I’ve been involved with affiliate, or performance-based marketing for a long time now.  More recently I’ve been interested in advertising models that utilize the benefits of performance-based marketing together with other forms of new-age advertising- primarily mobile marketing.

Taking the obvious benefits from today’s mobile marketing methodologies, and working them into a model that only charges advertisers for results would be a winning combination in my book.  Advertisers use affiliate marketing to drive sales, leads, clicks, etc, but only pay the publisher, networks, etc. when they produce results.  This takes a lot of the wasted ad-spend away, and significantly increases ROI in almost every situation.  This is the reason many small and large brands alike have been using the performance-based model for years and years.  Up until recently, however, it was only carried out online.

While there aren’t many services available that take this model into the realm of mobile, they’re starting to emerge if you dig deep enough.  One in particular is a company called RevTrax.  They’re utilizing mobile marketing, and mobile coupons in particular, together with a performance-based model to drive results to the brands distributing digital coupons or using any form of “customer loyalty” programs.

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With paid mobile apps and content growing in popularity, and people becoming more comfortable with the idea of using their mobile devices for payments, Bango has introduced a new secure and low-cost method for integrating credit-card payments into apps and digital content.

With increased smartphone usage and the evolution of the mobile Web, Bango has created an ”easy on” ramp to selling content on the mobile web as well as a solution to give businesses a low-cost, easy way to capture revenue from the growing number of smartphone users- users that are getting a lot more comfortable purchasing items using their devices much like they would on their PCs.  

With the new solution from Bango, anyone can offer credit card payments to their mobile visitors and refine their product offer, pricing and consumer experience, with the flexibility to upgrade to operator billing through Bango when they’re ready.  “With the current rise in smartphone users, a lot of businesses who have never considered mobile before, are now looking at how they can capture revenue from this new market,” said Anil Malhotra, SVP Alliances & Marketing. “And many of these smartphone users, such as those with a Blackberry or Google phone, are used to using the web on their phones, and are familiar with credit card services.”

The solution works by offering a similar experience to purchasing via credit card on the normal Web, and cuts out many unnecessary steps such as entering the card type and a full billing address.  This speeds up purchases, leading to more successful transactions across all mobile devices.

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On the heels of finally entering profitability, Pandora is seeing impressive growth in terms of mobile-based advertising revenue and the types of brands using the service to promote their products.  

With the launch of mobile apps for the iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Mobile, Pandora has seen subscriber growth reach well over 6 million mobile users.  This growing platform is ripe for integrated mobile marketing, and brands are starting to take notice.  What makes Pandora so appealing is the amount of time that users spend on the service creating stations, rating songs, and scrolling through playlists.  Pandora founder Tim Westergren claims that the service’s mobile users spend, on average, around 90 minutes a day using the service.

National brands have been using the service as sort of a testbed for different types of mobile marketing campaigns, and so far, the response rates have been very encouraging.  Target, for example, claims that 27 percent more people clicked on its Pandora ad promoting the release of Christina Aguilera’s greatest hits CD last autumn than on any other mobile web campaign.  Likewise, home music systems company Sonos said click through rates were typically 5 percent for their Pandora ads, compared to the usual 1-2 percent seen elsewhere on the mobile Web.

Most mobile Web services can’t hold consumers attention long enough for a successful mobile marketing campaign, but Pandora is one that can.  The nature of the service is perfect for almost all types of display advertising, mobile coupons and many others, and isn’t as limited as others have proved to be.  

Dockers, for example, offered a coupon, while Domino’s tried it out as a direct marketing tool, testing out ads that told mobile users to call to order a pizza.  It’s still rather early to speculate, but Pandora could prove to be a rock-solid platform for all types of mobile marketing- which is still rare these days.

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At Visiongain’s Mobile Advertising and Marketing Awards & Conference 2009 in London last week, Upstream and Telefonica-02 out of the Czech Republic took home a Gold “MAMA” award for their collaboration of the highly successful “100 BMW” mobile promotion that took place in November of last year.

Spearheaded by Upstream, a global mobile marketing company, the “100 BMW” mobile promotion which garnered the Gold award at MAMA for “best use of mobile in driving new revenue and sales,” consisted of utilizing SMS messaging to allow users to enter to win BMW vehicles.  The promotion proved very successful and drove a considerable amount of traffic and new revenue to Telefonica-02, one of the largest mobile operators in the Czech Republic.

