Live From DMDNY: Mobile Causes Marketing ‘Sea Change,’ Says Speaker

The stratospheric rise in the number of mobile phones means that for the first time in marketing history, all media can be consumed through a single device, according to Michael Becker, executive vice president of business development for ILoop mobile.

“A sea change is happening in how we engage with our clients,” he said during a presentation Wednesday at the Direct Marketing Days New York conference in the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. “If you look at all past and traditional media—TV, radio, recordings, cinema—when the Internet started emerging, it started a convergence.”

Moreover, the mobile channel will grow as consumers get increasingly comfortable using their phones to accomplish tasks beyond making calls, he said.

“Many of us think of [the mobile phone] as the ability to make phone calls,” he said. “That’s not it. It’s a multi-modal, multichannel device, and there are many constituencies within our demographics that don’t like voice. If you call a high-school kid, they will not call you back. They will only communicate through text messaging.”

And it’s not just teenagers who use text messaging, Becker said. "The broadest usage of text messaging is in the 35- to 45-year-old age group,” he said. “Text messaging is not just for the youth demographic. That’s a total fallacy. It’s a mainstream mechanism.”

To illustrate the growth of text messaging, Becker said that in all of May 2003, 300 million text messages were exchanged. On May 30, 2008 alone, 1.2 billion text messages were exchanged, he said.

Becker also pointed out that the largest camera manufacturer in the world is currently Nokia.

“This channel has exploded,” he added.

Currently, there are 257 million mobile phones in the U.S. and 82% of the population owns one, he said. Also, 82% of households own mobile phones and 11% have turned off their landlines, Becker added.

Globally, 3 billion people or 50% of the world’s population owns mobile phones, he said.

“These devices are becoming mini-computers and we always have them at all times,” said Becker.

He said a common question he gets from direct marketers is if they can use their current databases to mount a mobile marketing campaign.

“The answer is ‘no,’” he said. “These people have not opted into the mobile channel. The Can Spam Act of 2003, the Mobile Marketing Association, regulations by carriers and common sense all say you are not going to message someone unless they’ve explicitly invited you into this very personal domain.”

Moreover, people are very quick on the trigger to opt out of mobile marketing they deem is irrelevant, he said.

One marketer painstakingly built a permission-based database of mobile phone users only to lose 60% of them in one campaign as a result of a promotion they decided was irrelevant to them, he said.