(Image source: threehighlights)

Mobile has become the holy grail of marketing, but like many things that create such a buzz, it’s a classic case of nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so retailers and brands quickly build it into their business strategy.

A few years ago when social media kicked off, it was the same story. However, it soon became clear that the ones that were really ‘doing it’ were those who had something valuable to offer, and most importantly, respected the personal boundaries between the consumer and social media – the same is critical with mobile.

Digital is growing at an immense rate, and as consumers become more and more digitized, retailers are rightfully becoming more focused on this channel. However, despite the incredible opportunity that digital provides, it also creates a gap between a retailer’s digital and physical interaction. Digital might seem more exciting, but physical can be too – and that’s where mobile comes into play. Mobile has the ability to link together the retailer’s physical world assets with their digital presence.

Take for example the mobile app. On average, as a consumer, I carry a number of retailers and brands’ apps on my mobile phone. I download the app in excitement, which doesn’t last very long once I figure out it’s just a replica of what I can find on their (mobile) website. For all the effort, money and time spent on making and promoting the app, it doesn’t offer me any additional value – so it ends up biting the dust on my mobile phone. So whilst that particular retailer or brand may have a ‘mobile presence’ in my life, in reality all they have is just an expensive piece of real estate on my handset.

Apply this to Out of Home advertising. Do you as a retailer just want to be seen? Or do you want to be interacted with? Do you just want to advertise an offer on a billboard and hope it drives sales, or do you want consumers to receive the offer straight on to their mobile – over the air or tap or scan – to download that offer directly onto your app and spend it the next time they are in your store? The latter is possible by utilising existing capabilities which already exist on the consumers’ mobile – such as Near Field Communication (NFC), Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and QR code. However, technologies, like BLE, which are push opposed to pull require caution when used. There is a close line between relevancy and spamming. Remember, nobody needs coffee while they’re sleeping! In other words, it’s important to make sure that your customer has a choice in what they receive and when they receive it, so that the content is relevant and personal. At all times.

The key to making sure that your mobile content is relevant and personal is data! A consumer’s mobile behaviour, from offer to engagement, to purchase, can give a wealth of information to the retailer or brand about what they like and where their interests lie. The same mobile app that was once biting the dust now holds the key to personalisation. Data such as shopping preferences, gender, demographic and lots more which are stored on mobile apps, can be extracted and utilised. Wouldn’t it be better to push a message to a potential customer walking past your store that is relevant, as opposed to sending out an offer on men’s jeans to the wrong gender? More importantly, wouldn’t it be great to show real ROI? I’m not just talking number of downloads, I’m talking the number of times your app has pushed a customer in your store and a purchase has happened.

Flipping the switch on mobile means going from having a ‘mobile presence’ to having an ‘activated’ mobile presence. It means going from ‘mass’ to ‘personalisation’. It’s simple – you can make mobile a game changer, or for some, it could be just game over. It depends on whether the switch is on or off.

With more than 85,000 attendees, Mobile World Congress 2014 (24-27th Feb) held at Fira Gran Via and Fira Montjuic in Barcelona proved to be one of the biggest and busiest events to date, with attendees from over 200 countries.

There was a heavy presence from the usual suspects, namely Mobile Network Operators, Handset Manufacturers and OS providers, but they shared centre stage with an explosion of mobile solutions from other areas, best illustrated by the diverse range of keynote speakers which included Mark Zuckerberg, CEO at Facebook, plus CEOs from different industries and companies as far afield as Ford, IBM, Cisco, Bitcoin, Raspberry Pi, Shazam, WhatsApp to name but a few. Basically the who’s who of anyone connected to mobile seemed to be present with over 1,800 companies exhibiting in total.

As in previous years, Proxama was well represented at the show with a presence in the GSMA Connected City. This was a collaboration between Proxama, Gemalto, Verifone, Weve, The Logic Group, AIMIA, Deutsche Telekom and Escher to showcase multi-party interoperability of the standardised (NFC SIM-based) approach to loyalty and coupon redemption through existing contactless payment readers. This generated a huge amount of press and interest from many parties including the Prince of Spain! What was particularly pleasing was how collaboration across multiple vendors, in a very short period of time, can lead to great things – valuable lessons for everyone participating in a complex ecosystem where participants will always be dependent upon each other to deliver interoperable solutions and services.

