Not only do consumers use these devices for shopping locally, but they do so frequently. Thirty-three percent of tablet users and 40.3 percent of smartphone users use them once a day or more for shopping locally.

There is an apparent disconnect between consumer’s heavy use of smartphones and tablets to shop and SMBs adoption of advertising with these devices. SMBs are devoting just 5 percent of their total ad spend to mobile advertising, according to BIA/Kelsey‘s Local Commerce Monitor™. That 5 percent is spread among SMS, search, display, and other forms of advertising on smartphones and tablets.

Looking just at apps we see that 17.1 percent of consumer use apps regularly for local shopping and 3 percent make purchases based on apps. Only 9 percent of SMBs are tapping into this market and use apps for advertising.

While only a small portion of SMB budgets are going towards advertising through smartphones and tablets, its is providing big returns. Four of the top 10 media, based on ROI, are related to advertising through these devices. Mobile deals, mobile apps, mobile banners and location aware mobile ads all were felt to have provided SMBs with between 10 and over 20 times the return on spending by at least 40 percent of SMBs who utilize them.

Not only are SMBs who participate in advertising with smartphones and tablets seeing big results, the consumer base for use of these devices when shopping locally is expected to grow. Fourteen percent of those who do not currently use a tablet or smartphone for shopping locally say they plan to do so in the next six months. So for all of the SMBs out there who are not capitalizing on the mobile advertising opportunity, it is definitely a move that would be wise to make.

The post Major Disconnect Between Consumers and SMBs When it Comes to Mobile Advertising appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

We have all gotten used to looking at our phones and seeing several notifications on our home screens. From text messages, to emails, to sports updates, we are able to receive notifications for almost anything. More than ever, local businesses have apps that provide push notifications to consumers to encourage traffic.

— According to BIA/Kelsey’s Consumer Commerce Monitor ™, 35% of consumers who use smartphones when shopping locally regularly use apps to assist with their shopping experience. Most are not just using one shopping app either. On average consumers have 3.5 different apps they regularly use when shopping locally.

Push notifications have contributed substantially to app use in relation to local shopping due in part to the increase in engagement that happens once a consumer joins. According to the “Good Push Index” released by Urban Airship, on average mobile application users who have opted in to push messages have a long term retention rate that is 92% higher than those who have opted out of the messages. Not only is app retention substantially increased, but app engagement is also increased. Opt-in app users open retail apps 12.5 times per month on average compared with only 9.0 opens for those who opted not to receive push messages.

For marketers, the challenge is converting these consumers to buyers. In the local shopping space, according to BIA/Kelsey data, promotion and sales for local shoppers close the loop. Coupon reminders are a popular use of push notifications for retail apps.

According to BIA/Kelsey’s Consumer Commerce Monitor, 43% of local purchases made by smartphone users within the last six months were made through promotions or sales, such as discount deals, “daily deals”, coupons, or similar types of discount offers. Thirty-six percent of respondents to RadiumOne’s survey of women and their use of coupons on their mobile devices felt that push notifications of mobile coupon offers were useful.

Geo-targeting these coupon push notifications is important to drive purchases from local shoppers, especially smartphone users who are using their phones for local shopping in a variety of locations. Most importantly this includes 68% of smartphone users using their phones in the store, according to BIA/Kelsey data. We can also see that smartphone users are often on their phones when they are out and about. With 68% of smartphone users using their smartphones in public and 60% using them in transit, geo-targeting would prove to be highly effective in encouraging nearby consumers to pay more attention to the local businesses around them.

While the future of mobile push notifications is uncertain, BIA/Kelsey’s Mike Boland gives us his prediction in his blog post, BIA/Kelsey Mobile Outlook: 5 Predictions and a Wild Card.

The post Push Notifications Prove to be Impactful in Consumer Use of Shopping Apps appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

While Apple iOS and Google Android have attracted hundreds of thousands of apps, BlackBerry remains stuck at some single-digit percentage of that number.

Is it that BlackBerry users don’t have the same appetite for apps that other smartphone users have? That would seem highly unlikely. It seems much more plausible that BlackBerry users have not been habituated to apps because there are so few of them, and frankly many BlackBerry apps aren’t that great.

