Starbucks brings M-Payments to market – and no NFC in sight

If you aren’t reading this in Starbucks right now, there is I’ll wager, every chance that you will be recharging your batteries in said coffee emporium at some point today. Its has become part of the nomadic life of us telemedia people: we all moved to the country, but find ourselves trying to have meetings in London, so we head to ‘Buckies… you know how it is.

Ironic then that, while we’ve pumped so much money into the Seattle giant’s coffee coffers doing our business, they are leading the revolution in billing and m-payments that doesn’t use any of our billing tools and certainly marks another milestone in the shifting fortunes of operator billing.

Starbucks in the US is pioneering the use of mobile as a payment tool, harnessing the power of the company’s existing loyalty-cum-payments card and making it mobile. Unlike other coffee houses that offer loyalty cards that veer between the slick (Costa’s electronic credit card stylee offering) to the utilitarian (Café Nero’s cardboard number – frankly my favourite, its so low tech its cool), Starbucks has always taken a different tack, offering loyal users a charge card that they can load up with money and get more credit put on it as they loyally get fried on caffeine.

Whether the long term plan has always to be to turn this into a mobile or even multichannel payment tool is a moot point; today they have seamlessly got their be-chino-ed denizens to start getting their iPhone scanned to not only get loyalty points, but also to pay for their coffee.

This is remarkable and I think is the breakthrough moment for mobile as a contactless payment tool. I was holding out for iPhone 5 with its built in NFC and probably some sort of chip-and-PIN chip in April, but I think Starbucks may have stolen a march.

OK, so the payment tool uses a barcode that the barista has to scan – and there are many inherent problems with that, not least ear goo smears – but the whole thing is based around web enabled app on the phone. This is genius. No need for built in chips, no need for special readers and all that, it's a goddam app.

This changes everything. In app billing is exciting and has multifarious uses in our world, but using apps as a stored value gateway looks to me like a pretty simple way of turning all the smartphones already out there into payment tools – and if we are relying on barcode scanning technology, then the investment for the merchant is similarly small.

The upshot for telemedia is profound. Getting people – even geeky people – to use their mobiles to buy everyday things such as cups of coffee cements the role of mobile in consumers’ minds as a payment tool. That can only enhance the uptake of other mobile payment tools.

But there is a danger: increasingly on my travels around the offices of media companies, games and gambling firms, content providers and retailers I am getting a strong message that operator billing is not for them. While reverse billing has been extremely useful in many markets for many years, the rise of online-registered cards, the proliferation of debit cards and even the rise of things like Ukash are seeing PRS being eroded. Operator reluctance to improve payout rates isn’t helping much either.

But with Starbuck’s payment app comes home: it shows how smartphone tech can be used to create payment tools, and with the coffee house leading the way, telemedia players have a huge opportunity to deliver new billing tools that any merchant, selling any thing, can use.

2011: the year of mobile gambling – finally

Where 2010 certainly became the year of m-commerce – especially in retail – 2011 is already shaping up to be the year of mobile gambling.

OK, so various analysts, journos and other great thinkers of the age (and me) have been calling it the year of mobile gambling seemingly since Jesus was a boy (or at least since Justin Beiber was a boy – not that I think he’s the second coming or anything: check out the reviews of his ‘autobiography’ on Amazon if you want a laugh), but this time it feels different.

The swell of interest in social gaming and interactive mobile game play driven along in 2010 by Farmville et al on Facebook and by the explosion of smartphones across the handset market has seen a renewed interest in gaming generally. 2011 looks poised to become the year when this enthusiasm for interactive social gaming tips over into punters placing a small wager on the outcome. And from there we will see an explosion of gambling growth.

The other key driver is the boom that I believe will happen in in sports mobile interaction. Football stadia across the world are all looking at how to move from their week-day mobile and online offerings into compelling – and premium – services they can offer in game (and by that I mean while a real game is going on). Part of this inevitably will be betting.

And it doesn’t end there. The rise of interaction with TV talent shows is likely to spill over into how gaming and gambling can be added to programme formats. As our top story this week reveals, FremantleMedia has brought its nascent gaming division into the core of its business and is looking at how to create really interesting new formats (watch out for news of this, including an exclusive TelemediaTV interview with Simon Murphy coming up at the end of January).