Users were encouraged to send in SMS messages as entries to win BMW vehicles, thus generating massive revenues for the carrier via SMS charges, as well as capturing contact information and opt-in status from everyone that entered the promotion.

“We are absolutely delighted with the MAMA 2009 Gold award for the 100 BMW Promotion organised with Upstream,” said Matts Johansen, Chief Marketing Officer of Telefonica O2 Czech Republic. The promotion was a significant commercial success for Telefonica O2 and this award represents recognition for the hard work of the teams from both Upstream and Telefonica O2.”

The “100 BMW” promotion was by far the largest and most successful mobile campaign ever launched in the Czech Republic, with over 400,000 participants, an average of 13 participations per subscriber, and premium SMS revenues in excess of €5M for Telefonica-02.

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Mobile search is an integral aspect of mobile marketing in many respects, but still, mobile browsers inhibit the use due to their core design.

Of course the iPhone and other “full browsing” capable devices do a much better job these days, but looking at the big picture, most devices still in use today feature very limited browsing capabilities compared to the speed of the networks they run on.  Even with an iPhone, more searches are performed using search-based apps then with the browser itself, so why is this?

The overall search experience, while all the resources are in place, still isn’t where it should be.  The problem lies in the fact that most search engines rely on the publisher of the content to optimize for mobile instead of the search engine itself.  Most people start with a search engine when searching for mobile content, which works well, but when directed to content from the SERP, the experience weakens substantially due to the fact that 9 out of 10 websites aren’t optimized for mobile- meaning they’re slow-loading, full of flash and other content not viewable on a mobile device and so on.

The mobile search engine should take care of optimizing the experience for the end-user since it’s the first point of contact for most mobile-Web experiences.  SMS search services are becoming ever-more popular due to this fact.  It’s much easier, most of the time, to text-in a query and have it returned instantly.  Services like KGB and ChaCha are growing rapidly due to this fact, but mobile browsers should make the experience as easy and intuitive as it is on the desktop.

For mobile search to really gain traction, mobile browsers need to get better.  The potential for mobile search is huge, but the browsers they run on are limiting their potential.

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There was an interesting article over at Seeking Alpha that suggested that the mobile content market, growing as rapidly as it has in record time, is already set to overtake the online advertising market as soon as sometime this year.  

While this might be an over-optimistic theory, it’s very possible that 2009 will be the year that mobile content, and the subsequent integrated advertising, will outgrow the online-based market.  Research firm Strategy Analytics forecasts the value of the mobile content market, including downloadable games, ringtones, wallpapers, video, mobile TV, text alerts and mobile web browsing- to grow 18 percent to $67 billion this year. 

This number doesn’t even reflect the rapid growth of the mobile-app market that has the potential to soon dominate mobile content and mobile marketing all together.  Still, the numbers are impressive, and the time in which the market has grown is even more impressive.  

As the types of mobile content diversify and new technologies and methods are introduced, the opportunities for mobile marketing will be as prevelant as ever.  ROI and overall effectivemess is much higher with mobile than with online advertising, so as the content market evolves, mobile marketing will prove to be a much better choice for any type of advertiser- large and small.

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The idea behind “Content Management Systems (CMS)” for the web was to cater to the need of community-based websites to easily add, edit and share content without the usual complexity.  With more and more content being optimized for mobile these days, along with the emphasis on social media and community-building, the need for mobile-based CMSs are becoming apparent.

A company called “Kyte” has filled this need with what they call an “end-to-end online and mobile solution” for distributing and monetizing digital content- primarily video.  It’s one of the first web-based CMSs to extend to mobile devices as well.

The all-inclusive dashboard includes video/content upload, management and monetization capabilities, as well as “multi-level content moderation” and in-depth analytics reporting and visualization.  In other words, it provides everything from content creation (including video/music, etc.) to analytics to mobile marketing in one central content management system.  The platform creates a community around the content, both web and mobile-based, by way of user-generated content, commenting and other social media tactics.

This shows how fast web-based content is making its way onto mobile-devices these days, and how mobile marketing methods have to be adjusted to compensate for the different types of media.  The days of purely text-based content on mobile phones are long gone, as are most of the ways that type of content was monetized.  Video, community-based content, etc. demand the need for new ways to manage and monetize that content across both traditional channels and mobile devices, and CMS offerings like the one from Kyte seem to cater to that need perfectly.

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