Mobile Marketing Association Repositions Itself
The repositioning of Mobile Marketing Association disclosed Thursday is to create more commercial opportunities; better educate brands, agencies and consumers; offer better guidelines, standards and measurement; and better represent the industry before regulators and legislators, said Chief Marketing Officer Paul Berney. The group doesn’t have a position on net neutrality, but supports network openness, he said in an interview.
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Previously the association placed great emphasis on building a global industry, creating standards to support the growth of a new industry, said interim CEO Federico Massamormile. The need to act as “evangelists” for the mobile platform has evolved into a need to get brands and agencies to increase spending on a channel they are now aware of, he said. Marketers understand the need to include mobile in their plans but still need support to find the right role for mobile in the marketing mix, he said.
There’s urgent need for better measurement, Berney said. The group aims at creating and developing authoritative measurement, metrics and insight into the size, growth, trends and effectiveness of mobile marketing, he said. The industry also could use better standards and best practices to ease the planning, purchase and implementation of mobile marketing, he said. The group advocates for self-regulatory programs to lower barriers to entry and minimize non-economic costs of doing business, he said.
The repositioning reflects the changing face of mobile marketing, Berney said. Mobile marketing approaches vary in different regions so there’s no “one-size-fits-all,” he said. He noted the takeoff of permission-based mobile marketing by Vodacom in South Africa. The text-based mobile marketing service there allows someone out of credit to ask a contact to call them via a free SMS, which is accompanied by an ad. The operator-led ads have potential elsewhere in the world, Berney said. New and creative services and incentives are needed to be truly significant, he said. The critical pieces to mobile marketing and advertising are permission, privacy and preferences, Berney said.
Meanwhile, mobile is about customer acquisition, retention and brand building, Berney said. It works best when integrated into campaigns from the start. Marketers should consider how the medium can be used for those three fundamental tasks, he said.