Christine Herron at christine.net has a nice round up of the top 10 mobile marketing campaigns as presented at the recent Mobile Marketing Forum. She also outlines the key factors for a successful campaign. Worth a read.
Mobile marketing is still in its relative infancy. It’ll be interesting to see how consumers react over time to the different options on offer. The more traditional text-to-win approaches are relatively safe, it’s the consumer’s choice after all. But when we get into areas such as bluejacking and friend-call-a-friend techniques, acceptance will vary wildly from country to country as different cultures view privacy in very different ways.

The trick will be to truly engage the audience and not simply apply direct marketing or broadcast approaches to mobile. Personally, I believe mobile marketing should be part of a bigger integrated picture – that’s why I like the American Express Wimbledon Sponsorship as there was a wide range of other activity feeding in to the campaign. Whereas the have-your-vote approaches such as the Dove campaign feel a little shallow as a vehicle (although maybe there was more to it).

It will also be interesting to see what happens as we get greater bandwidth, the availability of ever richer media and the integration of technologies such as GPS into devices. Interesting times.

In their strategy+business emag this time, Booz, Allen, Hamilton has a report: “Smart Spenders: The Global Innovation 1000.” Ostensibly this is a report on why some companies (about 10% in the study) get exponentially better returns on lower levels of R&D investment. Strategy+business is usually a pretty good source of insight so admittedly my hopes were high.

There are some interesting facts in the piece. The top 1000 R&D spenders account for some 85% of R&D spending as a whole. The authors point to the fact that there is virtually no correlation between performance and R&D budgets (the only one being gross margin – yet the financial value of this is seldom captured). Many companies waste too much time reinventing the wheel and see ideas get mired down in organisational quicksand. And many simply don’t understand what their customers want or how to communicate with them.

All interesting stuff. But how about information that companies can use to do something about it?

The recommendations appear to boil down to:

• Get good at all parts of innovation ‘value chain’
• Go for flat structures
• Think about customer needs
• Be quick

Beyond that… well… everyone does it differently really.

This has the feel of a scenario where some very expensive research has been commissioned, but which hasn’t answered the key questions. So you get lots of information but precious little insight beyond a kind of innovation 101.

I would want to know about the corporate cultures that breed innovation. I’d want to know who they recruit, how they get the right mix of people and how they incentivise them (outside of offering loads of cash). And I’d want to know about how these companies move beyond what their customers say they want now to creating breakthrough products they will want in future. The report doesn’t answer any of these.

Shame.

This is nice. Musicovery is a Pandora-esque music discovery site that allows you to select playlists by clicking your mood. Choose from dark to positive and from calm to energetic and then watch it graphically spin out tracks in a very pretty Visual Thesaurus stylee.

Source: NOTCOT.ORG

I pre-ordered Worldchanging’s User’s Guide for the 21st Century some time back and promptly forgot about it (as you do). Then, last week, the Amazon fairy came and every spare minute since has seen my nose buried in it.

It’s a book that emphasises the dire situation the world finds itself in but is then both inspirational and practical in charting a path forward. From the introduction:

If we face an unprecedented planetary crisis, we also find ourselves in a moment of innovation unlike any that has come before… Humanity’s fate rests on the outcome of the race between problem solvers and the problems themselves. The world is getting better – we just have to make sure it gets better faster than it gets worse.

Technology, of course, is not the only solution (despite the head in the sand assertion by some that it is). But it is a part of the solution as is helping and cajoling people, organisations and governments to change their behaviours. Communications professionals have a key role to play, as I put in an earlier post, this is the kind of task we’re well equipped to take on.

The book is 600 or so pages which, as I was reading through, made me think: that’s a lot of dead tree. In the back, however, is a breakdown of how they’ve kept the damage to a minimum. Here’s one of the labels:

They have also purchased wind power credits equivalent to the amount of electricity used to produce the book. I wonder what would happen if all printed material had to carry the same declaration.

As I say, it’s a great book which should be on everyone’s bookshelf. You can buy yours here.

When Chevrolet jumped into consumer generated media with its ‘build your own Tahoe ad’ there was a collective gasp of ‘you don’t wanna do that’ from the internet. And yes, pretty soon people put their satirical skills to work with a series of ads highlighting the Tahoe’s woeful green credentials and the general perceived stupidity of anyone considering buying one. As of right now, you can see over 70 of these on YouTube (click here for a look). And, as is the norm, once the initial furore died down, it all went quiet.

Well, Wired has followed up on the story to see how well (or not) the campaign actually worked.

As it turns out, not badly at all.

BY ANY OBJECTIVE MEASURE, the Tahoe Apprentice campaign has to be judged a success. The microsite attracted 629,000 visitors by the time the contest winner, Michael Thrams from nearby Ann Arbor, was announced at the end of April. On average, those visitors spent more than nine minutes on the site, and nearly two-thirds of them went on to visit Chevy.com; for three weeks running, Chevyapprentice.com funneled more people to the Chevy site than either Google or Yahoo did. Once there, many requested info or left a cookie trail to dealers’ sites.

I guess the kind of people who are considering buying a Tahoe really won’t be that worried about its eco-credentials. They are not making a decision between a Tahoe and a Prius after all but probably between Chevy’s option and an even worse gas guzzler from another manufacturer. In that context, the difference between a brand that helps them celebrate their decision and others who remain detached is pretty clear. It’s just a shame that it’s working to put yet more CO2 into the air.