Smartphone Owners Want Mobile Coupons

A new survey published by Compete.com indicates smartphone owners are very receptive to mobile coupons.

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The survey, which looked at the time of day most smartphone owners use their devices, as well as what mobile advertising concepts they're most interested in, found that usage during commutes to work and while watching TV were the highest on the list by far.

To find out their receptiveness, the survey asked smartphone owners how interested they were in receiving various types of mobile advertising. The results were quite interesting, indicating consumers were most interested in receiving grocery coupons (36%), scanable barcodes (29%), offers to save and pursue at leisure (26%), movie theater offers (26%) and ads via SMS when going by a retailer with a promotion / coupon (21%).

The fact that over 1 in 5 smartphone owners would be interested in these top-5 concepts is very promising for the mobile marketing industry, considering that it's still in the early stages of mainstream adoption. Given the nature of smartphones, adoption via this user-group will signal what works and what doesn't - with concepts that do see mainstream adoption via smartphones making their way to feature phones eventually.

It is not surprising that barcodes, coupons and other retail-oriented mobile technologies are the first to catch on with consumers. It's a concept that provides the most value to users, while not interfering with daily usage like some other concepts.

-Mobile Marketing Watch

NBC Mobile Olympics Takes Gold With 87M Page Views

The Olympics have come and gone, but not without showcasing Kim Yu-Na's grace on the ice, Apolo Ohno's fast-growing medal collection, or mobile's equally speedy growth, worthy of its own gold medal. In the past month, the games saw 87 million total mobile page views versus 52 million for the 2008 Beijing games. It's a big sign that mobile tech is being adopted by the mainstream in America.

Stats released by NBC today show even more significant growth in mobile engagement with the games. NBC said its users initiated 2 million mobile video streams in Vancouver's 17 days of competition. The number of mobile video streams during the Beijing Games was 301,000, six times less than 2010 games figures. Also, the NBC Olympics Mobile App was the top sports app at the iTunes store throughout the first weekend of the games and the final day of the Olympics.

"We've had a continuing digital explosion," Timo Lumme, head of TV and marketing for the International Olympic Committee told a news conference earlier during the games. "We now have the same amount of hours covered globally on digital media Internet, as we have on the old media broadcasting, and a quarter of that is mobile."

Through the first 11 days, NBC's mobile platforms (consisting of its Web site and iTunes App) had generated 58.2 million page views, a 68 percent increase over the entire 17-day page-view total for the Beijing Games (34.7 million). At that point in the games, users had streamed over 1.4 million videos on their mobile devices, more than four times the 17-day total for Beijing. Alan Wurtzel, president of research at NBC, noted to Adweek that there was a rise in simultaneous, synchronous cross-platform viewing. Of mobile phone Olympics followers, about 50 percent also turned into NBC.com and watched a portion of the games on TV.