Telefonica Digital has recently announced it will be the headline sponsor for the Festival of Media LatAm in September. This is a key regional advertising event and, as one of the leading mobile marketing companies in the region, we are excited to support it.

Latin America is emerging as one of the most exciting territories for mobile marketing in the world. Although the UK and US have traditionally been the pulsing heart of the mobile marketing industry, large cultural and technological shifts happening in Latin America are set to supercharge its adoption across this region.

Latin America already has more mobile connections than people, and according to recent research from Ovum, smartphone penetration in South and Central America grew by 170% between 2010 and 2012 to 34%, and is forecast to hit 84% by 2017.

Smartphone growth in South America will soon get another boost, as Telefonica launches Mozilla’s Firefox OS handsets in the region, which will offer consumers affordable smartphones based on the Firefox open mobile ecosystem to counter the price barrier that has held back iPhone & Android adoption.

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Rumours are circulating that the first iPhone is set to become obsolete this month after six years on the market. It’s clear that mobile technology is moving faster now than over the last six years, and with innovation comes obsolescence.

As the mobile space has become increasingly competitive with several key players jostling to offer the latest features to draw customers to their devices, marketers are faced with the challenge of constantly evolving their strategy to meet customer demand. As the first iPhone becomes an artefact of the past, marketers need to be looking to new innovations on the horizon for further opportunities to engage and create an immersive mobile experience for consumers. Read More »

Consumer resistance to Google’s Project Glass will last “six months to a year”, according to mobile agency Somo’s global innovation director, Maani Safa.

In the video below, Saafa describes how previous technologies have suffered “people reacting a little bit cold” to them before the technology hits the mainstream, up to a year later.

Previewing the new, prototype product, which featured in last year’s New York Fashion Week, for Marketing, Matt Chapman, senior reporter, comments: “I was cynical at first but I can really see there might be a place for this”.

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Augmented humanity, HTML5 and mobile bridging are rapidly emerging as the next big things in mobile ad technology, not least because they offer enormous scope for creative impact and engagement. But for a brand marketer or media planner, how are these new technologies useful in practice? How can using them fulfil a brand’s objectives?

For a start, from an online brand marketing point of view, HTML5 is heaven-sent as it allows developers to create content that works across all devices and browsers.  Marketing teams can wave goodbye to the days of having to decide whether to develop in Flash or Java, or watching as the costs mount over a project that has to have a separate solution for an iOS app, Android app, tablet and mobile formats.

What’s also incredibly exciting about HTML5 is the fact that it is a ‘living standard’. Because it is part of the accepted global online language, it is supported by top developers and companies such as Microsoft, IBM, Google, and organisations such as the W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium). This means features and specifications are constantly being added to HTML5, helping to facilitate the positive growth and development of coding standards and potential.

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Traditional media owners are set to profit from multiscreen viewing and smartphone ownership if the right pricing models are adopted, is the rather heartening message from a KPMG study this month. In the advisory firm’s Media And Entertainment Barometer study, the decades old assumption that people have become too accustomed to free content online to start paying, is challenged. Read More »

Stories have been appearing left, right and centre over the past week or so about Mozilla’s plans to launch a smartphone specifically designed for emerging markets. This of course is not the first major brand who has been exploring how to successfully venture into emerging markets this year. The mobile community’s attention turned to Nokia as they ran a launch announcement about Asha501 (pictured) and questions were even asked as to how the functionality of the new Samsung Galaxy S4 would marry with what consumers in emerging markets are looking for.

But one major handset manufacturer yet to officially unveil a specific emerging market handset is Apple.

The fact is that Apple’s App Store model simply doesn’t fit with emerging market expectations. Where only half of adults in the developing world hold a bank account and under one in ten own a credit card, numerous consumers in these regions cannot readily access the content and services on offer via an App Store model. Research we commissioned in conjunction with YouGov and Vanson Bourne looking at current mobile usage in emerging markets found that the majority of consumers polled (42 per cent) expressed an interest instead in being billed for content and apps by their Mobile Network Operator (MNO).

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Here’s a question: why do so many brands feel the need to offer the new, shiny digital marketing thing, especially in mobile, seemingly just because they can?

Considering the growth of mobile marketing over the last 12 years, I’ve seen some brands use it successfully and strategically while others have ploughed money into a pointless pursuit of a project – often an app using augmented reality, or a badly designed game – that appears to have been devised solely to impress the chairman.

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 It is estimated that by 2015, one billion new email accounts will have been opened worldwide, based on an average annual growth of seven per cent. Also during this time, the number of wireless email users is expected to more than double – from 531 million to 1.2 billion.

But while the email itself has enduring potential, marketers should not be fooled into imagining they can simply plough ahead with the same old communication strategies – email design and consumption is evolving, and so should the supporting strategies.

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We’ve heard this before: we need to get serious about mobile as game-changer, especially in retail. And, yes, we’ve heard it because it’s impossible to ignore. The rapid developments are particularly acute in the UK. We love our smartphones: the average UK mobile connection used 424 megabytes of data per month, ahead of Japan (392 megabytes) and the US (319 megabytes), despite being 4G newbies.
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Here at M&C Saatchi, the ‘Brutal Simplicity of Thought’ is our guiding philosophy. We believe that no matter what the medium, it is the thought process that should apply to all forms of advertising – including mobile, which is becoming increasingly important to brands as a means to engage and target relevant consumers. And yet the incredible rise of mobiles and tablets presents new challenges and concerns to advertisers, perhaps making mobile advertising appear more complicated than it should be. Read More »