The primary reason is that software developers shy away from building native BlackBerry apps. The platform is simply much more difficult to develop for than Apple iOS and Android. Some real examples:

1. Multiple Versions/Devices: It’s hard to make one BlackBerry app that will work well for all BlackBerry devices — there’s little standardization among RIMM devices. The “smartphone” BlackBerrys are touchscreen, whereas the other ones use a scroll-ball to move a cursor and make selections. There’s not even a standardization of screen sizes, which makes layout difficult and time consuming. To understand the issue in about one second, take look at the BlackBerry Operating System version chart on Wikipedia.

2. Testing: You can test your code on a simulator in the computer — but each simulator download is 150 MB (!) per device — multiply that times the devices on the above OS chart.

3. Internet Connectivity: Getting a connection to the Internet from your app is not at all straightforward. BlackBerry is designed for security, which means that all of your Internet could be running through a central proxy somewhere. This becomes problematic for development as the app code must probe and prod in order to figure out the best means of connecting to the Internet to fetch data from any sort of Internet-hosted datastore.

4. Debugging: In iOS, the development cycle is:
– change code
– click button
– watch the app load on the device and verify your code change

Now here’s the comparative debugging process for BlackBerry:

Change code, click button, watch your app get sliced in to 64kb pieces, a window prompts for your encryption password, each 64kb is signed by TWO signing servers (meaning that you need to wait for about 40 requests/responses for even a meagerly-sized app — making a build at the end of the day? forget it — the signing servers are too busy to handle all those requests; watch your e-mail box as RIMM e-mails you for every single piece that was signed (hundreds of e-mails); wait for the device to completely reboot; wait for the debugger to attach; then dig through the menus to find the “Downloads” icon to actually launch the app; then, as standard operating procedure, the debugger throws two or three error windows for which you are recommended to “ignore” per the RIM documentation; then you may check your code changes.

Bottom line: Development for BlackBerry is complex for UI, complicated for developers, resource intensive for computers, and time-consuming to test versus the Apple and Android environments.

Not surprisingly, BlackBerry has begun taking the position that native apps are a fad (see the article RIMM co-CEO interview with Barron’s this week), much like the AOL proprietary service was.

RIM’s position is that Web-based apps will dominate in the future. But only time will tell if it is right. At least for now, consumers continue to embrace the use of proprietary apps.

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Tobias Dengel is CEO of WillowTree Apps Inc., a mobile applications developer. He is also BIA/Kelsey’s new technical editor and will be posting regularly on mobile-related topics. The views he expresses are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of BIA/Kelsey.

The post BlackBerry Bets Against Native Apps (Again) appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Sometimes you see something so compelling you just know it’s the start of something big. The 7-iCollection iPhone app recently launched by Green Tomato for 7-Eleven Hong Kong fits that bill.

Simply put, it uses the phones “augmented reality” feature (if you haven’t seen this, the easiest way to understand it is look at “Monocle” within the Yelp app) to collect items hidden in 7-Eleven stores. So the user walks into a store, holds up his/her phone until a “collectible” (in this case teddy bear) shows up, and then captures it by jiggling the phone. You can then exchange items with your friends, and once you get a complete collection, receive a prize.

This is the modern-day version of the Pepsi bottle cap promo of my youth, where each had an NFL team helmet and you got some huge prize if you collected all 28 (the NFL of the late 1970s). We all bought Pepsi whenever we could and traded with our friends in a mad pursuit.  Pretty soon it turned out all of us had 27 teams and none could get his hands on that elusive Baltimore Colts (before Peyton Manning) cap — rumor was that only five of those were made in the entire country.   Some Pepsi marketer should get a gold star — this campaign is still remembered by at least one kid 30 years later.

The power of campaigns like this 7-Eleven Hong Kong implementation may be similar:

— Most important, it’s fun and addictive, and so will drive downloads and usage. This isn’t another “store locator” app; instead it gives the user a real payoff for downloading it.

— It drives traffic to multiple locations.

— The Collectibles/Prizes can be tied into whatever a retailer is trying to push.

— Collaboration among friends builds brand awareness.

— Users download the marketer’s app (e.g. 7-Eleven), not a third-party app like Foursquare or Gowalla.

— And unlike the Pepsi version of the 1970s, the retailer has the option to promote additional products/coupons through the app.

Certainly there will be many iterations/improvements on this concept — but for marketers interested in location-based campaigns, this is surely an approach worth considering. This app might just be a little glimpse into the future.

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Tobias Dengel is CEO of WillowTree Apps Inc., a mobile applications developer. He is also BIA/Kelsey’s new technical editor and will be posting regularly on mobile-related topics. The views he expresses are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of BIA/Kelsey.

