Mobile Groove

Is personalization essential to unlocking mobile marketing profits? A recent report from Accenture — titled The Brave New World Of Mobile Commerce and based on a survey conducted by Lightspeed Research — sheds new light on global mobile advertising attitudes.

Specifically, the survey of 1,100 users ages 18+ in Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, the U.K. and the U.S. found that 65 percent of respondents in Asia and 32 percent of respondents in the U.S. and Europe would “welcome receiving personalized mobile phone ads when within a few steps of the promoted product or service.”

The global prepaid market is growing faster than post-paid, but winning and retaining these customers is no longer about extending plain-vanilla telephony services to people on fixed budgets. The advance of smartphones and faster 4G networks forces mobile operators to get smarter about how they offer data services (that were traditionally offered to post-paid subscribers) to everyone.

A recent poll conducted by research firm Ovum (and commissioned by Amdocs) reveals the vast majority of service providers and operators can read the writing on the wall.

Amazon may be a little late to the party, but it’s decision to launch the Amazon Appstore Developer Portal — a new self-service tool that allows mobile application developers to join the retailer’s Appstore Developer Program and submit apps for the upcoming launch of the Amazon Appstore for Android — shows a fast-follower approach may stir up the market more than Apple and Google combined.

Read between the lines and Amazon is out to take on Android Marketplace and cut out mobile operators (by copying Apple’s payment approach that allows consumers to purchase apps using a credit card stored on file, and so removes mobile operators from the revenue split altogether).

People want what they want. As a result, they have come to expect – even demand – content and services in tune with their lifestyles and life stages. On mobile – the fiercely personal device we take with us everywhere – the requirement for relevancy is even greater, which is why personalization is poised to become a mobile megatrend. Put another way, personalized recommendations and schemes that effectively expose us to the content we are most likely to appreciate (content ranging from websites to marketing messages to mobile apps) are gaining traction.

One mobile operator that “gets” the strategic importance of personalization (if only to satisfy our own requirement for convenience and reduce the heavy-lifting when it comes to choosing our entertainment) is CSL, the leading mobile operator in Hong Kong with 2.6 million subscribers.

The meteoric rise in the number of connected devices and the advance of hardware and software products by providers including Google and Apple to leverage the three screens – mobile, TV and Internet— has whet consumers’ appetites for new and connected experiences that deliver us content across time, place and platforms.

Indeed, 2010 has turned out to be the year for multi-screen content services and – more importantly – for multi-purpose applications and solutions that allow consumers to call the shots. Nielsen Three Screen Report – a regular analysis from Nielsen’s Cross-Platform Audience Measurement initiative to analyze consumer behavior –reveals a steady climb in the number of Americans that use the Internet (in many cases accessing the Web on their smartphones) and their TV simultaneously. As Nielsen observes: “New mobile devices and enhanced TV quality allow viewers to engage in more content than ever before.”

The heightened interest in more relevant advertising and the raft of recent consumer surveys — revealing people would appreciate (and hence be willing to accept) mobile advertising aligned with their preferences – combine to underline the pivotal importance of personalization.

The excitement in mobile may be relatively new, but players in the online space are well aware of the business benefits personalization delivers. In the online space personalized recommendations (similar to Amazon model) – once a source of competitive advantage – are fact becoming table stakes. The real edge is in strategies that personalize the whole experience, from advertising to