LONDON, 4 November 2011 – Upstream President, Marco Veremis, took the stage at the 2011 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards in London last night to outline his vision of the future of digital marketing and to make his case that real effectiveness is all about ‘quality, not quantity’ of communication. The full speech can be viewed here.
Upstream is one of the world’s largest mobile marketing technology and solutions providers, with more than 10 years’ experience, working with clients such as Vodafone, Telefónica, Coca-Cola and Nestlé in more than 40 countries.
In his speech, Veremis looked at how consumers today are being ‘bombarded’ with digital advertising messages:
“If you look at ad impressions, they’ve grown from 127 billion ad impressions in ’96 to five trillion today. To put this in perspective, 16 messages per person globally per year then, 750 today. So it seems to be results through volume, through bombardment. And the question is, have consumers may be reached their saturation point? Can they take more than 750 advertising messages a year? We don’t think so. That’s why we are sponsoring these awards. Effectiveness is about quality. It’s not about volume and I think this is going to be a big thing in the next ten years.”
Veremis voiced his thoughts about how to solve the issue and what the current trend for communication bombardment is doing to response rates:
“So quality, where does quality come from? I think quality comes from consumer insight. Take that extra, extra care and understanding of what consumers want to hear. When they want to hear it? At what frequency they are willing to hear it? And it’s a tough job. It’s much easier to press the launch button and send billions of messages and billions of tweets or whatever else. But it seems to be working the opposite way.”
“Response rates in ’96 were 7% in the digital marketing space. Today they are below 0.1% average. Now I think that tells the truth, right? People are pretty much fed-up. So quality comes from consumer insight and we’re mobile marketers. We are essentially celebrating today the campaigns and the companies that took the care to identify these consumer insights and deliver quality campaigns that deliver effectiveness, true effectiveness. Not volume, effectiveness.”
Veremis wrapped up his address with a view about how he believes mobile marketing companies should be looking to the future:
“A final thought. We are all very happy to be in the mobile marketing space. It’s a booming space, but perhaps you’ve got to think about it from the perspective of five or 10 years from now. Most likely there will not be a separate category for mobile marketing. Most likely it will converge into the wider marketing space as most other media in the past have. So we should celebrate that in fact we are innovators. We should celebrate the fact that we are pioneers. But we’ve got to think to the future. If we still pigeon-holed as specialists five years from now, it’s not going to hold much value. … I am hoping that a lot of the companies in this space are going to emerge as leaders in the wider marketing technology space. In the same way Google did.”
The awards, created by Mobile Marketing magazine, are now in their second year and the winning campaigns can be reviewed onwww.mobilemarketingmagazine.com or by downloading the free Mobile Marketing Awards application for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad from the App Store – Mobile Marketing Magazine Awards 2011 App .
On the awards night, Upstream was recognised for its expertise in generating response and engagement over the mobile channel for its marketing campaign for client, Saudi Telecom Company (STC), the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s leading telecoms provider (by revenue), across its subscriber base of 22 million.
Media contacts – EMEA
Daniel Rhodes / Valerie Christopherson
Global Results Communications (GRC)
+1 949 608 0276
upstream@globalresultspr.com
Media contacts – EMEA
Giles Barron/Colin Myer
Diffusion PR
+44 020 7025 1504/ 6831
upstream@diffusionpr.com
