Saab Dips Its Toe Into Mobile Marketing
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In a move that could make its business reply cards obsolete, a mobile effort from GM has its Saab brand prospecting for leads via cell phone, a strategy the company might take national.
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General Motors' clever ad campaign comes up short.
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Here&#8217;s a nice overview piece &#8212; together with the requisite &#8220;who will win?&#8221; dramatic elements &#8212; from BusinessWeek, covering mobile search:  The emergence of Internet-connected mobile phones, or what&#8217;s known as the Mobile Web, is turning the wireless search business into a horse race&#8212;one that&#8217;s too close to call. Unlike its dominant role in search [...]
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Saab Automobile AB expects to be profitable this year after cutting its loss to $5.9 million in 2003, its top executive says.
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SAN FRANCISCO (Billboard) - This past year marked the  beginning of a revolutionary experiment to sell and distribute  digital music to and from mobile phones. The stage is only just  being set, with the business models, pricing and marketing  issues still evolving.
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(InfoWorld) - Spending on mobile search and display advertising will skyrocket in the coming years in the U.S., finally making cell phones a viable vehicle for this type of online marketing, according to research firm The Kelsey Group. Spending is expected to total $33.2 million this year and grow at a compound annual rate of 112 percent through 2012, when it will hit $1.4 billion, Kelsey Group analyst Matt Booth said. This means that major players in online advertising,Â such asÂ Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, as well as the major mobile carriers, will battle it out in a market that is uncharted territory. "Between now and 2012, the opportunity [in this market] is wide open," Booth said. As the market morphs from tiny into sizable, Internet companies and carriers are learning as they go, figuring out how to compete and partner with each other, win over advertisers, and better serve mobile subscribers, he said. The boost in spending follows technology advances, such as the increasing availability of mobile broadband services, the expansion of GPS capabilities, and improvements in device usability at the hardware and software levels, he said. For Google, the broadening of the mobile channel for search advertising comes at a good time because it currently has ad inventory backed up awaiting increased traffic, Booth said. It's no secret that mobile is the next big frontier for Internet services and advertising, although the market's explosion has been prematurely predicted in the past. Kelsey Group expects mobile Internet users to grow at a 20 percent compound annual clip in the U.S. through 2012, when there will be almost 92 million people going online via their cell phones. Previous unfulfilled expectations haven't discouraged Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other big Internet companies from adapting in recent years their PC-based online services like e-mail, instant messaging, photo managers, and search engines for mobile devices. Yahoo, for example, has a suite of mobile services and applications called Yahoo Go for Mobile 2.0, while Google offers mobile versions of several services, including Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Picasa, Blogger, and search. Meanwhile, Microsoft's mobile offerings include Windows Live Hotmail, search, Spaces, and Messenger. Beyond adapting services to mobile devices,Â Google has also expressed interest in bidding in an upcoming U.S. Federal Communications Commission auction of 700MHz wireless spectrum set for January. There have also been rampant rumors thatÂ Google is developing a cell phone, but the company hasn't officially acknowledged those plans.
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LOS ANGELES (Billboard) - The music industry, searching for   ever-expanding ways to promote acts and generate new revenue   streams, is getting increasingly creative in its use of mobile   technology.
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MILAN â Mobile e-mail, until recently the exclusive terrain of business executives, is breaking out of its niche market even as cellphone operators remain ambivalent about a service that will cut into their lucrative text messaging market.
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J.C. Penney's desire to reposition its brand as the preferred choice in the "hearts and minds of Middle America" drove its decision last week to shift creative duties on its ad account from DDB to Saatchi & Saatchi, said Penney chief marketing officer Mike Boylson. The shift came after months of presentations by both DDB in Chicago and Saatchi in New York.
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Struggling electronics firm considers breaking itself up in a move that could reshape the mobiles industry
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Users in the United States continue to think of a cellphone as a device for talking, not text messaging. Marketers, however, hope to change that as soon as possible.
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While many industry and internet specialists agree that a genuine convergence between technology and content for mobile has been achieved, many questions still remain on what exactly are the opportunities for local merchants and search marketers. Is now the time for search marketers to enter mobile and bring their clients with them?
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The company is facing challenges as it changes its business from one focused on PDAs to one that specializes in smart phones.
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Open-source mobile e-mail provider Funambol is working with advertising company Amobee to give network operators a way to offer free e-mail services to users.The new mobile offering, which Funambol plans to announce on Tuesday and demonstrate in Barcelona next week at the Mobile World Congress, will display banner ads served up by Amobee on every page of the e-mail software. The banners take up about two lines of a mobile phone screen, leaving plenty of space for users to read their e-mails, said Hal Steger, vice president of marketing for Funambol.Funambol must sell the idea to operators, which would then self-brand the e-mail service and offer it to end-users. Steger envisions that operators will let customers access the e-mail service for free, without requiring them to subscribe to a monthly data plan, because the operators will earn revenue from the advertisements.But Funambol would have to convince operators that they&#8217;ll make as much or more in advertising than in their monthly data subscriptions before they&#39;ll want to offer mobile e-mail for free. &#8220;Unless there was considerable potential revenue, which I think is doubtful but who knows... operators won&#8217;t want to cannibalize their subscription model,&#8221; said Greg Sterling, an analyst following mobile search and advertising as part of a joint venture between Sterling Market Research and Opus ResearchIn the future, however, operators may feel forced to begin offering ad-supported data services, he said. For example, if a winner of the 700MHz licenses currently on auction by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission deploys a network and offers free ad-supported services, other operators may begin to follow suit, he said.Funambol already offers its open-source push e-mail software to operators. The service supports the open SyncML standard so it&#8217;s compatible with Java and Windows Mobile phones, which Funambol estimates make up about half of all phones on the market.So far, no operator offers Funambol&#8217;s open-source e-mail, but two are offering Funambol&#8217;s backup service for calendar and address book information. Those operators include one in South Africa, which Steger wasn&#8217;t allowed to name, and Comcel in Columbia. Both plan to begin offering the open-source e-mail service, he said.Operators in less-developed regions like South America might be more likely to offer the ad-supported e-mail service. That&#39;s because in those regions, end-users are quite price-sensitive -- so operators have a harder time selling them data subscriptions, Steger said.
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A UK insurer is fitting mobile technology to some policyholders cars to track their journeys as part of pay per mile motor insurance pilot.
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A new push is on for a smarter, less finicky Java mobile architecture -- with the goal of making it easier for Java/J2ME architects and devs to design, deploy, develop and manage mobile apps.
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The head of marketing for T-Mobile,   Deutsche Telekom's DTEGn.DE mobile phone operator, will leave   his job at the end of the year as the unit changes its   marketing strategy, T-Mobile said on Tuesday.