Marketing Pilgrim

Microsoft announced late yesterday the launch of a new mobile search offering—product search under their Live brand. Microsoft’s browser-based mobile product search, accessible from m.live.com

The Live product search page displays products available in online stores (though the “Near Santa Cruz, CA” in the screen cap below would indicate that brick-and-mortars are also searched), including prices, ratings and reviews. The search results also composite ratings on specific features of the products, including things such as ease of use, and report the results back to you.

A sample generic search results page:

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One of the biggest gripes small businesses have about local review sites is that not all of them provide an opportunity to respond to a customer complaint. Popular review site Yelp is hoping to address that issue with the launch of a new set of tools to help business owners manage their Yelp profile.

Along with new features, such as…

• Allowing business owners to claim their Yelp profile
• Update their Yelp profile and add images
• Send messages to customers
• Receive email alerts of new reviews
• Add free Yelp badges to business web sites

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Google must have a lot more confidence in the growth of mobile marketing than I do because it has just launched some new mobile image ads.

According to the Google Mobile Blog…

For advertisers, mobile image ads serve as a branding tool and have shown to have good clickthrough rates. Advertisers using mobile image ads will also benefit because we only show one image ad per mobile page. For publishers, mobile image ads provide added flexibility. They can now choose to show text ads, image ads, or a mix of both and Google will dynamically return the ad that we expect will perform best at the time the ad is shown. Publishers who are already using AdSense for mobile content just need to update their AdSense code to start displaying mobile ads on their site.

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Until the launch of the iPhone, I’d all but given up that we’d ever really see cell phones become a legitimate replacement for our desktop or laptop computers. Mobile technology just wasn’t satisfying when it came to web browsing or information look-up.

I still don’t own an iPhone, but I do own a BlackBerry and today Microsoft’s Tellme unit launched a new Blackberry application that lets you speak commands and look up all manner of useful information.

Once users download the program, they can push on their phone’s green "talk" button and say either the name of a business, type of business, or the keywords "weather," "movies," "traffic," "map" or "driving directions."

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In the last 24 or so hours, all of the big three search engines have had news about expanding their maps programs.

Live Maps Gets Way Cooler
Live Search Maps and Virtual Earth 3D both got major tweaks this week, rolled out yesterday. The Live Search blog lists among the improvements:

• Directions and Traffic enhancements, including 1-Click directions (Party Maps!)


• Improved 3D cities (Las Vegas is shown below)


• Labels in Birds Eye imagery


• Exporting collections to your navigation or GPS device


• Tour enhancements, including HD movies

But the Live Maps/Virtual Earth blog has a much more extensive list of cool new features.

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Good news from many quarters for mobile marketing. Not only are Yahoo and Microsoft announcing enhanced mobile features, but mobile advertising response rates are up.

In a survey conducted last quarter, Nielsen reports that mobile advertising exposure and response rates are up in the US. Fifty-eight million mobile subscribers reported seeing ads on their mobile phones in the month before the survey—that’s 23% of all mobile subscribers. Of those 58M, over half of them (51%, 28M) responded to the ads in some way during that period.

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Both Microsoft and Yahoo announce big moves in the area of mobile and mobile search today.

Microsoft plans to upgrade its mobile Internet Explorer browser, according to an announcement released yesterday (no word on whether that’s just prank, though). Microsoft’s press release states that this will bring “desktop-grade Web browsing to Windows Mobile phones,” with enhanced features especially for mobile phones.

These enhanced mobile features include:

• browsing and bookmarking features (”Easily flag, delete or move groups of messages and keep track of conversations through threaded text messaging. Zoom in on text or pictures, or view an entire Web page at once.”)

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Last week, we talked about predictions for the future of mobile Internet and concluded that this isn’t the year mobile will take off. We’re not the only ones. Yesterday, Alice Z. Cuneo of Advertising Age agreed, and offered five reasons why 2008 isn’t mobile’s year. Her reasons:

1. Lack of reach
2. Poor measurement
3. Complexity
4. Isolation/lack of integration of mobile
5. No “hallelujah moment” (a mobile campaign so wildly successful that everyone will want to emulate its success in the medium)

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Now here’s the kind of prediction that I like to hear: eMarketer’s John du Pre Gauntt says that “2007 was not ‘the year of mobile marketing’ that it was advertised to be, and 2008 won’t be either.” I don’t have anything against mobile marketing itself, I’m just tired of the hype. So a down-to-earth look at the future of mobile marketing is what I want.

eMarketer’s key points:

• Text-message–based campaigns will dominate
• Mobile marketing affects many different industries—and it affects them all differently.
• Consumers are resistant, especially to targeting based on personal information that their phone and/or provider will store.

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Free, nationwide WiFi. Drooling yet, or do I need to say it again? Free, nationwide WiFi from Google. As we mentioned earlier, Google is lobbying the FCC for some of the wireless spectrum that will be freed next year when television will cease analog transmission. Google’s plan? “Wi-Fi on steroids.” (Without the ‘roid rage, I’m guessing.)

Late Friday, Google submitted a six-page letter to the FCC outlining processes and tests to avoid interference on the frequencies in question. Google also promised to reserve some frequencies not for wireless Internet and provide free tech support for people using their Wi-Fi. Presumably, this would dovetail well with Android-enabled handsets, due out later this year.

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While it would have been interesting to see what Google would have done, if it had won some of the new wireless airwaves, the company’s satisfied with it’s role as disrupter.

As Reuters reports…

Nevertheless, the auction was seen as a victory for Google, since the bidding was high enough to trigger the “open-platform” rules it requested for the nationwide airwaves eventually won by Verizon.

Google called it a victory for American consumers. “Consumers soon should begin enjoying new, Internet-like freedom to get the most out of their mobile phones and other wireless devices,” said a statement from Google lawyers Richard Whitt and Joseph Faber.

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The long-awaited FCC wireless spectrum auction is over and the winner is declared—and it’s not Google. The auction raised a record $19.59 billion dollars, with the spectrum rights going to Verizon and AT&T, among others—but not Google.

AT&T won rights to almost 300 licenses in the “B” block of the spectrum, while Verizon will be granted the coveted “C” block nationwide. AT&T spent a total of $6.64 billion while Verizon spent $9.63 billion for the “C” block and 25 licenses in the “A” block.

Did I mention that Google got not one single license?

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