Local Search powers 30% of all Mobile Searches

Google this week shared some very powerful and persuasive data about local search on mobile phones and devices. Diana Pouliot, Director of Mobile Advertising, Google, Inc, shared with those in attendance at the CTIA Wireless Conference Mobile Marketing & Advertising forum that 30% (one-third) of all Google searches on the mobile web are about some aspect of the searcher’s local environment.

Paul Feng, Google’s Mobile-Ads Group Product Manager, expounded on Google’s efforts to make the search giant’s advertising reach as “local as possible”. Some efforts underway include developing new ad formats. Feng suggested further tweaking of those formats in the near future – changes that may even involve new forms of user interaction, including navigation. “We think of location as a hugely important signal.”

And Google is admittedly hard at work optimizing advertising platforms for the increasing pertinence of “local-intent” in a substantial chunk of all mobile searches. Google, however, isn’t along in its efforts. For example, this week Yahoo’s sales reps are “going after big companies with outlets that advertise in local newspapers and on regional radio stations and Web sites.” The marketers referenced include Dunkin’ Donuts, Burger King, Pizza Hut, State Farm Insurance and Home Depot.

The mobile industry seems to agree: analysts are now forecasting and predicting that location-based mobile spending will top $4 billion in 2015. That’s up from just $34 million spent just last year.

Mobile Marketing and Mobile Advertising center on location, location, location. Certainly already a very familiar concept in real estate marketing and other industries that base it’s value around location including: billboards, channel position on cable channels, online marketing (above or below the fold), land value, store traffic, etc.

Bottom Line: Local Intent will drive mobile marketing and advertising.

March 25, 2010 in Blog   |   1 Comment

5 Billion Text Messages sent/received each month in the US. Mobile Messaging continues to show enormous uptake in SMS and MMS.

The Wireless Association (CTIA) today announced at it’s semi-annual conference its semi-annual survey results. Mobile messaging continues to grow in both text messaging (SMS) and multi-media messaging (commonly referred to by some as picture messaging or MMS).

THE HIGHLIGHTS
SMS/ Text Messaging Stats:
According to the survey, text messaging (SMS) continues to grow at an unprecedented rate: more than 822 billion text messages sent and received on carriers’ networks during the last half of 2009—amounting to almost 5 billion messages per day at the end of the year. During the 2009 calendar year, there were more than 1.5 trillion text messages reported on carriers’ networks.

MMS / Multi-Media Messaging Stats:
Wireless subscribers are also sending more pictures and other multimedia messages with their mobile devices—more than 24.2 billion MMS messages were reported for the last half of 2009. That’s more than double the number from the previous year, when only 9.3 billion were reported for the last half of 2008 – a growth of over 250% year over year growth. The growth in messaging take up is also fueling mobile marketing growth and adoption of mobile marketing by companies of all sizes.

Device Growth & Increase Data Connection:
There are now more than 257 million data-capable devices in consumers’ hands in the US – up from 228MM at the end of 2008: 50 Million are smart phones or wireless-enabled PDAs and nearly 12 million are wireless-enabled laptops, notebooks or aircards.

As of December 2009, more than 285 million wireless connections. This represents a year-over-year increase of more than 15 million.

“With wireless connections now equal to more than 91 percent of the U.S. population, mobile broadband is pivotal to ensuring all Americans are ‘digitally literate’. CTIA’s survey results show the wireless ecosystem is constantly reinventing itself, and other industries, to be more productive and efficient” said Steve Largent, president and CEO of CTIA -The Wireless Association. “Mobile broadband will increasingly play a vital role in people’s lives.”

People Still Making Calls:
Other highlights included wireless customers using more than 1.12 trillion minutes in the last half of 2009, up 38 billion from the last half of 2008—and breaking down to 6.1 billion minutes-of-use per day. Wireless service revenues for the last half of 2009 amounted to almost $77 billion—up from a little more than $75 billion in the last half of 2008.