Bringing these to strands together, 2011 has all the ingredients to make mobile gambling not only an acceptable way to while a way a few minutes, but an increasingly integral part of social networking, game play and enjoying sporting fixtures: both live and on TV. It will also become part of the whole media consumption experience.

And Telemedia-news and our associated products are here to guide you through this brave new world. The one issue facing all gambling protagonists is getting the money in (and occasionally getting money back out again) from punters. Online, gambling sites offer a panopoly of billing tools; mobile will be the same. And that means that it won’t just be pre-registered cards, but the whole gamut of alt.billing payment tools perfected by the telemedia community. This is a huge opportunity for the industry. Are you ready to take it?

TELEMEDIA360 MANCHESTER – Moving the media on

November 16 and TELEMEDIA360 Manchester draws near and, with the line up complete, there is much to look forward to. As you will see from our round up of the week’s news (below) there is already much discussion about the issues tackled in the conference as the media and telemedia industries look at how to embrace m-commerce and start monetising what they do across all media platforms.

The among the key things that the event is looking at are how print and TV companies need to look these days at such a complex array of options when looking at how to exploit new channels.

From a print point of view, delegates will hear from Inge van Gaal from INMA that newspaper publishers are still locked in some old ways of thinking and that the market  is moving on.

“In general the main problem for at least the newspaper owners is that they still think of their newspaper as a product to put online, on mobile devices and get money from it,” she tells Telemedia-news.com ahead of her keynote panel appearance. “This of course is the old way of thinking and it doesn't look into the real problem: what is it that they offer that would create unique value people want to pay for?”

In van Gaal’s view its not just about sticking a paywall in between consumer and content, but is a complex balance of what people will pay different amounts of money for and on what devices.

“The coming of smart phones and the tablets have changed people's behavior but also have and will make them more and more demanding. And many more of these devices will come into the market next year. The smart phones have showed a radical shift in how people are using their phone. Many of the tasks done via smart phones used to be done via the computer,” she says.

“The content providers will soon have services related to where you are with your smart phone.  Question is how will we pay for that? Will advertisers see a use, maybe.”

From a broadcaster and wider media point of view, fellow keynote panellist Stephen Petheram, marketing director at MGt, it’s not just a question of how do you monetise multiplatform, but how do you first create a homogeneous view of your content and services across devices and platform.

“Once this is in place the services are much more compelling and you can look at how to monetise them,” Petheram says. But here there is also a challenge: “there is no compelling micropayments system that can handle subscriptions and one off micropayments across all these channels”, he says.

This will be a bone of contention at the show and is why TELEMEDIA360 MANCHESTER exists – to bring together media companies and billers who do offer the kind of payment and micropayment tools that will suit the complex array of pricing and business models a pay-for-content environment will unleash.

That is why the event on 16 November not only features seminar sessions on monetising media, the impact of new devices, the role of gaming and social media, as well as the opportunities in live events for cross platform, but also it has in depth drill down sessions on billing, payments and m-commerce that will show the media industry that the tools do exist to monetise complex cross-platform media and content business models.

Featuring a stellar line up that includes:

THE TELEGRAPH MEDIA GROUP ▪ TALK SPORT ▪ LIVERPOOL FC ▪ ENTERACTION ▪ MGt ▪  RUSSELLGRANT.COM ▪  INTERACTIVE NEWSMEDIA MARKETING ASSOCIATION ▪ O2 ▪ ASSOCIATION FOR INTERACTIVE MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT ▪ MOBILE INTERACTIVE GROUP ▪ SPONGE ▪ BEMOKO ▪ FUSION TELECOM ▪ QUESTICO ▪ ORCA DIGITAL ▪ INTERACTIVE MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES ▪ OXYGEN8 ▪ STAN JAMES ▪ ATLAS PREMIUM BRANDS ▪ OPENMARKET ▪ BOKU ▪ TXTNATION ▪ NETCOLLEX ▪ ZED ▪ ROULETTECRICKET.COM ▪ M LAW ▪ MAKE IT RAIN ▪ MONTY MUNFORD ▪ GUAVA ▪ GP BULLHOUND ▪ 2EGRO ▪ MBLOX ▪ OFCOM ▪ C3 ▪ WIN ▪ GLOBAL TELECALL ▪ MOBILE FORMATS ▪ PHONE PAY PLUS ▪ ADVERTISING STANDARDS AUTHORITY ▪ RIBOT ▪ NET MOBILE ▪ TELEBILLING ▪ BCH DIGITAL ▪ ADVANCED TELECOM SERVICES ▪ KCOM ▪ SQUARE ONE COMMUNICATIONS ▪ CELLCAST ▪ 24SEVEN

