While much of the discussion around Apple’s forthcoming iTunes Radio is around its head-to-head competition with Pandora, this conversation is missing the larger opportunity. Radio advertising, with its $14 billion in annual ad revenue, is the real target here.
The 100+ year old institution of radio has been punished over the past decade. The first insult came with the introduction of Sirius and XM’s satellite radio services with hundreds of stations. This forced the traditional broadcast versions to be re-categorized as “terrestrial radio.” Next, the introduction of Pandora allowed users to create their own radio stations, in a virtual on-demand approach across many connected devices, including mobile phones. This was the new way of radio. So the now-terrestrial radio stations fired back with their own non-innovative innovation, HD-radio, which did little to pry lost listeners away from the new world.
When terrestrial radio was the only game in town, stations fought one another for radio budget dollars, based on the archaic Arbitron sampling rating system. But the modern technology radio battle will continue to be fought with real, attributable data, and massively improved targeting. No more audience inferences, no more “trust me since I take you to lunch” media buying. The new... Read more
'Wireless' Category 
How did we get so mobile, so fast?
Smartphones penetration in the US has crossed the 50% mark and we check them over 150 times a day – for everything from looking at email to taking photos to getting the weather forecast to browsing the web. Considering smartphones were first introduced less than 6 short years ago, that kind of growth and usage is nothing shy of amazing.
So how - and why - did all this happen? To get a clear picture, it’s worth taking a look at the underlying technologies and economics that made it possible for the smartphone to become the transformational device it is.
Let’s start with the device itself. Smartphones are the latest link in a chain that started decades ago and are responsible for the broad democratization of the Internet, making it available to almost anyone, anywhere, anytime. In a very real way, smartphones opened the floodgates and released the “digital pressure” created by the exponential increase in online data and services available.
The smartphone itself is a powerful, handheld, networked computer with more processing power than all of NASA had when it put a man on the moon in 1969. Combine that with an incredibly intuitive and user-friendly interface that provides easy access... Read more
Time To Forget Feature Phone Users? Forget That Idea
A majority of Americans now own a smartphone, a fact that leads some to believe that marketers can now ignore feature phone users.
I’m neither in that camp nor inclined to create mobile marketing and advertising programs that are exclusive.
For the first time, the highly respected Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project told us today that the majority of Americans now own a smartphone of some kind. Pew’s definition of a smartphone owner includes anyone who said “yes” to one—or both—of the following questions:
55 percent of cell phone owners say that their phone is a smartphone
58 percent of cell phone owners say that their phone operates on a smartphone platform common to the U.S. market
Taken together, 61 percent of cell owners said yes to at least one of these questions and are classified as smartphone owners. According to Pew, because 91 percent of the adult population now owns some kind of cell phone, that means that 56 percent of all American adults are now smartphone adopters. Further, 35 percent have some other kind of cell phone that is not a smartphone, and the remaining 9 percent of Americans do not own a cell phone at all (yeah, there are... Read more
Debunking the Myths of Mobile Marketing: Leveraging Results
Now that we’ve debunked the myths of targeting the right customers, delivering personalized offers, acting in context and creating valuable offers, there’s just one more to dispel…leveraging the results. More often than not, marketers initiate a campaign and then following its completion analyze the results, but the real value lies in between these two steps. In the world of mobile, you no longer have to ‘accept’ the end results – you can continually impact them along the way.
THE MYTH: Results and lessons learned drive future campaigns
Have you ever been fishing and used the same rod and reel, the same lure, and casted to the same spot only to catch a few inedible fish? At the end of the day when you’re counting your less than impressive catch, do you make mental notes of what you should try the next time?
Sounds like an ineffective way of upping your results but this same method continues to be utilized by marketers. Decide what to measure, launch the campaign, gather results, interpret results, and apply to the next campaign…sound familiar?
Although with traditional channels the waiting game was a necessary evil, with mobile marketing the waiting period from execution to... Read more