Proxama were also present on the Valid stand, reinforcing our partnership announcement the previous week which extends Proxama’s reach into the key market of Brazil and the wider South American region.

Proxama also ran demos on the Trustonic stand, which included HCE Payments and a MasterPass secure payments demo. With a TEE installed base of around 150 million Android handsets which continues to grow, this emerging technology and partnership opens up many new exciting solutions in the provision of secure mobile applications.

In our own meeting room, Proxama ran demos showcasing Bluetooth LE (service discovery) in partnership with HCE and SIM SE Payments as well as HCE and SIM SE loyalty & coupon redemption solutions, highlighting the fact that technology and services can indeed be decoupled and independent from each other.

There were some key recurring themes, with a recognisable and significant interest around relative newcomers Bluetooth LE (Beacons)

NFC remains omnipresent and seemed to enjoy a renaissance on the back of HCE and BLE (as complementary technologies, not competing ones), but far from being just a payment technology, NFC solutions were exhibited in devices as diverse as cars (Ford), homes and connected devices (Qualcomm), access control (various) and many other connectivity based solutions.

An undeniable take away from the event was that mobile commerce remains a big ticket item, and I personally returned from MWC 2014 feeling more positive and energised about the future of mCommerce than I have in years. Which technologies will prevail may remain uncertain, but it’s evident that the smartphone will continue to play a pivotal role in all our lives in the years to come.

By Andy Ramsden, Direct of Wallets & Payments at Proxama

Considered by some to be the father of modern advertising, heralded as the inventor of the seasonal sale and the humble price tag, John Wanamaker was also credited as the first retailer to place a newspaper ad in the late 1800’s. His famous quote “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half” is still one of the most referenced in the marketing and advertising world today.

Of course, we’ve made great strides since the 1800’s thanks to cutting edge audience measurement technologies and techniques. Validating our clients spend across the media mix is big business and this year Out of Home (OOH) will be centre stage.

Like everyone else in media land, OOH specialists love their data. If you want to run a national campaign looking for ABC1 males in their late 30’s with a penchant for bagels, I’m sure someone somewhere could come up with a good media buying plan for you based on solid audience research.

Now let’s take this a step further. What if your OOH specialist offered the ability to report on how many people have entered your bagel shop because of your 6 sheet poster ad?

I’m sure John Wanamaker would be interested.

Mobile proximity marketing is the next evolution in connecting the consumer journey from the ad to the point of sale and your client’s brand.

For some in the OOH space, alarm bells may already be ringing as they did with the online display world; ‘Just because someone didn’t click on my banner doesn’t mean it didn’t work’. This debate has been and gone many moons ago. OOH advertising and its attention grabbing creativity will continue to do a great job with or without device interaction, and clients are too canny to measure the value of a successful campaign purely based on device interaction connected to it. However, audiences are getting harder to reach in all the traditional media channels, and the great distraction to the consumer on the move is of course their mobile phone. It goes without saying, from morning until night, we are a nation of device addicts. Therefore, if that’s the world we consume in then OOH needs to embrace cross media initiatives with passion to stay ahead of the curve.

If I’m offered something that helps me whilst I’m on the move, is relevant to where I am, provides me with a great experience and is sensitive to the times I’m communicated with, then I’d be more tempted to engage.

As it goes, I am a fan of a bagel every now and then. If I could download an app from a poster because it’s got a big discount on a bagel in it, then I’m interested.

And if I walk past the bagel shop a week later and my app triggers another offer, then I might be tempted to pop in and buy again. Furthermore, if my experience is sweetened by my in-app loyalty stamp card automatically updating after a purchase, (so I don’t need to root around in my wallet for that illusive stamp card any more) then I might even share this neat solution with fellow bagel lovers in my office. A win for the consumer, a win for the client, and a win for the OOH specialist who can now see true ROI through measurable interaction from ad to store.

Welcome to the OOH evolution.

