Inside Mobile Marketing

Here’s a running a list why we haven’t seen more Cross-carrier MMS Marketing Campaigns in the U.S. to date.

• Carriers have been slow to open up MMS infrastructure for off-deck A2P applications 
• Aggregators - usually waiting on the Carriers - have then had to configure their gateway interfaces to manage the new message format.
• MMS infrastructure has cost the Carriers a good deal of investment dollars. Thus the costs to run MMS campaigns are ultimately higher than SMS.  Not all Carriers - SPRINT specifically - have stated that they are NOT interested in powering Standard Rated MMS marketing campaigns over their network at this time. This means negotiations will ensure as to what payment terms will change their mind to let a particular program run over their network.
• MMS costs those consumers without a full data plan or a big bucket of messages more per MO & MT than SMS - sometimes as high as 25 cents per message.  PLUS because MMS requires a data connection - data charges can accrue as well for the consumer.
• There have not been a lot of turnkey tools announced for marketers to build out SMIL-based MMS programs.  Plus, I can’t imagine there even a lot of developers in the U.S. that very skilled in developing rich MMS campaigns yet using XML-based SMIL.

The good news is that all of the Tier 1 Carriers and the many aggregators supplying them with off-deck marketing programs are moving (some faster than others) to get their systems set-up to launch MMS MO based programs.  This will certainly spur more Social Networking an i-journalism programs -  SEE CBS Mobile’s recent launch of their EYEMOBILE website - in which users can upload video from their mobile phone via an MMS shortcode.

What really excites me as a marketer are the MMS MO use cases that come from the Image Recognition Technology camp.   The two big U.S. players in this space are MOBOT and SNAPTELL and both companies offer advertisers the ability to “mobilize” their existing traditional print, outdoor signage, packaging, even TV ads (although technical issues are inherent here) by simply allowing a consumer to take a picture of say a company logo OR an entire print ad in a magazine and send it to a shortcode via MMS.   The company’s servers then identify which marketing program the image is aligned with and triggers an appropriate MMS MT or SMS or WAP Push.  This means that marketers don’t need to modify their existing creative other than to insert some sort of call-to-action for consumer to snap a picture and send it to a specific shortcode.  This technology basically enables advertisers to insert a direct response mechanism in their traditional ad units. 

In terms of marketers creating Application-to-Peer based MMS campaigns - the tools are slowly emerging. PLEASE NOTE that dealing with MMS is trickier than SMS in that not all handsets support the same MIME types that may be included in an MMS deck - such as audio and video formats.  ALSO - the U.S. Carrier networks may have different guidelines on MMS running through their network such as the maximum payload size of each message (I believe usually capped around 300K per msg).. ALL OF THESE MEANS MORE TESTING will be required both on the part of the vendor and marketer to ensure the user experience is as consistent as possible across a wide variety of handsets.  I’ve experimented with a self-serve MMS composer toolset from Massachusetts-based CellySpace.  Pretty slick app, but as the website indicates it is still in BETA and there of course some bugs to be worked out.