With the recent flurry of activity in the mobile marketing space, there's been significant speculation about its importance for North American marketers. While there's legitimate debate about what the mobile marketing ecosystem will look like over the long haul, forward thinkers already know that the North American practice needs to quickly evolve to more closely resemble what we see in Europe today.
The best of the European practice takes a converged and integrative approach: advertisers look across the full suite of mobile marketing tools and bring the right mix to their larger communications platform. By contrast, North American marketers are best described as very curious about mobile and, by and large, they continue to experiment with one-off, stand-alone, SMS-based mobile tactics.
Historically, operational and economic factors were cited as the primary causes of the divide. Expensive voice and data plan rates made mobile communications prohibitive for consumers; network capacity constraints meant carriers were reluctant to roll out improved messaging functionality; and lack of number portability between carriers meant mobile marketers communicated with phones and not people.
The drawbacks have been, for the most part, resolved over the past few years. Yet, North American enthusiasm about incorporating mobile marketing as part of an integrated brand communication strategy continues to lag.
The market, however, is ready and the audiences are waiting. Smartphone and feature phone penetration in North America is quickly approaching European levels. While the U.S. is currently in third place behind Italy and Spain, per The Nielsen Company, Gartner predicts that more than 50 percent of mobile phones in use in the U.S. by 2011 will be smartphones, up from just 14 percent at the end of 2008. Moreover, North American consumers' engagement and intimacy with mobile is at an all-time high; a recent global mobile phone survey by Synovate found that most people would rather lose their wallet than their mobile phone, and over a third of respondents reported that they "couldn't live" without their phone.
As mobile becomes an increasingly important part of consumers' lives, the expectation for ubiquitous and optimized mobile content has grown in lockstep. With these skyrocketing smartphone adoption rates, customers are proving to be more mobile savvy than companies and agencies. This presents a strategic gap that will be filled by North American agencies and brands that recognize the disconnect between how companies think about mobile, if at all, and how intimately North American subscribers interact with their devices.
If the technological barriers to adoption have been eliminated and the customers are ready, why are North American marketers slow to adopt? Some argue that the marketplace needs more education on how to incorporate mobile marketing into the mix. Others point to a general "first-mover" reluctance to adopt new media. While these may be contributing factors, the fundamental barrier to adoption lies with how most mobile marketing service providers in North America have been tackling the opportunity.
Consumers expectations of mobile have been largely shaped by the interactive experiences of the desktop Internet. However, mobile's far more complex than traditional interactive. Unlike an online campaign that must deal with just three popular browsers and a handful of screen resolutions, optimizing for mobile must factor thousands of handsets, hundreds of carriers, in a variety of mobile outputs, ranging from couponing to messaging to rich media.
Faced with this complexity and a lack of comprehensive full-service partners, the busy marketer often ignores mobile entirely, or experiments with "mobilizing" desktop content.
Best practice demands more than making digital campaigns mobile-accessible. The platform and the context for the information need to be well understood, and the inherent characteristics of the mobile channel properly exploited.
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