By Ciaran O’sullivan Head of Business Development ( Proximity Marketing) at Proxama

HCE solutions typically use tokenisation and do not require a secure element. This reduces complexity significantly (and potentially, cost too), but it’s a new and unproven paradigm being a risk based model which works well with profiling approaches.

Secure element based solutions on the other hand, characteristically use an MNO SIM with Trusted Service Managers doing the heavy lifting on provisioning and management over the air. Embedded SE solutions have also gained popularity in some areas, where handset manufacturers take a bigger role rather than the MNO. These SE solutions are generally accepted to be more secure, but perhaps less granular in control and they do need a more complex and binding eco-system to deliver them.

When Apple released iBeacon, their version of Bluetooth LE, it also prompted comments of ‘NFC is dead’ from industry commentators, and yet once again, these are very different solutions and not necessarily open to comparison.
In truth it’s about how best to create a compelling consumer experience. After all, do consumers really care how they get an offer or make a payment at a technical level? Surely it is more important that it is secure, easy to use, and most importantly, fit for purpose.

The arrival of HCE in Android 4.4 could play a key role role in bringing choice to organisations, possibly offering a faster route to market whilst the big players continue to investigate rolling out SE based offerings. With Proxama’s HCE solution (EMV-TT), it is entirely possible to work with HCE AND a secure element, allowing SPs to launch more quickly, testing out new services in a HCE environment, before perhaps migrating towards a more robust SIM/SE based solution in the longer term. Throw in BLE for targeted push offers and you have a menu of complementary options and features to choose from, offering end users a rich array of services supported across multiple technologies working in tandem.

So perhaps it is time to stop thinking in terms of OR, but instead look at what needs to be combined to deliver what your consumers want and need, by using AND…

By Russell West, Head of Business Development  (Financial Solutions) at Proxama

BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) marks a generational increase over previous versions of the Bluetooth specification and really shows that the working groups have taken on board the criticism and issues associated with the original Bluetooth work. Crucially, it shows a return towards the original intentions – a good solid foundation for great apps to use, that add value to people’s lives.

The ‘Advertisement’ section of the Low Energy in the Bluetooth 4.0 specification is the biggest alteration. It can be misinterpreted to mean visible display adverts, but in reality it so much more. It provides the method and framework for a device (a beacon, a terminal, a set of speakers or a printer) to inform other devices (handsets, laptops, terminals) that they are there and (potentially) available for use.

Unlike previous versions of Bluetooth, the handset now makes a decision on whether to do anything about a device when it first sees an ‘advert’. The receiver decides (based upon its configuration, and apps installed by the consumer) whether to act on the advert by allowing pop-up messages, or processing that information in some other way (perhaps logging it into a database for future voucher or reward population). This by far marks the biggest improvement between standard Bluetooth and BLE – the control that the consumer is given to easily filter out irrelevant messages. It also gives app owners a great advantage, as the ability to easily filter out irrelevant ‘adverts’ ensures you only provide relevant and useful information to the consumer. Which leads to less spam and more value.

The key to this is the app that is listening to these ‘adverts’. A good app will filter the beacons and only listen for the ones that are relevant to the owner of the device at the time. A bad app will listen to all beacons in range and annoy the user with irrelevant alerts and notifications, leading them to delete the app and damages the consumer-brand relationship.

We expect to see many BLE beacons appear, maybe two in a small corner shop, but as many as a twenty or even fifty in a big department store, giving information about which area of the shop you are in. A well programmed, value added app can ignore most of these and only respond or notify the user when something of interest (based on their configuration) to them is happening. For a consumer interested in one particular department within a retail store (because of their registered interests, or monitored behaviour), they might be notified of special offers in that department once they enter the area. Whilst another person walking through the same zone would receive nothing.

Allowing apps to tightly control messaging is what takes BLE to the next level when comparing it to the original ‘Bluetooth Spam’. By allowing Brands and Retailers to send valuable, targeted messages to specific consumers, BLE can help increase consumer engagement and drive sales in-store. By ensuring that content pushed to users is relevant, personal and is received at the right time, BLE can and will transform the retail experience.

