The Globe and Mail reported today that Microsoft is again talking to Yahoo. Get the full article here.

Seen largely as a way to counter any potential Google and Yahoo advertising partnership, a new Microsoft relationship would bolster their rating and access to the market while giving Yahoo shareholder value without raising too many regulatory eyebrows around anti-trust.

The long term play

Although still relatively small compared to the desktop web market, partnering with Yahoo now means Microsoft can also get access to their leading mobile platform.

Within two years mobile advertising in Canada will include inventory for marketers that will reach beyond Carrier on-deck portals. Already we are seeing early versions of mobile search (with proximity capabilities), mobile video, and mobile social networking sites with built-in ad-serving abilities. This market is going to be massive.

It also sets up the possibility of another takeover attempt in the not so distant future.

It’s a silly excercise, but everybody does it.  After a banner year for mobile in Canada, here are 10 outrageous predictions for 2008:  

1. SMS third-party advertising – every SMS you send is 150 characters…most of which is sent as blank space. I predict new services will take advantage of this in 2008 to deliver SMS advertising to off-set mobile costs for the consumer (but only if they opt-in of course)
2. Mobile Web advertising will take a piece of your media buy. We’ve seen it happen with online media…now with more inventory becoming available off-deck, the time is right to test and pilot this channel
3. MMS Common Short Codes will finally arrive and usher us into a new era in Mobile marketing in Canada….or at least catch us up to the rest of the world.
4. Mobile payments (m-Commerce) will start to emerge from text books, blogs, and sales pitches.  Look for pilots from Interac, Visa and at least one of the major banks next year.
5. The iphone will finally arrive in Canada – but it will be the second generation 3G phone that will support higher internet access speeds and cool features like video calling. This will be offered exclusively on the Rogers network – but don’t be surprised if another non-mobile retailer offers them for sale first
6. Fixed or low-cost data plans will be universal across all carriers in Canada. It’s already started with Bell and Rogers now offers an $80 / month plan for 500 megs of data – plenty for most of us. It’s still a long way from other plans around the world that are 4 times cheaper or better, but it’s a start
7. Due to fixed or low-cost data plans, look for the mobile web to catch fire.  Marketing campaigns will start incorporating mobile web strategies as part of their marketing mix
8. A new mobile carrier will be announced. The Canadian government announced the opening of new spectrum and is reserving a piece of it for a new player and with special engagement rules that will make it easier for a new competitor to enter the market.
9. Google will continue its charge towards world mobile domination. Look for their gphone sometime in the 3rd quarter and look for them to either bid on spectrum in the U.S., buy a carrier like Sprint outright to own a piece without having to go through the auction process or leverage their new mobile platform called Android to get direct access to many subscribers across many carriers.
10. Social Networking will make the leap from desktop to Mobile as a primary interface / access point 

Even if only a few of these come to fruition in 2008, it will be a great year for Marketers and a great year for Consumers.

Happy Holidays!

The CWTA just released their third quarter report on the Canadian mobile industry. Highlights include:

1. September 2007, person-to-person text messages totalled 946.7 million (approximately 31.5 million per day), up from 795.3 million in June 2007.
2. The total number of person-to-person text messages sent during the first three quarters of 2007 totalled 6.8 billion, surpassing the total of all text messages sent in 2006 which was 4.3 billion messages. Canada is on track to deliver over 9 billion text messages in 2007.
3. There are now over 19 million mobile subscribers in Canada or about 60% adoption overall. Adoption is around 70% in major urban areas and around 80% in major cities.
4. There were over 500,000 new subscribers in the third quarter.
5. 80% of mobile customers are on postpaid plans – so 20% are on prepaid plans.
6. There have been 18 applications processed for mobile micro-payments (mCommerce) in Canada in 2007.

What does this mean for marketers in Canada? It’s time to divert marketing budget to mobile. If you are looking for support with customer acquisition campaigns – SMS is still the way to go… or at least where you should begin your efforts.

Mobile web (including advertising) is growing and it’s now possible to buy inventory off-deck. Off-deck means developing something that isn’t carrier specific or that does not rely on the carrier for delivery. This means you can now promote your product or service beyond the confines of the “on-deck” carrier web experience.

For marketers looking for customer retention or growth tactics to compliment existing initiatives - SMS is still a great place to start by offering alerts, timely news, or information that is specific and personal to your customer. Stay away from many to 1 messages. Mobile is a very personal channel that rewards 1:1 communication. 

Marketers who have had success using Mobile have seen 94% open rates or better on SMS and 15% response rates to a call to action.   I don’t know about you, but that’s information I’ll be sharing with all our clients as we roll into the new year.

Tired of waiting for the iphone to arrive in Canada or tired of out-of-world expensive data plans?

Bell has quietly launched a fixed data plan with the new HTC touch mobile device.

For as little as $15 / month, consumers can get unlimited data plans as part of the Bell fun bundles.

Click on the image on the left to get a full screen shot of the comparison chart between the Bell HTC plan vs. iphone vs. the Telus HTC plan.

Although the HTC touch is no i-phone killer in terms of usability and overall cool factor, it’s an impressive looking mobile device stacked with many features that will make some geeks think twice about waiting for the iphone.

This is a pre-emptive strike from Bell to counter the hyperbole created over the iphone.

This is great news for consumers as Bell’s plan should lead to more affordable data plans across all carriers.