The post A Glimpse Into Next-Gen Retail Apps appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Millennial Media — the largest independent mobile ad network, reaching 63 million U.S. mobile Web users — has published its August Mobile Mix report. The report covers impression activity and trends across its network, encompassing device hardware, operating system software and applications.

Highlights from the latest release include:

– Android OS smartphone impression share climbed 7 percent month over month, capturing 26 percent of the U.S. smartphone OS mix. Only Apple is ahead of Android with 48 percent impression share. Apple OS, however, dropped 7 percent from the July report. The results mark the continuation of Apple’s summer slide, as its July impression share score was lower than June. RIM placed third in this category with 19 percent of smartphone impression share. Surprisingly, its relative share grew by 3 percent from July.

– Zooming out, overall smartphone impression share improved from 48 percent to 51 percent, distancing both feature phones (33 percent) and connected devices (16 percent) and serving as a microcosm of the hastening adoption of smartphones.

– In terms of ad requests, Android also gained ground, surging 39 percent month over month while Apple remained flat. The continued rise now brings Android’s explosive growth in this area to 996 percent since the beginning of 2010.

– Apple’s growth spurt occurred with iPad, where ad requests were up 76 percent from July.

– Among device impressions, Apple still holds a commanding lead at more than 28 percent, with Samsung (15 percent), Motorola (14 percent) and RIM (11 percent) trailing. Apple’s iPhone is the dominant branded device at almost 28 percent, with the Motorola Droid rising to a distant second at nine percent. BlackBerry’s Curve checks in at 6 percent.

The post Millennial Mobile Mix Report: Android Surge Continues; iPad On the Move appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

The new Q1 2010 Smartphone Intelligence survey from Compete (a Kantar Media company) shows significant developments in the use of local search, social networking and gaming on smartphones.

The quarterly study found that nearly one out of three smartphone users has called or stopped into a local business after finding that business from a local search application. Close to one-third of Android and iPhone users discovered at least two new businesses that they were not previously aware of.

Findings from our own consumer research are broadly consistent with the theme of the importance of mobile devices in local search. For example, our latest Mobile Market View survey found that 49 percent of smartphone users have searched for local products or services from their smartphones in the past six months.

On the social networking front, the Compete survey reported several findings that highlighted the importance of mobile devices for accessing the dominant social networks, Twitter and Facebook. For example, the survey found that 33 percent of smartphone Twitter users primarily send tweets via their smartphones.

Finally, the Compete survey found that iPhone users, in particular, are avid gamers, with 51 percent having five or more games loaded on their smartphones. Over one-third, 37 percent, of iPhone users report playing games on their smartphones at least daily.

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Lisa Bishop at Gray Television took a few contrarian views when discussing mobile strategies, during an afternoon DSB session on “New Ad Revenues for New Times.” Taking issue with the app craze we’ve seen dominating the media world over the past two years, she’s seeing better engagement and returns with SMS and WAP strategies.

“WAP is more widely available to a larger consumer base,” she said. “The iPhone makes up 2 [percent] to 4 percent of devices and our developers were spending 80 [percent] to 90 percent of time reaching this smaller share of end users.”

This flies in the face of News Over Wireless’ Sam Matheny’s point yesterday about greater growth and rich media capabilities of iPhone apps. There is also the argument that what the iPhone lacks in device share, it makes up for in engagement share, holding the vast majority of mobile Web traffic in the U.S.

The mobile products and features that Gray has focused on include WAP sites for each of its stations and SMS alert service for weather, news and sports alerts (monetized with sponsored messages). Next up are coupons, local search functionality (working with Local.com) and social sharing features.

Also somewhat of a contrarian take from Gray was its recent decision to go it alone when it came to building and managing its WAP product. This was a risk at first because it lost on-deck traffic it previously enjoyed by virtue of the carrier relationships held by the vendors it worked with.

But given more smartphones in the market, Bishop argues there are more users going off deck to search the mobile Web, thus mitigating this lost traffic. Bringing the platform in-house has also allowed Gray to have better control over the dynamic nature of its content, site design, ad serving and perhaps most of all, cost.

“Selling mobile [advertising] was difficult because costs were so high,” said Bishop. “We were selling $20 to$25 CPMs for our WAP sites. But we’ve been able to lower that and see greater returns.”

The results speak for themselves: Gray has cut mobile costs by $0.5 million and increased revenues by 90 percent over the past year. With SMS, it has seen a 20 percent increase in sponsored alerts and has run 130 SMS campaigns in the past month alone — more than it did all of last year.

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