By James Taylor  Head of R&D at Proxama

As 2013 came to an end, predictions for 2014 have been making headlines with many journalists declaring this year as the year of mobile. But 2014 is not the year of mobile. Mobile is already here and has been for a while. We think 2014 is about the next phase of evolution for mobile, in 2013 mobile was perceived as just another channel. 2014 will be about using personal mobile devices to connect our experiences across all the different channels. And to do this we have to focus on the enabling technologies that support frictionless interaction between physical world things and digital services.

2013 saw mobile strategies take a big step forward. Many companies scaled their mobile presence by delivering big on commerce enabled mobile sites and apps – we even experienced the UK’s first ‘truly mobile Christmas’. But, we’re not there yet – we’ve only scratched the surface.

Mobile had a significant impact on lots of different industries throughout 2013, but arguably its impact on retail has been the most noticeable of them all. Christmas was a record-breaking period for mobile commerce. John Lewis reported a growth of 22.6% in its online sales with mobile devices overtaking desktop computers and laptops for the first time. And likewise US retailer Macy’s experienced strong holiday shopping as it focused on closing the gap between store, desktop and mobile.

Many other traditional bricks & mortar retailers, however reported a significant drop in Christmas trading. Despite many online successes there was no Christmas cheer for the UK high-street, highlighting that just having mobile apps and websites, doesn’t necessary solve the business challenge of staying relevant.

Mobile has been mainly treated as simply another channel, mimicking the work of existing e-commerce offerings and making the user experience work on mobile devices. Whilst this is a great starting point, it’s meant that many retailers and brands are still challenged when it comes to cross platform consumption and aren’t creating a seamless shopping experience for their consumers. For retailers to create a truly Omni-Channel experience, their consumers should be able to interact with their websites, apps and importantly, their physical stores seamlessly and interchangeably throughout their entire shopping journey. This isn’t created by using mobile as a channel, it’s created by using mobile as the bridge to bind physical engagement with digital interaction across the entire commerce cycle.

At Proxama, we believe in harnessing the various enabling technologies to help advertiser and retailer to deliver these seamless commerce experiences. These technologies include QR codes, even though the user experience is not ideal, it works. We’ve always been a big advocate for NFC, which has gained momentum in both proximity marketing and contactless payments and we now have a huge installed base of consumer devices and contactless readers. We’ve also welcomed back Bluetooth technology in the form of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) or iBeacons. We are actively using all of these technologies to create the full end-end user experience.

Our predications for the top challenges and trends in mobile for 2014 are:

Physical drives digital; the connected consumer is here and the biggest mistake companies make is to solely focus on digital. Being truly connected to your consumer means bridging the physical world with the digital. This means that physical assets can no longer be passive – Out of Home, POS terminals, consumer electronic goods and in-store media can be made interactive. 2014 will pave the way for a future where mobile and physical commerce are properly integrated with a huge increase in the number of physical world commerce assets that are enabled to drive digital engagement and sales

Data leads to personalisation; we can’t say it often enough, mobile is personal! Mobile enables the gathering of consumer data and tracking of consumer’s retail behaviour from offer to purchase. To implement an effective mobile strategy it is essential to understand the customers purchasing behaviour. Smart mobile devices combined with analytics and new insights will give a whole new meaning to consumer intelligence. Personalisation is not a new concept in marketing but we will see that in 2014 the key to success in mobile commerce is not getting consumers to buy, it is to provide a tailored experience that will help consumers buy more from brands they love.

Mobile contactless payment; technological developments like host card emulation (HCE) will become a big impetus for banks to add contactless payments to their existing mobile banking apps and this in turn will allow the network operator wallets, provided by JVs like ISIS and Weve, to provide the SIM as the most secure and convenient location to store our cards. 50% of current smartphone users are set to use their mobile wallet for daily transactions by 2016.

So, we believe that 2014 will be a transitional year for the next phase of commerce evolution. Enabling technologies will become the backbone that will foster a new wave of innovation, drive a whole new range of products and services and lead to mobile playing a centralised role in accelerating commerce.

By Neil Garner, CEO & Founder

While we believe that BLE is a great technology, the idea that it is a replacement for NFC is based on a misunderstanding. In his blog, Neil discusses using both technologies to implement PUSH and PULL strategies and how they are in fact complementary to each other, not competitive.