The CTIA Semi-Annual Wireless Industry Survey results were released at International CTIA WIRELESS 2010. For more survey information, please visit: http://www.ctia.org/advocacy/research/index.cfm/AID/10316

POSTED: March 23, 2010 (LIVE FROM CTIA)

March 23, 2010 in Blog   |   2 Comments

Teens point the way to Texting Trends (averaging 2900 txt per month)

QWASI works with advertisers and brands of all sizes and demographics. However, when we first officially launched our services in the market place in 2005, we were immediately hit with the comment “who texts” or “my teenager sends a few each month” and most aged 35-54 claimed they didn’t use it or even know how to text. Now they are without excuse – because only the smallest population doesn’t text.

During the second quarter of 2008, a typical U.S. mobile subscriber placed or received 204 phone calls each month. In comparison, the average mobile customer sent or received 357 text messages per month — a 450% increase over the number of text messages circulated monthly during the same period in 2006. (Nielsen Mobile, September 2008)

Nielsen Mobile released a new study on “How Teens Use Media” and reveled new information on the rise of mobile usage for this demographic.

Here are some excerts from their study:

Of all the mobile behaviors of teens, texting is most talked about. Fingers fying and phone cameras fashing, 83% of U.S. mobile teens use text-messaging and 56% use MMS/picture messaging. The average U.S. mobile teen now sends or receives an average of 2,899 text-messages per month compared to 191 calls.

The average number of texts has gone up 566% in just two years, far surpassing the average number of calls, which has stayed nearly steady.

More than half of all U.S. teen mobile subscribers (66%) say they actually prefer text-messaging to calling. Thirty-four percent say it’s the reason they got their phone. Still, texting isn’t the only means of communicating with teens over the mobile phone. Teens are avid users of a wide variety of advanced mobile data features. More than a third of teens download ringtones, Instant Message or use the mobile Web, while about a quarter of U.S. teens download games and applications.

To a lesser extent, teens are using video messaging (26%), watching mobile video (18%) and using location-based services on their phone (16%). There is a popular notion that teens in the U.S., indeed U.S. subscribers at large, may be far behind subscribers in other markets in terms of mobile data use. In fact, U.S. teens have adopted mobile media more quickly than in many of the markets Nielsen tracks. Consider mobile Web: as of Q1 2009, 37% of U.S. mobile subscribers 13–17 accessed the Internet on their phone—this ranks U.S. teens second, behind 50% of China’s mobile teens, in terms of mobile Internet penetration. With all of this expanding mobile activity, schools and parents are stepping in to set parameters. Sixty-two percent of U.S. mobile teens say that parents have placed at least one restriction on their mobile use. Ninety-three percent say that their school has.

At home, 24% of teen mobile subscribers said they were not allowed to use the phone at dinner, 22% were required to make certain grades, 21% had a limited number of minutes and 13% had a limited number of text-messages. At school, 77% of mobile teens say they are not permitted to use their phone in class and 50% are restricted from using it during assemblies. As teens around the world continue to adopt mobile phones, mobile media and messaging, marketers will be paying attention. Mobile marketing offers the most personal and direct form of engagement for an audience that, as this paper demonstrates, is spread broadly across the media ecosystem. Moreover, teens seem to be particularly open to the idea of mobile advertising. A 2008 study by Nielsen found that teen mobile media users were roughly three times as receptive to mobile advertising as the total subscriber population: just over half of teen mobile media users considered themselves open to mobile advertising.

However, while these trends are most revealing about teenagers, they happen to strike a chord at home too. Why? It’s a universal trend.

David Crystal, author of the book “txtng: the gr8 db8” (Oxford University Press), said that the idea that texting is still just a youth thing is a lingering myth of the past, and that moms learning to text has been a driving force around the world. AT&T also confirmed this is their own research conducted last year that showed 50% of moms and dads started first texting because of their teens. “The trend is pretty universal,” said Crystal, a linguistics professor in Wales. “It’s even more noticeable in places that have taken up cellphones even more obsessively than in the United States, places like Japan and China and the Philippines.”

