Advertisers asking (aka forcing by waving their dollars) publishers to think outside of the banner ad box is nothing new. Sure its a trend that has continued to pick up steam in the last 18 months where is seems like any large ad buy from a publisher includes something custom and unique. Everyone does after all want to be special. And large advertsiers feel that differentation pressure more than anyone.
So when you great friends over at About.com contacted the team here at ShopLocal a few months ago to help create an embeddable iFrame widget that would display T-Mobile phones, it seemed like a great opportunity to leverage
What we came up with was this T-Mobile storefront, specifically the phone finder module that is in the middle of the page. It’s a clever little Adobe Flex/Flash powered widget that allows users to browse all of various phones that T-Mobile currently sells. It was then seamlessly inserted into an overall page within About.com that has a bunch of other T-Mobile content on it. About.com did a great job of helping create a rich branded environment that has some utility and promotes the actual products that the advertiser (T-Mobile) is trying to sell to consumers.
Within the T-Mobile storefront, the phone finder / selector area in the middle left of the page is a ShopLocal powered iFrame app that pushes dynamic real time data into this embeddable widget.
SMS (Short Message Service or otherwise known more commonly as ‘Text’ or ‘Texting’) is the most pervasive digital data application in the world with 2.4 billion active users, or 74% of all mobile phone subscribers sending and receiving text messages on their phones. In the US alone, in 2008 there was about 75 billion message sent per month. These sort of numbers should make any marketer pay attention.
Here at ShopLocal we have been live for about year with SMS messaging in a variety of applications. One of the unique aspects of how ShopLocal has applied texting technology is for on-demand, ad-hoc alerting and messaging. Instead of trying to “subscribe” a user to a series of ongoing message, ShopLocal uses text message as a way of moving content from a user’s computer to their more portable mobile device. So users that choose to engage this SMS feature on any ShopLocal site are NOT signing up for a never-ending stream of messages, but rather just one (1) single message to help the user take some information they have identified as useful with them.
The core value proposition is simple then. If a user knows where your store is and/or knows an item they want to purchase, the more sticky and portable this information can be the better. Since the goal of the SmartCircular sites is to drive shoppers that are researching online into a physical store location to make a purchase, this type of shopper tool should increase the ‘conversion’ rate of these type of consumers.
By using text or SMS messages, there are loads of benefits not available to any other medium such as:
- Ubiquitous format across carriers and mobile devices
- Highest deliverability rate of any pushed based medium
- Messages are sent as the action happens which creates instant user gratification
- 95%+ of all US mobile subscribers are supported which includes all the major carriers such as Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, US Cellular, AMP’d, Alltel, etc, etc, etc (all due to picking the right underlying mobile platform partner – 4INFO)
With text or SMS messages, there are a few constraints to be aware of (so as to tell a balanced story):
- Only 160 total characters can be inserted into any one (1) outbound SMS message. This is an inherent limitation of this type of media
- Can’t track opens like you can with email. You can track sent and click thrus but open rates are not available
- Privacy and permission are managed at the highest tolerances. The mobile carriers often remind anyone that is sending message across their walled networks that unlike email where
- To prevent SPAM, no more than 5 unique messages can be sent to any given user within a 24 hour period
- This service is only available in the US. Sorry Canada…
The two main use cases that ShopLocal currently supports with mobile text (SMS) messaging are:
1. Send A Store Location Of Interest To Your Mobile Phone (just one)
2. Send A Specific Item Of Interest To Your Mobile Phone (just one)
Here is an example of what a typical screen flow would look like for the 'Send A Store' to a mobile phone or device. The user is prompted to enter their 10-digit mobile phone number, agree to a terms and conditions (mandated by the mobile carriers) and then hits a "SEND" button to fire off the SMS text message. Note the red arrow. This is the link on the page that triggers this mobile messaging feature.
Once a user hits the "SEND" button, the SmartCiruclar site displays this confirmation message on screen assuming all the error checking conditions are meet.
Finally, here is an example of what type of SMS text message would actually be sent to a user's mobile phone or device. In this case, the store address, phone number and hours of operation would be included.
Here is a partial list of some of the retailer that have chosen to deploy this type of mobile messaging – just click to see and use live examples of this mobile feature:
Time for some level setting before answering the question at hand. Within the mobile display world typically…
- Ads can NOT use advanced rich media capabilities such as Adobe Flash
- Ads are typical built using circa 1997 display technologies such as .gif’s and.jpg’sn (and maybe in some really fancy mobile ads they might use javascript)
- Ads can have only one click action (eg exit URL) for the entire ad
- Ads can NOT pull in dynamic data in real time
- Ads for the most part can NOT be 3rd (or 4th) party served
- There is little to no targeting available
- There is very limited reporting available, typically only total # of ad impressions served and total # of click throughs
After all of that, one should walk away with a very limited vision of what is capable within the mobile display world at large (yes, there are a few bright spots of innovation, but in regards to the typical mass reach of the mobile ad networks, it’s all about the lowest common denominator which means pretty limited everything). It’s light years behind of what is possible using rich media display ad technologies within the normal web browser environment.
So back in late 2008 Yahoo! Mobile, ShopLocal & PhoneValley came up with a product and solution that given ALL of the above limitations and constraints that have to be dealt with, pushed the boundaries as far as I have every seen in regards to advertising specific products across multiple ad networks. In essence, what ended up being built was a process to create ahead of time (so the offline part) every single permutation of ad creative size AND localized circular based item content (so the dynamic part). Hence where the name “offline dynamic” comes from. Basically still using dynamic content, but ‘caching’ or pre-building the ads upfront and offline
Here is an example.
- Need to support four (4) unique ad creatives (eg sizes)
- Need to advertise the top 40 (subset of overall available content) unique weekly ad products per week
This would mean that 160 (4 X 40) unique mobile display ads would be created and trafficked in this scenario.
The solution that went live ended up:
- Having all of the ad generation process being fully automated, including generation of the appropriate click-through URL that was product specific
- Allowing multiple ad unit creative sizes that were needed to create mass distribution options across numerous mobile ad networks
- Allowing multiple featured products (drawn directly from ShopLocal’s content) to be advertised with unique:
- Item thumbnail image
- Item title
- Item price
- Item specific deep link URL
Here is an actual example of one ad that was generated for this Wal-Mart specific holiday campaign. Notice that depending upon the ad size, the amount of data fields used changes (eg look at the smallest ad – it is missing the item image) as well as the amount of data inserted in each field (eg notice within second smallest ad – the item title is much shorter). All of this was based upon a rules engine that controlled the creative generation process.
Notice that the same featured advertised item (a Compaq latop in this case) has been used to generate four (4) unique ad sizes
(4.00 out of 5)
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