Mobile Fix – Mobile Money

Simon Andrews, founder of the full service mobile agency addictive!, on the pace of change in mobile money…

The pace of change in mobile money is unrelenting. The Barclays PingIt app now lets anyone (Barclays customer or not) download the app and create a Pingit wallet, then pay anyone up to £300 by using their mobile number. The recipient gets a text and, if they are not using Pingit gets asked to register.

It’s a good service and the built in ‘virality’ means Barclays could do really well with this. We know from our time working on HBOS that getting people to switch banks is really hard – people are more likely to divorce than change their main bank account. This could be a great customer acquisition tool for Barclays and reinforces our view that smart use of mobile can deliver real competitive advantage.

Unfortunately Barclaycard’s mobile innovation isn’t as well thought through. In an attempt to accelerate the use of NFC, Barclaycard have launched PayTag, promising to turn your mobile into a new contactless way to pay. This sounds great until you realise it’s just a slightly smaller credit card (containing a NFC chip) that you stick onto your phone. Or anything else you want to stick it onto.

We’re always pushing innovation and plan to use the card to create Umbrella Commerce. Just wave your umbrella over the McDonalds contactless reader and you can pay for your Big Mac with your brolly.

It’s rather pointless and is very similar to a US business called Bling that closed down a couple of years back. It supports our view that NFC may never take off. We heard this week that a McDonalds employee says more people attempt to pay with fake £50 notes than pay with a contactless card.

There is smart thinking going on around mobile payments and in their latest results presentation eBay CEO John Donahue talked of PayPal defining the future of money with their new initiatives. These include eBay’s version of Square and testing a service at Home Depot, where people can pay with PayPal by giving the cashier their mobile phone number and a pin code.

But consumers are still concerned over the security of mobile money and all the players need to work hard to correct this misconception. One of the advantages of the Project Oscar for the mobile operators was that their trusted brands (O2, Vodafone and Everything Everywhere) would help mobile money take off. But the initiative seems to be running into problems with the European Union.

One of the things driving mobile money is that cash is an expensive business to handle. The Canadians are about to stop making pennies as it cost 1.6 cents to make each one cent coin. And they are asking tech companies to help them create a mobile alternative.

Mobile disrupting the content business

There is no part of the content industry that isn’t thinking about whether mobile will continue the corroding effect of digital or whether it offers some light at the end of the tunnel. At the London Book Fair this week there was lots of talk about digital and mobile, but the digital zone was only 5%.

The news that Amazon now control all distribution rights for all the James Bond books came too late for the event, but there is no better indication of how the world is changing. We haven’t seen any pictures of Jeff Bezos stroking a white cat yet, but it can’t be long.

While Amazon says it will make the paperbacks available to all retailers, the digital-only editions will be for the Kindle. And there is some resistance to Amazon acting as a publisher, with Barnes & Noble refusing to sell its books.

For the owners of the rights this is probably a great deal, but are we moving towards a world where GAFA balkanise content? Imagine if Apple bought the rights to Motown or the Beatles back catalogue and said that the only way to buy that music was through iTunes. Unlikely right now but how long before it makes sense?

If you can pay $200 milllion for a game how much is a content franchise worth? We have seen the power of exclusivity in TV –  Sky built their business around exclusive deals with sports franchises.

TV and mobile

As Shazam agree that ITV can be their exclusive sales partner in the UK, the connection between TV and mobile gets ever stronger. A new survey in the US suggests that the combination of the two mediums is stronger than either alone.

Probably the best two screen experience so far is the Shazam-enabled promotion for Red Bull.

Measuring mobile and digital for brands

As mobile becomes the connective tissue or glue holding smart brands marketing together – and making the whole more powerful than the parts, getting better measurement metrics is key. We are already hearing TV producers get more excited by the quantity and quality of social chatter about their programmes, than the BARB data – and Zeebox is going to accelerate this.

But whatever people may think about BARB and brand awareness metrics, they are accepted currency among traditional marketers, so digital is getting smarter about how we measure the value of what we do.

Following on from the comScore Validated GRPs initiative launched recently, Google is now pushing Active GRPs. Positioned as making the web work for brand marketers the Brand Activate Initiative has two elements; Active View, which means the ad was visible for at least one second and Active GRP showing the Gross Rating Points delivered; allowing for reach and frequency measurement.

As we said about the comScore product, a key benefit of GRPs is that everyone can see the respective weight of activity indifferent media, which should mean that we see higher spends.

One stat that came out of the research is that many campaigns are planned and bought at far lower weights than in traditional media. One campaign mentioned was 40 GRPs, which means it reached just 8% of the target audience – and was seen an average of five times. It’s not too long ago that a typical TV campaign was 10 times the size of that ‘ 400 GRPs reaching 80% of the audience. So if people say online doesn’t work, it could be because it’s just not reaching enough people.

Finally… in this complicated world where mobile and digital are disrupting every aspect of business, what is the role of an agency? We’re trying to define addictive as an agency that solves business problems by solving consumer problems, using the modern marketing palette of Mobile First, Always Social and ROI obsessed. Our friend Neil Perkin has done some fascinating work for eConsultancy on how agencies are adapting (which we contributed to) and it’s a must read whether you are an agency or a brand.

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