It's something of an urban legend - though I'm told it's utterly true - that, in the Far East, a mobile phone user can barely walk past a vending machine without pointing their device at it to buy something. Books, cans of Coke - all sorts are bought through phones and added to their usual monthly bill for payment. In the UK, that functionality has been on the radars of most in the industry for years. Now O2, which has just conducted a trial of such technology with 500 users,
says it was a screaming success and is ready to bring it to market. So what does that mean for mobile marketers?
Well, if you follow the whole 'valuing interaction' model (see
here for what that means), then mobile phones as cash utterly completes the circle between promotion and sale and should therefore open the floodgates to marketing budgets. For, once sorted, the mobile wallet means any marketing work delivered through the mobile as the media channel can be connected directly to sales in a way that even web work can't.
ISPs could have worked to use their monthly billing relationships with users to allow them to add web purchases to their connection charges, but it never happened. And, even if they had, the mobility of mobiles (!) takes us a significant step further, since it ties mobile marketing to offline sales – a link that the web has battled for some time to prove exists.
So, we dream up an ad, we send it to users’ phones, they are utterly convinced, walk to their nearest store (which we point them to using GPS and mapping functionality), wave their phones (complete with discount voucher) at the nearest payment thingy and walk away with their goods. It’s advertising utopia, and a sure way to the inside pockets of marketing directors.
In all likelihood, this kind of thing will only work for small ticket items – drinks, chocolate, crisps, tube tickets (Oystercard top-up was featured in the O2 tests) and the like. But, interestingly, these are the very types of brand that have struggled to make sense of the direct-response dominated online world because no-one buys sub-£5 items online. And, since it never proved to be much cop at brand advertising, that utterly limited the value of the web as an FMCG ad medium.
So, not only will mobile wallets make our lives as consumers much more whizzy, they could also open up some large doors to bigger digital budgets.
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