Steve Levy, president of Canadian Market Research, Ipsos Reid, presented highlights from a survey of marketing executives at Marketing Week today in Toronto. As stated in the afternoon daily, Steve indicated that only about 12% of marketers are actually incorporating mobile into their marketing mix.

The reason… apparently infrastructure barriers. Huh?

The only barriers are marketers and brands who haven’t yet educated themselves on where / how mobile fits into the marketing mix NOW.

With over 75% of Canadians actively using mobile phones and with numbers approaching 40 billion for SMS messages sent in 2009, I don’t know how anybody could say infrastructure is barrier to leveraging mobile.

Earlier this year I blogged about Rogers breathing rarified air with the introduction of their 7.2 mbps network. Since then they have nearly trippled those speeds to 21 mbps which has also since been matched by Bell and Telus with their new 3.5G national network.  High speed (nearly broadband) wireless is now truly available to most Canadians.

Having said all that, any marketer reading this post who has yet to incorporate mobile into their marketing mix should erase this post from their memory and go back to their usual ways.

Understanding how to use mobile in the marketing mix is one of our agency differentiators. The longer inaccurate messages are propagated about the mobile opportunity the better our competitive advantage will continue to be

Q: What are the Top 2 or 3 reasons clients that are being pitched say they do NOT want to spend media dollars on Mobile campaigns?

A: Over the last few years I’ve spent a fair amount of time pitching mobile to clients and potential clients as the principle mobile evangelist for the company I work for.

Here are the top reasons why clients haven’t bought mobile:

• Too difficult to engage existing customers through mobile. Some believed that because they had a general opt-in policy for communication with their customers that they had the right to automatically start engaging customers through SMS. Mobile is a permission first, opt-in only medium and not following this rule will result in a program and short code being shut down by the CWTA. Running a campaign (like text to win) to get opt-ins has sometimes been a barrier to piloting a program in mobile because of time and costs associated with taking this initial step. Unlike email, you can’t buy a list of consumers to start marketing to – and you can’t use your own unless you re-qualify them with a mobile opt-in

• Lack of metrics. Although we can speak to general engagement in mobile, we don’t yet have absolute demographic information on who / how Canadians are using mobile.  Although we have some convincing performance metrics from case studies and other campaigns, we don’t yet have the same level of details that media planners and marketers routinely reference for interweb campaigns. This makes mobile a harder sell sometimes

• Fear of doing something different. Few people get fired for doing what has worked before. In today’s market, there is huge pressure to get good ROI on all marketing spend. For this reason, some are hesitant to put money into an emerging channel until it becomes easier to predict ROI.

• Cost - even though some basic / common mobile campaigns end up costing less than an email campaign, some clients have still balked at the price. Some believe that because the medium is still emerging, costs should be close to zero. Developing for the mobile web for example is comparable to developing for the desktop web – yet some believe that because the screen is smaller, the price should be less

• Belief that the market is still too small or that mobile marketing is only for kids. Although we have good data around how big the mobile audience is in Canada, some are looking at mobile the same way they’d look at another medium that can spray a message to the masses – like TV.  Mobile is not a one to many medium – it’s most effective as a one to few or one to one channel.

Although some of the reasons mentioned above have resulted in some initiatives being stalled, for the most part we are seeing healthy interest from Fortune 500 brands in mobile who are looking to extend their messages into mobile.

Are you a client or work for an agency that pitches mobile? What are your top reasons for not buying mobile?

Q:Do you think there is enough saturation in the market from pdas that support them to make branded widgets/applications a viable option for clients? How do we position this in a world where everyone watches tv but only a small percentage use PDAs?

