Interview With Mark Kaplan, US Mobile Marketer

Mark Kaplan is one of leading mobile marketers in the US, recently giving the keynote speech CITA’s Wireless IT & Entertainment conference in San Francisco. In this interview with IF he talks about the opportunities mobile marketing presents to brands and the risks and threats created by the tactics of providers and agencies that make the sector feel more like the Wild West.

Tell me about what your team does?

There are two sides to our business: mobile operations management and proprietary products. The mobile operations management covers Consulting & Product Development, Creative & Operations Management, Content Management & Hosting and Customer Service / Mobile Support. It also involves distribution management, working with an aggregator.

On the proprietary side we create products and market these to other companies.

Can you give me an example of some proprietary products?

We recently worked out how to encode the multimedia chips (or flash cards) you use in phones (and your camera). We can play DVDs from them – and those films can be played from any type of media player. The cards come as plug and play – and even have their own inter active menus. This would be idea for TV shows on the phone.

We also create things like Mobile Enabled Banners. You put your cell phone number in the banner on a website to respond to an offer and just click go. Most systems need the user to guess the model of their phone and provide a whole load of info – we don’t need to gather that info from the user.

That’s a broad range of services – how would you describe your company’s mission?

They are all methods of efficiency that enable the delivery of the promise of what mobile is meant to be – seamless integration for consumers across web, media and so on. Anomaly aims to deliver the optimal interactive consumer experience.

There seems to be quite a few companies like yours operating in the sector. You agree?

Sort of. A lot of those companies are designed to service the carrier. We approach our business from a brand’s point of view. Another thing to notice is that a lot of other mobile marketing companies make content that competes directly with their own clients. What happens is that they learn from a project their clients pay for and then build a competitive product and market along side their client.

Would you say you were like UPOC?

No, UPOC is a pure SMS “community” more like a message board that functions like SMS spam.

Your sector sounds like the Wild West.

Let’s just say it’s early dot-com. Too many companies in this space buy their credibility with exaggerated/misleading press releseases and since most clients don’t know anymore than what they read in the trades they say; “sure we’ll go with them, I just saw that article in X magazine. Contributing to this problem is that none of the traditional Ad Agencies really know what they are doing in mobile, so they, as expected go with the flavor of the month company who recently got covered in Ad Age without really doing functional due dilligence on capabilities.

What type of risks does that present for prospective clients?

One real problem is that mobile marketing companies and aggregators are squatting brand codes: these companies register a short code for a brand’s campaign but they register it under their name. Then they hold the brand to ransom.

Another issue is that many so called aggregators are actually aggregator resellers who markup every expense in the value chain, thus diluting the ROI to the brands. Similarly, brands can have their user databases resold/reused by their mobile marketer. We have seen both of these happen with so called “expert” mobile marketers.

These are just some of the appalling business practices we have seen.

Is that common?

It’s happened to 75% of our clients, before they were our clients. We set up short codes in our clients name, in their own account – like an agency would set up a website.

You mentioned your encoding of flash cards to play video. What do you think of the trend in video?

Video will be big, but it will have limitations. Would you every watch an hour of video on your phone? No. There are better uses of the phone that have more consistent consumer experiences across all carriers, like commerce. Right now, mobile commerce is really based on premium downloads but – if done properly, with all the proper parties involved, a consistent consumer experience could happen simultaneously across all carriers.

So when is this ‘commerce’ going to come?

Very clever people are going to do very clever things with mobile commerce. Watch this space in the next 6-8 months.

I wrote recently about my theory of the ‘Battle For The Bulge’ – ie. consumers want to carry around only one device. Your thoughts?

I think that’s dead on. That idea scares various stakeholders in mobile. Look at how WiFi and WiMax will affect the industry. It puts the manufacturers in control – and the telecom companies in a squeeze. Nokia has the end user relationship with the phone user, not the carrier, meaning people buy a Nokia phone with service, but can switch the sim card or use WiFi without one. When people can make a WiFi call with Skype while they IM instead of text message and download from a VPN client, there will be no need for a mobile network,

But will that phone be an Apple?

Not necessarily an “Apple” branded phone: Nokia has some fantastic phones with MP3 players coming out in the states soon like the N91. Samsung have a supreme phone with extraordinary video capacity and sound quality. All of these phones can sync to a computer.

Mark Kaplan works for Anomaly. Anomlay is a sponsor of IF and PSFK but we do operate a ‘Church & State’ system – we interviewed Mark because we thought he was a cool guy doing cool things.