TELEMEDIA360 MANCHESTER is the one-stop-shop boutique event for uncovering the true meaning of m-commerce and multi-platform content monetisation. Book YOUR PLACE now here

Text for success – its the consumer lingua franca

The launch last week of O2More, the carriers location and time targeted advertising service marks something of a watershed in how mobile marketing works. Now consumers can, when they enter a ‘geo fence’ around a brand offering something they have pre-opted into, will get a message offering money off or other inducements to engage with that brand. Such offers can also be targeted around time of day also and are showing how mobile in retailing and commerce isn’t just about buying stuff via the mobile channel, but is also about retailers using mobile to drive footfall into the stores they have already heavily invested in.

But what makes it all the more exciting for the telemedia industry is that it uses text. Yep, good old SMS. OK, if you are a smartphone user you get a graphically enhanced MMS, but the service is designed to use SMS wherever possible as that is useful to the vast majority of people with mobile phones.

This move ‘towards’ SMS in retailing and marketing is clearly driven by expediency among those wanting to reach the widest audience possible. It is also the lingua franca of the people right now.

A survey by mBlox has found that 71% of consumers in the UK want mobile coupons sent to their phones while they are out shopping and 59% wanting retailers and brands to contact them using SMS.

Looking specifically at the role of SMS for business communications, 59% of UK and 17% of US consumers surveyed stated SMS as their preferred choice when being contacted about appointment reminders.

“More and more people are turning to SMS for important communications because emails can easily get lost or overlooked in an email inbox,” says Brian Johnson, senior vice president of sales and marketing for mBlox. “Mobile phone penetration in the US is now catching up to the UK and mBlox is experiencing a hockey stick effect in growth for business-to-consumer messaging. Businesses are beginning to give their customers the option of how they want to communicate with them and increasingly consumers are realizing the power of mobile messaging.”

For payment reminders, such as credit card and utility bills, the consumer research showed that more than one in three consumers chose SMS as their preferred communication channel in the UK, but just one in 10 chose SMS in the US.

“To stay ahead of our clients demands in key verticals such as Finance, Communications, Pharmacy and Travel we will launch 15 unique SMS programs this year,” agrees Jennie Hanson, SVP of West Corporation’s Alerts and Notifications business. “We see many companies adding SMS to their customer contact strategy for payment reminders, order ready notices, appointment reminders, customer care, promotions and a variety of other notifications as consumers begin using text messaging to communicate with businesses and not just family and friends.”

So text is firmly on the agenda again driven by retailers. But it is also looking likely to gain credence in the business sector too and, should it ever return to TV, in the voting stakes as well.

Personally I use text all the time and think that its an easy and cheap way of marketing and of developing communications between business, brands and consumers. We don’t need all the flash ‘flash’ graphics; we need simple messaging. It is also cheap to do and everyone can do it.

In these straightened times we are likely to see a lot more text based services happening as brands reach out to the maximum number of people with the minimum amount of outlay.

Find out more on how SMS and MMS marketing are going to effect the market at Telemedia360 in Manchester on 16 November, when we have keynote presentations from mBlox and OpenMarket.

Register here 

Lipsmacking thirstquenching acetasting motivating goodbuzzing cooltalking highwalking fastliving evergiving coolfizzing IVRdriven mobilemarketing Pepsi

In this day and age of apps and mobile web, canny cross platform marketing, multimedia video downloads, social media and all the other things that gets people in the telemedia space hot and panting, you’d think that there wasn’t any room for such prosaic services as IVR and ringback tones – they are so 90s and early 00s.

But you’d be wrong. IVR and ringback tones look set to get a new lease of life. Both technologies are still widely used, but both have lost their sex appeal years ago. IVR in particular is like death and taxes, boring but important and totally unavoidable (unless you are Tory donor Lord Ashcroft, in which case you can safely dodge one of them, if not the other). Ringback tones are up there with Strictly Come Dancing as the king of cheese.

But they both have a hugely important role to play in the development of mobile marketing, as ably demonstrated by Pepsico (makers of, to my mind the far superior of the colas) Pepsi in Turkey.

Cola wars are intense in all regions and Pepsico, having seen its market share hit by a new kid on the block – Cola Turka – in 2003, looked at how it could use the then nascent mobile marketing – among other things – to take on this rival and to try and chip away at Coke’s lead in the market too.