The question of which technology trumps the other is the wrong question to ask. Brands and retailers are not concerned about which technology wins, they are concerned with how they can create compelling consumer engagement experiences using mobile.

At Proxama, we’re focused on creating technology agnostic mobile proximity engagement solutions. So instead of asking which one, ask how these technologies can be combined.

By Andy Ramsden

Business Development Director at Proxama

It has been rumoured for some time, but last week finally saw confirmation that Android 4.4 (KitKat) will in fact support host-based card emulation (HCE).

So why is this significant and why has this sent so many people into a potential tailspin? Many Android devices can already support NFC card emulation services, so this is just yet another variant surely? Well, not quite.

To date, if you wanted to offer NFC Card Emulation based services from an Android device, you needed a Secure Element (SE) environment in which to operate – typically the Embedded SE provided by the handset vendor, or the SIM SE provided by the Mobile Network Operator (MNO). But with HCE, for the first time there is an opportunity to supply NFC Card Emulation Services which removes the need for an on-board SE environment, thereby allowing any Android 4.4 application to emulate a card and communicate with any NFC reader programmed to operate in NFC Card Emulation mode.

Of course this has been available for some time on the Blackberry platform (BB7, BB10), but with due respect to Blackberry, it was always going to be a niche solution until Android made it mainstream, which it now has through the introduction of HCE, and in the process it has opened up a wide range of potential use cases to a huge new audience.

NFC card emulation has now gone mainstream. Removing the need for an SE also removes the need for an SE Issuer (e.g. MNO, handset vendor) and an SE Manager (e.g. SP/TSM), thereby greatly simplifying the ecosystem, reducing cost and complexity and potentially removing some of the major roadblocks that have so far stymied the mass adoption of NFC CE based services.

On face value this appears to be great news for consumers and service providers as we might now finally, at last, start to see that much-vaunted proliferation of new and innovative NFC use cases we have been promised for many years. However, some NFC ecosystem players who have built their business cases to date around the provision, secure maintenance and lifecycle management of secure elements, principally the MNOs and the TSMs, may argue that HCE still lacks some of the security needed to deliver certain services.

So whilst HCE may look appetising for loyalty, retail offers and some access control use cases, what about payments? It could be argued that Secure Elements, by definition, are incredibly secure and play a vital role in the provision of secure services, suggesting that a HCE solution alone won’t meet the stringent requirements as dictated by the financial services industry. However, recent work by the card schemes, Visa and MasterCard, around ‘tokenisation’ may mean these security requirements lessen, but further work is needed to fully address concerns in this space.

It may well be the case that HCE alone can’t address all these issues, but what about HCE plus a cloud based SE solution? If a user can authenticate to a cloud-based service, which could then issue a token, which could then be used in a HCE environment, then maybe some or all of these security fears can be allayed.

Furthermore, the emerging Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) starting to emerge on many new smartphone devices, could offer additional security to the handset, and so potentially TEE coupled to a HCE environment (potentially with cloud based SE services if needed) might offer a new breed of ecosystem that is finally capable of offering a secure environment through which all NFC card emulation services can at last be offered to a mass audience.

Of course MNOs may still have the final say. We have seen examples in the past where the might and strength of the MNO community has successfully managed to block competing solutions (e.g. Embedded Secure Elements in some smartphones), so what is to stop them doing the same with HCE?

It would be nice to think the MNO can still have a pivotal role to play – after all they own the relationships with the end smartphone user, they have a channel to market unrivalled and unmatched by anyone else. The MNO may in fact supply the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle, providing the much needed and necessary channel distribution and route to market, working with the HCE community rather than against it, to finally offer a truly world beating, game changing solution for many.

From Proxama’s perspective, it is the services around ticketing, access control and loyalty where the biggest gains are to be had, and this technology opens up the vision to finally build out a full wallet capability on the phone, where the right application can be automatically selected for the card (service) that is being used. After all, HCE supports other secure elements as well, and so ‘cards’ may actually be resident in the SE in the phone, on the SIM card and/or in an android app in software, but the key thing is that neither the reader nor the user will need to know the difference.