A:The first thing you need to do is not think of mobile as a one to many medium. Because relevance and context are key, there are very few widgets or applications that everybody would want or need.  The closet thing i’ve seen to a mass appeal widget are the weather widgets. The Weather Network now has both a blackberry and iphone widget and they are doing really well

The key to developing a mobile widget or application is to first understand your target audience and validate that you would be fulfilling a need by creating a widget.  If your target audience is not primarily on a smartphone / pda device, chances are you would have better success building out a mobile website or even an sms based application… or maybe even something on the old desktop interweb!

Having said that, last month the new 3g iphone was the top selling mobile device in the U.S. – outselling the Motorola Razr for the first time. This is significant because the iphone is more expensive – and it’s offers the richest user experience for mobile web, widgets, and applications. 

What does this mean? Soon we will not be distinguishing between smartphones and others as all phones will come feature rich no matter what shape / form they take.

In regards to the comment about television – keep in mind that consumers are multitaskers. Chances are they are watching tv and checking their email or sms on their mobile device at the same time. Many also have their laptop open too.

If you’re an agency lucky enough to control the entire marketing mix, be sure to include a call to action in your television commercial to drive them to web, mobile web, or sms. This will make an old medium like television more measurable – and you get to start or continue a conversation with a consumer beyond your 30 second spot.

Earlier this week I moderated the mobile panel on digital day at Marketing Week. We had an animated discussion and thanks to our friends at Magnet Mobile, we had a “txt your question” segment where we invited the audience to participate in the discussion.

We managed to answer many questions – but there were too many great questions left unanswered.

Over the next several days I’ll post & respond to all the great questions that we didn’t have time to get to. Feel free to comment & provide your own POV as well.

Q: What mobile data is available to agencies in Canada?

A: Unfortunately there isn’t a lot of data available to marketers and agencies in Canada yet. The CWTA publishes a quarterly report with high level SMS usage stats that include total peer to peer by month and YTD. It also reports on the % of unique users. You can get the details at http://www.cwta.ca. I also summarize & publish the highlights on this blog and you can search the archives for past data

To help fill the data gap, the company I work for has started collecting some behavioural /demographic data on SMS programs that we run in-house which we can anecdotally apply across the board. We also track usage patterns from our own mobile web programs.

For mobile advertising stats, be sure follow Admob -they’re a global leader in mobile advertising and frequently report on their own network usage broken out by country.

The leader in Mobile metrics (m:metrics) was recently bought out by Comscore; however, they don’t offer anything on the Canadian market. Hopefully this will change in the coming year as marketers are hungry for more data.

In summary -there is an opportunity for a data aggregator to develop relationships with Carriers and other ecosystem players in Canada to provide marketers and agencies some much needed insight.  We’re even willing to pay for it

Today is the start of Marketing Week and today’s theme is digital day. There is an impressive roster of keynotes and break out sessions. Check out the full agenda for the week here.

I’ve been invited to moderate the mobile breakout session this morning entitled “Mobile Marketing to Die For.” Yah, it’s a bit dramatic, but the session should be fun, engaging, and educational. Here’s a full description of the session:

Text to win. Mobile couponing. Is this the extent of the opportunity in mobile for advertisers? Hardly. In Europe, Asia and the U.S. marketers are leading the charge with increasingly complex campaigns that allow them to do everything from reach target customers to identify influential consumers. This session will include real-life examples from outside Canada to show what’s possible in the mobile space
Moderator: Phil Barrett, Senior Director, Mobile & Interactive, Carlson Marketing
Panel:
Derek Colfer, Co-Founder and VP of Strategy, Jambo Mobile Solutions
Nick Patsiopoulos, Director, Mobile and Digital Services, Yahoo! Canada
Marc-Henri Magdelenat, Director, Sales & Marketing, Microsoft Mobile Advertising
Michael O’Farrell, Chair, dotMobi Advisory Group, Vice Chairman, ooober, Co-Author, “Mobile Internet for Dummies”. If you are interested in purchasing “Mobile Internet for Dummies” please click on the link here. I also reviewed his book on onedegree.ca here.  

I’ll be participating in the entire day. Follow my tweets at #mw08