Fast forward to 2009 and the company had seen off Cola Turka, and was gunning for the big red ‘un and was seeing some stunning results with mobile marketing campaigns that offered those that texted or called the numbers inside the lids of Pepsi bottles free mobile minutes and the chance to win prizes etc.

So far all pretty standard. But Pepsi had a challenge on its hands. Between 2003 and 2009 it had successfully used mobile to target youngsters. Now it wanted to use mobile marketing to get itself in front of the primary shopper – mums. And this was a whole different ball game.

So the company turned to Turkey’s answer to Oprah to start getting the message across to this crucial, multipack buying demographic. And how did it do this? Well it used TV ads of course, but it also used IVR and ringback tones. When anyone entered to get free minutes, they got an IVR call back from Turkish Oprah telling them how great it was to get free minutes and to tell their friends a number to call to also get free minutes.  When the friends called they got a ringback tone message from Turkish Oprah telling them how great Pepsi was and so on.

Thanks to this canny use of IVR and ringback tone advertising, the offer spread virally like wildfire, notching up 25.8million calls, more than 5million of them uniques. Pepsi even claims that it out performed Coke in the market in the Spring of 2009.

Pepsico upped the ante again in 2010, using IVR, ringback tones and MMS videos to create an even more in depth – and totally mobile – spring marketing campaign (it saved money for the big summer push, when cola wars are at their height, by not investing in TV ads). This time it used the star of Turkey’s leading soap to do the IVR and ringback tone message and to create an MMS video advert too.

Again the campaign spread virally like, well a pretty contagious virus, and soon the company was again getting more than 6million unique interactions and sign ups and sales went through the roof.

And it is thanks, in part, to the use of IVR as part of the marketing mix. This lesson, learned today at the MMA Forum in London from Ugur Oglu, marketing director at Pepsico Turkey, shows how mobile marketing is a mixture of channels, technologies and some good old fashioned outside-the-box thinking. It also shows that IVR has a huge roll to play in turning static mobile marketing campaigns into celeb driven interactive campaigns that can spread, if you get it right, like the plague (well, they do call it viral marketing).

So take heart IVR providers: the future is yours to take – just get your message out there to those brands and mobile marketing agencies and show them how its done.

BlackBerry comes out to play

Apple has, until now, held all the cards around tablet computers, the latest device sub-genre to get developers excited/overworked. Then came Samsung, with some shortlived fanfare. Now BlackBerry has joined the throng with its delightfully named PlayBook (not BlackPad as most of the media called it) and the game is truly on.

The device is highly capable, looks good and, like iPad and GalaxyTab, does loads. There is no denying that it is a superbly engineered bit of kit. All that the media can find to knock it on is the choice of OS – not really something that impactful so long as it works.

But perhaps this device long tail that is emerging is something of a phoney war. There is no shortage of hype around tablets and how they are going to revolutionise the media and content market, but will they?

OK, many will be sold on the back of the hype and there are always enough people out there with money to chuck at the latest fad, but, once the dust of publicity has settled, will people really actually use them or will they be dug out in five years time when people start moving house again to the bemused smirk of “Darling, do you remember this?”

The experts thing that tabs are here to stay. The newspaper barons think so too. And the content providers really hope so.

Already these devices are having an impact.

Research by eMarketer suggests that these devices – along with the wealth of music players and games consoles now getting wifi and smarts – are making the content market, especially for games, music and movies, boom, hitting $1.54billion this year in the US alone.

“The continuing advance of smart devices—including tablet-style computers, led by Apple’s iPad—and the growing ubiquity of mobile broadband networks mean that consumers have to make fewer compromises when it comes to the consumption of games, music and video,” said Noah Elkin, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, “Mobile Content: Games, Music and Video Take to the Cloud.”

eMarketer estimates combined revenues from three principal streams—subscriptions (streaming music and mobile TV services); direct and pay-per-view downloads (full music tracks, games and TV/movie/event programming); and advertising-supported (games, music services and video)—will more than double from 2010 to reach $3.53 billion in 2014.

Gaming is by far the leader in terms of usage and revenues: The number of US mobile gamers is expected to reach 64 million in 2010, driving revenues of $849 million.

Meanwhile the number of US consumers who watch mobile video or television on their mobile devices is expected to reach 23 million this year and draw revenues of $719 million. By 2014, however, mobile video revenues are expected to reach $1.3 billion.