At Posterscope we have been testing and demonstrating NFC to our clients for five years, so it’s certainly been a long time coming.  In 2011 we ran the UK’s first pilot campaign in partnership with Proxama to promote the X-Men movie.

Over the last year there has been a dramatic rise in the number of clients rolling out NFC campaigns and our 2014 campaign planning demonstrates that growth will continue, helped by the expectation that one third of the smartphones sold globally this year will support NFC.

So far, Posterscope have ran over 20 NFC campaigns with a wide variety of applications and using a range of formats and environments; from bus shelters to beermats and in-store displays.

Brands using NFC include ABInbev, Nestle, KFC, Transworld Publishing, Domino’s, Very.co.uk and many more. A range of applications have been deployed such as the delivery of exclusive music and audio, sample book chapters, vouchering, competitions, social links, maps and directions and even purchase options straight from the poster.

Effectiveness & Learnings:

Brand equity statements and purchase intent can increase significantly:

• For Becks Vier 51% said it would make them more likely to purchase a Becks Vier in a pub/bar and 32% for off trade.
• The NFC campaign also increased 11 brand equity statements shifting the average from 51 to 68%.
• Consumers claimed it made the brand seem more innovative, progressive and trendsetting.

Interactions tend to peak during the first week of a campaign so brands should consider changing the OOH creative and consumer reward for the 2^nd week.

A strong, clear and simple call to action increases interaction rates.

Transworld Publishing created our most successful campaign to date.  Whilst the reward was a sample chapter the poster simply referenced ‘freebies here’.

It’s still early days for NFC so interaction levels are modest and appropriate location selection is key.

Apple users interact less. Those with iOS are still important given that they represent 31% of the UK smartphone market and iphone users can interact with most of our campaigns by using the QR code option, however only 24% of interactions come from iOS.

NFC now accounts for over a third of interactions (when offering both NFC and QR options) and this has doubled in the last year.

Of course NFC is no panacea (Beacons anyone?) but all in all its good progress so far. What’s really needed are some hero applications that take the experience to the next level and inspire both brands and the consumers regarding the possibilities…watch this space!

Brand communication used to be built on the idea of interruption; brands who were able to create the biggest and loudest ‘noise’ when advertising were generally the ones winning.  However, today’s consumers are not as open to this disruptive way of communication.

With the number of channels to communicate through growing, consumers have been empowered to control the information they receive. Increased filtering by today’s consumers has made it increasingly difficult for brands to create meaningful consumer engagement and the old ways of advertising have become less adequate for reaching their target audience.

Today, there is more emphasis on providing content that consumers deem valuable, entertaining and most important of all, relevant.

Take the mobile phone; it’s arguably the most important platform for brands to connect with the consumers of today and tomorrow. Mobile isn’t new, however over the years it has opened up a mass of opportunities for brands to communicate with their audience, virtually anytime and anywhere through emerging technologies like QR codes, SMS, Bluetooth, augmented reality and NFC.

Through these technologies, mobile marketing has entered a new paradigm, one that takes brand-consumer interaction to the next level. Unlike traditional advertising however, mobile campaigns often require users to opt-in. Today’s brands therefore need to deliver interesting and relevant advertising that tells a story if consumers are to listen to what they have to say.

NFC enabled media can tell a brand’s story more effectively, as it allows brands to interact with consumers who have proactively chosen to engage with them. The emphasis here is on proactive – mobile’s personal after all.

Take for instance the recent pilot NFC marketing campaign for Harrods, who celebrated the expansion of its luxury accessories department with ‘The Handbag Narratives’: an exhibition showcasing handbag interpretations of the world’s leading luxury handbag makers.

Harrods integrated mobile into their world famous window displays by enabling handbag fanatics to get up close and personal with the stories behind brands and their creators.

By utilising the magic of NFC, they’ve bridged the physical world and digital world perfectly. Consumers were rewarded for opting in, with stories about their favourite bag designs and exclusive behind the scene footage from the designers themselves. Now that’s what you call a window shopping experience!

Utilising NFC within your digital strategy means advertising is richer and engagement between brand and consumer more meaningful.  Communication is no longer about being the loudest. It’s about a building a one-to-one relationship. And what better way to do this than through their smartphone.