Marketers take note - this could mean the mobile web will finally catch on in Canada!  Could 2008 be the year of the mobile web?

Steve Levy, President of Market Research in Eastern Canada for IPSOS Reid, declared at this week’s CMA digital marketing conference that there is no mobile marketing in Canada. According to their research, 27% of Canadian marketers agree that mobile marketing will be very important in the future with 9% indicating they are practicing it now. Steve indicated he didn’t know how anybody could actually be doing mobile marketing now as Canadian carriers don’t yet support it.

I had an opportunity to speak with Steve after his presentation and suggested that his definition of Mobile Marketing was likely different from the 9% practicing it in Canada today.

He pointed out that when he walks by a retail outlet he doesn’t get coupons or messaging sent to his mobile device – which is how he defines mobile marketing. His definition really refers to location based services (LBS) or sometimes referred to as location based messaging (LBM). LBS / LBM does work in Canada across all carriers for those with built-in GPS in their devices (like the Blackberry 8800), but all the examples I’ve worked with require you to download a supporting application to your mobile device to make it work. Related to this are QR Codes (or Quick Response Codes) which are already rampant in other countries. Oh, another interesting stat from the Ipsos-Reid survey, 29% of marketers believe that QR Codes will be a part of many campaigns in the next three years. I’ll cover more on LBS & QR Codes in an upcoming article.

Mobile Marketing is more than LBS and QR Codes, although it is true that the future of Mobile Marketing could revolve around them.

Mobile Marketing is about creating conversations and creating engagement with audiences through the Mobile channel. Put another way, mobile marketing is about amplifying branded events, extending product or service experiences and extending the reach of a campaign which may already include TV, print, web, and email.

When I give an overview of Mobile Marketing to our clients, I tend to break it out into four channels:

1) SMS (or text messaging) & MMS

2) Downloading (ringtones, video & images) & Applications

3) Mobile Web

4) Mobile advertising

Of course others may define or categorize the mobile channel a bit differently, but I’ve found that using this approach can bring clarity and focus to your conversations. Over the coming weeks, I’ll provide my point of view of how to leverage each of these channels into your marketing mix. This year’s CMA conference had its moments, but I’m looking forward to next year’s conference where I’m expecting a location based message to be delivered from centre stage.

Marketing Magazine hosted the Mobile Breakfast: Brands in motion recently in Toronto and Montreal featuring John Hardl who is a global advisor to P&G on mobile marketing.

There were over 100 marketers at the Toronto event and over 70 in Montreal from Fortune 500 companies in Auto, Financial, Pharma, and Retail.

John delivered an engaging presentation that covered his definition of mobile marketing and presented several case studies on how he has been leveraging mobile as an essential part of his marketing mix for Proctor & Gamble.

Here are some key takeaways / lessons learned from his presentation:

1) Ad placements on carrier platforms in the U.S. are resulting in great ROI & engagement. In some campaigns, John experiences a higher number of unique visitors on mobile compared to web.

2) Mobile web is part of every campaign – but people would rather SMS for the initial engagement / opt-in process than provide an email address in a mobile web form. Mobile web has worked great in retail when purchase decisions are being made. Consumers are pulling up sites on what colour lipstick to buy for example.

3) Marketers buy audiences – not tools… so be sure to partner with a mobile marketing agency that will partner with you - not just sell you a nifty platform or tool box.  

4) Mobile works best as part of integrated marketing strategy. John has experienced great lift from magazine ads and television that include a call to action to an SMS short code or mobile website.

5) Mobile provides a constant engagement mechanism in a fragmented world.

In Canada, we don’t have access to a lot of inventory from the carriers for mobile banner placements – but this bound to change soon.  Because consumer data plans are not yet fixed or really cheap like they are in the U.S., mobile web in Canada is not as integrated into an overall marketing campaign as it is already in the

It’s interesting to see how the mobile browse space is finally starting to defnine itself.  Although still mostly an after-thought for most websites, many are now extending their reach to the mobile environment. The first big question – how do we differentiate our mobile site from our current website?

Adding an “m” subdomain to an existing one makes a lot of sense. Examples of this are “m.facebook.com” and “m.netvibes.com”. It’s simple, intuitive, and easy to remember.

Adding “mobile” to an existing domain does not make any sense to me – like cnnmobile.com. Why did CNN more then double their URL for mobile? That seems backwards to me. Given the size of a key pad and number of letters available on the average mobile device, why wouldn’t you look for the simplest way to make your site available via mobile?

There is also the mobile domain – .mobi which now has over 5 million indexed pages on google. There is a lot of discussion around the long term viability of this relatively new domain name. It took about 10 years for 1 million dotcom addresses to be registered – but well over 500,000 domain names have been registered dotmobi in the last 12 months. This is one to watch and track over the next 12 months. Google.mobi and fordca.mobi are two examples of big brands deciding to leverage the mobile specific domain over other alternatives. Why? For one thing, dotmobi is becoming a brand trust for consumers that says “this site will work great on my mobile device.” Following W3C approved design and development standards is part of the agreement when a dotmobi domain name is granted to you. It’s an interesting approach that is building momentum worldwide.

With over 3 billion mobile devices live around the world compared to around 700 million Internet connections, the mobile channel will (not if) become the dominant digital access point for consumers. Isn’t it time you incorporate a mobile browse strategy as part of your overall online brand outreach plan?