The global Mobile Marketing Association and its newly formed SA Council, recently held briefing sessions in Cape Town and Johannesburg. The objective? Get the South African mobile marketing industry involved. But as Brandscape’s Gordon Parkin found, some key players weren’t there.
Most notably, very few advertising agencies appeared to have arrived, although OgilvyOne are in fact a founding member. There’s no shortage of heavy hitters on the founding member list: Vodacom, Microsoft, Google, One Digital, Cellsmart and BulkSMS are all there. Brandscape has taken a decision to join the MMA, and it will be our approach to encourage our agency contacts to consider joining too. The sooner we can have agencies, brands and specialists pointed in more or less similar directions – the better.
“The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) is an international non-profit industry trade group that represents over 600 agencies, advertisers, hand held device manufacturers, wireless operators, aggregators, technology enablers, market research firms and other companies focused on marketing via the mobile channel. (Wikipedia 2009)”
Globally, the Mobile phone is now regarded as the most pervasive media channel in the history of media communication. There are Billions of mobile devices in daily use throughout the world, and for many people it is their primary communication channel.
Like many new technologies, the mobile phone was not designed as a marketing channel; it is a ‘personal communication’ device that some would say has been hijacked by advertisers in an attempt to grow consumer reach beyond the traditional channels.
The mobile channel provides brand marketers with the unique ability to connect with their audience like never before, with the opportunity to build a meaningful dialogue of engagement between the brand and the potential customer.
But the growth of this always on, always connected channel presents new and important challenges for marketers that if not addressed in an inclusive and cohesive manner will ‘kill the goose that lays the golden egg’.
As marketers we have all seen the power of the consumer backlash to invasive advertising. Technology has helped the consumer nullify the impact of TV advertising by the use of the PVR to skip over 70% of Ads. The same is happening online with software to exclude pop-up Ads and banner Ads. It is only a matter of time before technology will once again allow the consumer to do the same on the mobile device.
So as marketers we have a choice: either achieve an acceptable balance or suffer the wrath of the consumer.
The MMA is patently aware of this fact, and has since 2005, taken steps to help marketers establish recognised ground rules on ‘Best Practice’ mobile media communication.
At the top of the list of best practice is permission. We must never forget that the mobile phone is primarily a PERSONAL communication device that has an emotional impact on its user. By this I mean that if we receive a call or an SMS we associate this with personal connections to family, friends and in a lot of cases business and these connections are rarely ignored.
A brand marketer communicating on this channel without permission is at best interrupting and at worst invading the users privacy. If marketers do not have permission, it’s not marketing, it’s suicide.
What are the best practices for marketers? What are the acceptable ways for brands to engage? How are other marketers making effective use of the channel, and how are they gauging their success? Is success gauged and measured as ROI or ROO? How can mobile technologies become more integrated and accessible when incorporating them in the marketing mix?
These questions and more are the reason why, in my opinion, the MMA has a crucial role to play in setting organizational standards and best practices. Marketers, Agencies and Media Planners need to have confidence in proposing mobile media communication. Accredited membership of the MMA should be a prerequisite before engaging the services of a supplier. An MMA accreditation should give clients confidence that their supplier adheres to recognised guidelines that are legal, decent and honest when proposing a mobile channel campaign and that the client would have recourse in the event of a dispute.
In any wide reaching communication channel, a code of practice is desirable if not essential and in the case of the mobile channel the MMA is vital to the future of effective, successful mobile media communication.
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