So if the average number of text messages sent has gone up for this demographic over 500% in the last two years, how do you think it trends for Mom and Dads on the go – a key demographic for most brands. Let’s also look out 5 years and you will quickly see that this has ginormous implications for brands ignoring the mobile revolution.

Don’t forget, by the time the ink drys on these strudies, the numbers are even larger…. So get mobile. Let QWASI help take you there.

October 1, 2009 in Blog   |   1 Comment

ATT has Best Performance & Most Reliable for Mobile Messaging

A good friend of ours at Keynote Systems, the network monitoring company that tracks and monitors performance in various locations, has a compelling set of numbers in his email signature. I am ALWAYS shocked to see how well some networks perform over others. You know what I mean whether it’s ‘America’s Most Reliable Wireless Network’ or as another hangs their hat on ‘More Bars in More Places’ – but how do they really compare? And what does each mobile user care about most at the end of the day? Service that just works when we need it to work.

So these results may shock some of you:

	Average Availability (%)	Average Performance (secs)
AT&T	98.6113	8.9673
Sprint	94.7547	16.1505
T-Mobile	98.5483	11.1372
Verizon	97.1555	15.8996
Overall	97.2675	13.038

Want to learn more about these numbers and how they impact your business, give our friends at Keynote a call. Tal Turner can be reached at 650-403-3435 or via email: tal.turner @ keynote.com (tell him Dave from QWASI sent you). He’ll have a good laugh.

July 13, 2009 in Blog   |   No Comments

One in five households have cut their landlines

FACT: 20% of Households are Mobile-Only.

A survey conducted by the NCHS found that on- fifth of U.S. households have cut out their land line phones and rely solely on their cell phones. In fact, the rate of households going wireless may be increasing as families cut costs during the economic downturn.

Preliminary results from the July-December 2008 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) indicate that the number of American homes with only wireless telephones continues to grow. More than one of every five American homes (20.2%) had only wireless telephones (also known as cellular telephones, cell phones, or mobile phones) during the second half of 2008, an increase of 2.7 percentage points since the first half of 2008.

The number of households without a land line phone jumped to 20 percent from 17 percent in the second half of 2008. This is the largest jump in mobile-only health since the National Center for Health Statistics began this survey in 2003.

The NCHS collects statistics on land line and mobile phone use as part of its annual National Health Interview Survey. The survey showed that over 12 thousand US households became mobile-only from July to December last year.

Now there are more households in the US relying solely on mobile phones than land lines. Just 17 percent of households surveyed relied solely on a land line phone for calls.

Of the households with land line phones, many of them already receive the majority of their calls on their mobile phone. This portion of the homes with land lines represents almost 15 percent of the remaining households.

Over 60 percent of adults that share a flat with other roommates and a third of those aged 18-29 also rely exclusively on mobile phones to communicate.

Other groups relying solely on mobile phones are 40 percent of all renters and 25 percent of Hispanic households. On the other end of the scale are homeowners, of which only 9 percent have cut out their home phones.

Stephen Blumberg of the CDC, an author of the report, believes, “that with the recession, we’d see an increase in the prevalence of wireless only households, above what we might have expected had there been no recession.” After all, if a family has to choose between the two, they’re more likely to keep the mobile phone that they can carry with them.

BACKGROUND:
For many years, NHIS has included questions on residential telephone numbers, to permit recontacting of survey participants. Starting in 2003, additional questions were asked, to determine whether the family’s telephone number was a landline telephone. All survey respondents were also asked whether “you or anyone in your family has a working cellular telephone.”

A “family” can be an individual or a group of two or more related persons living together in the same housing unit (a “household”). Thus, a family can consist of only one person, and more than one family can live in a household (including, for example, a household where there are multiple single-person families, as when unrelated roommates are living together).

June 18, 2009 in Blog   |   No Comments