I thought my first post on Right Brain, Left Brain should be to tell you all a little about my background, so you have some context for my posts about mobile media.
While I'm originally an old-skool marketer and agency chap, in 2000 I helped launch one of the very first startups in mobile marketing - ZagMe. I think even today ZagMe would have been ambitious, visionary and ahead of its time, so 9 years ago we didn't really have much of a chance, with the benefit of hindsight. But thanks to our VCs, we did help invent mobile marketing and many of the lessons are still very relevant today.
ZagMe was more than a mobile marketing startup - it was a location based mobile marketing startup. The idea was that shoppers at Lakeside and Bluewater shopping malls (the largest two in Europe) could get special deals from retailers via sms. On many levels it was actually very successful. We signed up 85,000 consumers, who generally loved the service. And we ran 1,500 campaigns for the likes of Burger King, Body Shop and Quiksilver, to name a few.
You can see the TV coverage of the launch here
One of the great campaigns we ran was for Reebok, which I'll mention as Richard Prenderville, Head of Global Brand Marketing at Reebok is also a fellow blogger here at RBLB.
Reebok were opening a new store and their objective was simply to communicate that they were open and where they were located. They sent out a message saying that the first into the store and shout "I've been Zagged" would receive a free pair of trainers.
Within 4 minutes, there were over 50 people in the store "causing something of a crush" according to the manager. The Reebok Effect was repeated many times by the ZagMe
service to promote itself in the malls and provide additional fun to ZagMe users.
This led to the memorable (and very un-FT) headline in the FT of "Mobile Marketing Meets its Moment of Mayhem".
Sadly, the mayhem wasn't destined to continue as the investors shut the company down in the immediate aftermarth of 9/11. If you're interested in finding out more about ZagMe and the lessons of location based marketing, drop me a line russell AT admob DOT com and I'll send you a free white paper.
The next few years saw me doing the consulting thing and keeping the faith that one day mobile marketing would work. I also wrote a pretty widely read blog called MobHappy, which is how I met Omar Hamoui when he was starting the Silicon Valley based, AdMob. Blogging really doesn't make money, but the indirect benefits can be huge.
The idea behind AdMob was to run banner and text links on the mobile web. Started in 2006, we're imminently going to serve our 100 Billionth ad, which is a clue that mobile advertising is already much bigger than many people think. We serve over 8 Billion ads per month (as of June 2009) on a global basis, with the UK being a top 5 market.
The big step change for mobile advertising came with iPhone, although it was already mainstream before that. Apple products (which includes the iPod Touch) account for nearly 50% of AdMob's 250 million monthly page impressions in the UK - a very respectable medium in its own right.
The main changes I've seen since AdMob started is that brands are increasingly getting involved and taking over from the early pioneers, who were mainly mobile content retails, such as ringtones. Today we have companies like MTV, Capital Radio and VW investing serious budgets in campaigns.
So there you have, a quick tour of mobile marketing from ZagMe to AdMob, or the Z - A of that world.
I'll end by writing that the great thing about blogging is interactivity. So if you have any questions or comments, ideas for topics you'd like to see covered or ideas you want to explore, please let me know. Any blogger will tell you that comments make us go all shivery and excited, so don't hold back.
