Mobile Marketing

Pepsi starts the World Cup!

A very funny advertisement from Pepsi on Mydadada. This advertisement is already cited on many blogs and web sites, the buzz promises to be a big success!
And you can send a voice call to your friends with the "dadada song". A good means of distribution to your community and wide spreading the info.

It is interesting to note that Pepsi don't have the rights of the World Cup and can't use these words which are a trademark of FIFA. However, they show a football team in Germany and of course, everybody understands the reference.

Vision of a Swiss knife

In a Financial times article already cited on various web sites such as Moco.news or l'atelier [fr], Nokia predicts the end of cameras, music players and video cameras. All these features will be included in the mobile devices. The word mobile phone is of course obsolete.

This Nokia statement may look very strong and quite arrogant. At least, it opens an interesting discussion: will we have one device, the Swiss knife of the XXIst century that will do everything or several specialised devices?

Let's have a look at some of the applications.

Camera
Already Konica-Minolta announced they will stop producing cameras.
However, I believe that still digital cameras will be superior to mobile phones in terms of resolution or quality of lens.

Music players
Despite the tremendous Apple success of I-pod, I am sure that mobile phones will replace music players in the short term. The advantage of music player in terms of storage space or brand will not last long. Just take the success of the Sony Ericsson walkman!
However, it's probably not such a big threat for Apple in the long term. They will leverage on their brand and marketing strengths and make a lot of money with I-tunes.

PDA
PDA feature is now part of the smartphone. No doubt about it.

GPS
Clearly the GPS functionality will be soon included in handsets.
It makes a lot of sense to combine the location and the mobility.
See this impressive service under development by Google, Volkswagen and nVidia (see other screenshots).

Mobile ticketing in France

The Toulouse Football Club is now selling tickets over mobile phone.
How does it work?

1. 1. You purchase the ticket online through the Internet.
2. 2. You receive the electronic ticket via MMS. The ticket is displayed as a mobile tag on your phone's screen.
3. 3. At the entrance of the stadium, the guy checks the mobile tag on your handset''s screen with a scanner.

I heard that there are some issues with scanning the screen of the handset. But my brother used the service for the match Toulouse-Nantes and it worked perfectly on his Sony Ericsson W800i.

This is a great innovation. I am looking forward seeing similar applications based on contactless technology. Then it will be even more convenient.

Mobile TV in France

Four trials have been conducted in France to validate Mobile TV. The feedback of these pilots is given in the excellent JDNet article (fr).

Based on my last trip to Korea in January 2005, I am convinced that this is a new killer application. Mobile TV will be very successful if the price is affordable.
I will talk about the Korean experience in a future post...

Some lessons from the French trials:

• The main usage is at home after 7pm!  The mobile is an alternative TV screen at home. This is a big surprise. It was expected that the main usage would be in public transportation, that's not the case!
• Key programs are obviously sports, news, music, adult content.
• Usage is 20 minutes per day.
• Users are ready to pay between 7 and 10 euro/ month for the service.

In Europe there are some other trials ongoing and the service will be soon launched in Italy, hopefully before the World Cup.

                                    

In France there are still very important questions:

• Technology

It seems that the technology chosen in Europe will probably be DVB-H as it is pushed by big players (mainly Nokia).
DVB-H is an adaptation of DVB (in French TNT) for handsets.
Other technologies are DMB-S (satellite) and DMB-T (terrestrian). DMB is an adaptation of DAB. In France, Alcatel space is pushing for a combination of terrestrian and satellite technologies.
There is as well Flo, a proprietary standard done by Qualcomm which doesn't seem too much popular in Europe.

• Indoor coverage

The indoor coverage is a key requirement and still a challenge for all technologies.

• Lack of frequency

In France there is a lack of frequency so a big lobbying is ongoing to get free frequencies.

• Who owns the customer?

Is it the mobile operator (e.g. Orange or Bouygues) or the TV channel (e.g. Canal+ or TF1) or both?
The encryption of pay TV like Canal+ will be done through the SIM which means that an agreement between both partners is necessary...

 

In summary, this is a very hot issue in the whole mobile com industry. For sure when the service is launched, it will be really a big success!