but counsels caution over how long it may take.

Google seems to be making efforts to drive up revenue from display, to balance out their current huge reliance on search. They are very bullish about online display, and they are confident that the majority of the ads they deliver will be over mobile.

It’s good to see Barry Saltzman back in the space with Google – we dealt with him lots back in the day when he was the first guy at DoubleClick to focus on opportunities outside the US.

Location – or how Facebook becomes essential to the retail business

A new feature from Google highlights the importance of location and search – search ads can now show the distance to the nearest stockist or dealer using the searchers gps location.

There is a great TechCrunch piece that highlights how location – in particular the scale of Facebook Places – will impact retail and enable real integration between online and offline.

In our conversations with retailers, it is this ability to link what someone does on the web with their instore behaviour that really excites – mobile becomes the key to unlocking the potential of CRM – enabling a real dialogue. And we think that the perennially unfashionable area of sales promotion (BOGOFs and instore posters don’t get may people we know excited) is about to become cool. We’re doing lots of reading about early efforts in this space as well as digging out our old Paco Underhill books.

Integration

Staying with the integration theme, we thought linking mobile with TV is interesting – but scanning a QR code on a TV screen seems to be trying too hard; wouldn’t they get similar or better results by asking people to text a short-code?

And the combination of print and iPhone looks very cool – but when you dig into it, the reader needs to go to a mobile site to play the video that completes the press ad.

Both of these will play really well in awards shows but given iPhone penetration is around 5%, you have to wonder whether enough people will bother to complete this puzzle to make the spend worthwhile. Still, people are trying to integrate mobile into their activities and that should be applauded.

Who owns the customer?

The New Yorker magazines debate with Apple over selling subscriptions rather than one off sales, demonstrates what it is that Apple have and want to keep to themselves – user data and user credit card numbers.

The ability to charge people in one click is the holy grail – and only Amazon and Apple have any real scale at the moment. Google Checkout is growing and PayPal remains strong but media players are now keen to develop a direct relationship, which is why Murdoch is so keen to get full control of Sky and extend that billing relationship to his online properties and his papers too.

Amazon are looking for ways of extending their reach too and coming soon after their Kindle play, they are now to launch an Android app-store. No one understands discovery and ecommerce better than Amazon, and if they can bring some order to the Android market, they could do really well.

Some quick pointers

We’re sort of over stats on how big mobile is – we all know its mass market and we shouldn’t need new data points to justify a mobile budget – but econsultancy’s summary is useful .

Finally, whilst lots of people talk about mobile and retail, one smart brand has gone ahead and done some experimentation – getting great learning and a real success story. That’s not mobile commerce, that M&S mobile commerce.

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