What retailers really want from mobile telemedia

Last week saw the massive Internet Retailing Expo take place at the NEC in Birmingham, which once again featured a huge mobile spin off conference that grows and grows year on year. And jolly interesting it was too. But there was something missing: operators. Not for want of asking, but they were a bit thin on the ground – especially given that the 4000 people who came along were almost all retailers charged with developing their omni-channel retailing.

In was great to hear so many ideas from top retailers about how they are using mobile and about how, to them, mobile is no longer just a channel but part of the whole way they interact with consumers across all channels. To them mobile is not a platform, just part of what they do and how they build a cross-channel customer experience.

Funny how there was no mention really of network operators, nor indeed of the network operator joint venture Weve, set up to bring mobile marketing and payments expertise to the retail and brand businesses.

Only this week, as one of our main stories reveals, Vodafone UK CEO Guy Laurence laughingly told a gathering in London – in a somewhat confused analogy – that “brands and retailers not signing sign up to Weve, will be like not signing the Beatles”.

On paper Weve looks like it might be quite an interesting proposition. Born out of project Oscar, it could well start to make mobile payments easy to do for retailers and it could well help with some joined up mobile marketing. But as important as not signing the Beatles? I don’t think so.

In fact, to any old lags from the mobile industry it is all very reminiscent of the thinking behind operator portals back in the mid 2000s (BA – before Apple). Back then the operators moved too late and too slowly to try and tap up the then burgeoning content business which had, until that point, done nicely through independent providers. It was all part of the plan to stop operators becoming dumb pipes. That, as is easy to see today, didn’t work. MNOs aren’t quite dumb pipes yet, but they certainly don’t really have much of the content market do they? As Juniper Research found, they account for just 6% of content sales worldwide.

Likewise, Weve appears to be a similar land grab – this time for the retail and brand space around marketing and payments.

Of course, there are many people already doing mobile marketing and payments quite well. They don’t need the operators. Weve aims to stomp into this market and soak it up for the operators. Will they succeed? Given past operator form no. It will be too big, too didactic and move too slowly. The operators are up against Google and Facebook here. These two giants of the new economy already have mobile marketing in their grasp. Google has the ability to to make a good play in mobile payments. It's a tough scene to muscle in on.

As with the content portal days, MNOs have the idea that their brand identities are revered by consumers: they are not. Google and Facebook, while not revered, have a certain cache with consumers. They certainly are revered by other brands, retailers and the companies they face. Vodafone and O2 et al don't have that.

They need to woo retailers and brands. They need to come up with a better name than Weve to do it. It will be interesting to see how this ends up, but I am prepared to make a small wager that in five years time youngsters will wonder what you are on if you say “remember Weve?”