The main factor driving revenues to game, video and music publishers is still paid or subscription-based content, though ad-supported revenues are expected to grow at more than double the rate of paid mobile content through 2014.

“The rules have not been written—yet,” Elkin said. “The ongoing digitalization of media and the increased emphasis on monetization spells opportunity for mobile game and music publishers as well as producers of video content.”

But there still remains a niggling doubt in my mind that as the phone gets smarter, the need for tablets starts to disappear. Couple this with web enabled TV hitting homes now – and that all new TV’s will be wifi enabled by 2013 – and the role of the tablet as a media and content consumption device starts to look really shaky to me. It just doesn’t fit anywhere.

I am sure millions will be sold and used, but in a few years time this market segment will be dead and buried and we will be back to looking at the TV screen, our laptops or our phones if we want to engage and it will all depend on where we are.

This will be one of the key themes at Telemedia360 in Manchester on 16 November, where we will have a panel of experts, lead by Sponge and Bemoko, to talk about what impact new devices will have on the market and whether we are right to get in a lather about tablets.

Book your place now at www.telemedia360.com

Practice what we preach

I, like many of you, went to Ad:tech at Olympia this week and was surprised. Yes, I was pleasantly surprised that it was a lot busier than last year and really pretty up beat. Surprised too that there was a lot of emphasis on mobile, which until this year has tended to be something of a curio rather than part of the main event. But I was most surprised by the fact that, for a show about electronic marketing – taking in mobile and social networking – no one was actually using any of the tech available to get through to people on the show floor.

I was expecting Bluetooth shots from stands. I was looking for some SMS and MMS contact from exhibitors. I was hoping for some sort of in-show social network that took the meeting system idea to the next level. What I got was a trade show. With stands. Often empty stands. With some poor signage.

Now, to be fair I did learn a great deal from the on-floor seminars and I did meet some really interesting people and got some real insight in to social media marketing, where mobile marketing is heading and some great stats and stories. They even laid on the sponsored airship to cruise majestically about the hall. It was on this level a great show.

But for an advertising/marketing event, especially one that is aimed at the e and i sectors (e-commerce and i-whatever) the overall display from most of the exhibitors was awful. Stand after stand with nothing more than a pop up featuring way too many words. Many with no staff on them. Others that had no branding to speak of at all, just a few flyers (again, generally pretty poorly designed). Very few had any gimmicks.

I know times are tough and, as David Cameron and Nick Clegg make us all embrace dour economic realism there is no space for showyness and extravagance, I was really amazed to find that no one Bluetoothed me with a teaser, or used bump to give me their details, or had QR codes on their stands so that I could get some bumpf from them electronically.

No one was there collecting my data either apart from the organisers. Hats off to DMG and the Ad;tech team for getting their electronic badge scanner to work. I was mightly sceptical as I stood in the queue on arrival with my ‘badge’ on the screen of my iPhone waiting to scan it and get my proper badge, but lo, it worked a treat. I even used the e-badge on my phone for the data gathers at the door.

But that was it. Why weren’t any of the exhibitors actually using what they sell to not only demonstrate that it works, but to get those that are visiting from the ad industry and from the brands to buy into what the technology companies expect consumers to adopt?

While there was so much going on on the show floor and it was a really great show, the exhibitors let themselves down. I signed it with FourSquare when I arrived and got my Swarm badge as there were more than 50 other people logged in. I fired up Facebook places and saw quite a few familiar faces come up on that. But no one thought to leverage it at all.

And this isn’t just me whinging. A survey carried out by the MMA last week found that, across Europe, 25% of consumers want to have a mobile response channel to adverts in any medium – and if they had it, they would use it.

A quarter of consumers out there WANT to get in touch with you from your adverts using their mobile phones. Its doesn’t even have to be a QR code or anything fancy: an SMS shortcode is all they are looking for.

So with this in mind, it is doubly disappointing that the industry can’t even be bothered to use mobile cleverly to market to itself at its own event. What hope giving consumers what they want?

So I am going to do it. It’s time that we in this industry practiced what we preach. Trade shows are social gatherings of a finite number of people interested in the same thing – they are a social network. So Why don’t we treat it as such and harness all the powerful marketing opportunities social networks offer? Anyway, I am going to make this happen, so watch this space. Trade shows will never be the same again.