by anton | Jul 29, 2015 |
A report last year by On Device Research states that South Africa’s mobile penetration rate is now a staggering 133%. ‘Staggering’ is no exaggeration if one remembers that just two decades ago, in 1993, the country had but 4 million landlines, and was just about to roll out its first cellular base station. Twenty years later, we’ve hit the 60 million mobile phone mark. For marketers, the relevance is that along with 60 million South African cellphones comes the fact that advertising rands are better spent when they target mobile screens. Some 63 percent of South Africans, Kenyans and Nigerians say that the mobile Internet has ‘greatly improved’ their lives – no doubt because it has greatly improved their ability to make informed purchasing decisions. Now that it’s clear that the number one mobile marketing trend is ever-increasing opportunities thanks to ever-upwards mobile phone sales, we took a look at what leading opinion-makers say are three more specific mobile advertising trends that we can expect during the latter half of 2015. We looked at VentureBeat, Matomy Media, Target Marketing and CNBC for certain common threads and this is what we came up with: With growing mobile impressions, there’s an increase in demand for better and richer measures of ROI. Advertisers are looking for more meaningful interaction and will therefore want to see more cost-per-acquisition (CPA) campaigns. Essentially, we’re likely to see mobile advertisers focusing increasingly on performance. As users start demanding more interactivity, and marketers realise that video formats are highly effective in engaging users and delivering stronger brand stories, video will become ever more essential. Allied with this...
by anton | Jul 22, 2015 |
I don’t think it would be out of place to write that ever since our ancestors discovered that logs could be made into seats – and a circle of cavemen could then be called a meeting – we have equated meetings to work. This is why for many years competitive types would settle down at their favourite pubs and hold after-hour meetings where they would all inform each other about how many meetings they had attended that day. This was a way of illustrating to their friends just how hard working they had been. Enter the advent of ubiquitous email access in corporate South Africa, and suddenly hard work is not defined in meeting hours anymore, it’s about how many emails you sent and received during a particular working day. A friend of mine recently told me he sent and received over 120 emails in one day, followed by perhaps a dozen text messages, and in last position, he said he received perhaps ‘one or two’ phone calls. ‘One or two?’ I thought, ‘That’s an opportunity!’ It seems to me that communication has become more text-based than at any other time in history. With people having to work their way through thousands of lines of text-based emails a day, marketers have a fantastic opportunity to be heard – quite literally – via InTarget’s voice-based mobile advertising service. These days, when the phone rings, people take notice because it has become so unexpected for so many of us. And that’s especially true of the younger generation who barely make a phone call today. We’d love to hear from you (forgive...
by anton | Jul 15, 2015 |
With South Africa’s GDP growth expected to come in well under the 2% percent mark again this year, it’s clear that marketers are under pressure as consumers slash spending and try to conserve as much of their dwindling cash reserves as possible. The good news, however, for InTarget clients is that challenging economic times are when mobile advertising really comes into its own. Few firms can afford to spend right now on lavish brand-building exercises that are designed to deliver little else than promoting vague consumer recall at some far off point in the distant future. What we’re seeing in our business in the current climate is a strong demand for ‘call-to-action’ mobile advertising campaigns that move inventory – and move it quickly, or at least campaigns that result in strong leads. Who can afford to brand the crowning glory of a 50-storey building, for example, or a fleet of 100 cars, and then wait for some unspecified future positive impact on the bottom line? While InTarget can certainly implement mass airtime campaigns, for instance, that are ideal to create general brand awareness, even better and faster results can be achieved by linking mass airtime campaigns to below-the-line promotions. Our interactive mobile platforms and applications can provide the end user with a unique customer experience featuring instant gratification – and immediate sales for the marketer. While we excel at creating billions of monthly advertising impressions through our mobile advertising properties and engagement channels, for the marketer wanting a quick bottom line impact, InTarget offers a variety of sales-supporting tools. For example, sending and receiving bulk text messages is a...
