Optism™

The first of the MMA Forums for this year will be taking place in Singapore next week, 23 – 25 April. This year’s Forum is bringing together the world’s leading mobile marketers and big brands to showcase smart approaches to mobile marketing. Through their examples and discussions, you’ll learn how to capitalize on the power of mobile in your own endeavors.

We’re happy to report that Optism’s Avtansh Sharma, Commercial Director, Media Monetization for Alcatel-Lucent, will be presenting at the Forum. Avtansh’s session, Mobile Marketing Meets the Wallet, will focus on the promise of commerce aided by advertising and how you can use mobile as the connective tissue in your marketing strategies. Avtansh will explore the benefits of surrounding mobile payments with additional value such as offers, deals and loyalty programs. This topic is very timely, given the growing demand from the industry to bridge the gap from advertising to actual conversions and demonstrate the ROI from mobile marketing.

The MMA Forums provide an excellent opportunity to learn the inside scoop on our always-exciting industry. There’s still time to register so please check it out. If you can’t join us, then follow the conference chatter on Twitter #MMAF2012. We hope to see many of you there.

This year at MWC, we will be showcasing a complete Mobile Commerce offering that includes our permission-based Mobile Marketing solution, Optism, as well as the Alcatel-Lucent Mobile Wallet Service and Digital Media Store. Our Mobile Commerce solution addresses the entire lifecycle of user purchases from preferences, promotion and discovery, to storefronts and settlement. Thomas Labarthe, Vice President of Mobile Commerce Solutions, will be at MWC ready to talk to you about how our Mobile Commerce offerings can help you foster new business opportunities.

Optism is one example of the innovative thinking at Alcatel-Lucent, a company that combines technological expertise, hands-on global experience and creativity to help operators maximize profitability. Alcatel-Lucent’s strength in both IP and wireless has put the company at the forefront of the mobile broadband revolution. At MWC, Alcatel-Lucent will be offering guided tours of the booth, with seven tour options to fit different business needs and interests. To learn more, check out the Alcatel-Lucent Mobile World Congress website.

Join us at MWC — February 27 to March 1, 2012, Barcelona, Spain — to find out what Optism and Alcatel-Lucent can do for you. We’ll be in Hall 6, Booth 6C23. Even if you can’t make the show, you can participate in the excitement by following us on Twitter @Optism. We’ll be sharing our insights into the show throughout the event.

This week marks our final Permission marketing in the news roundup for 2011. What a great year it has been! To send us all off to year-end celebrations in the right mood, we have reports on Mobile Marketer’s “Marketer of the Year” as well as some inspiring video of mobile campaigns from Mobile Marketing magazine. Also, we hope you will indulge us with our first two pieces, which feature our own recent publications.

Hot off the press, we’d like to draw your attention to a new article by Optism’s Lisa Ciangiulli, published on MobileGroove. In “Why Starbucks’ Mobile Strategy Sets The Bar(rista)” Lisa commends Starbucks for demonstrating their “respect for us (the customer) and a deep understanding of what we need on the move.” Lisa believes the most “effective advertising delivers us value.” And for Lisa, an on-the-go multi-tasking mom and marketing expert, Starbucks delivers the perfect mix of “utility and familiarity.”

Recently named the “Best iPhone Lifestyle App in the U.S.”, the Starbucks app enables people to use their smartphones to make mobile payments, track their Starbucks rewards and send e-gifts to loved ones. In her article, Lisa explores how Starbucks has succeeded by “paying meticulous attention to…the Three Rs of mobile marketing: respect, reinforcement and repeating.”

This week also marked the conclusion of our review of Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing. The series was conceived as a fitting way to celebrate Optism’s one year anniversary. Over the past several months, we’ve featured a chapter-by-chapter review of Seth’s seminal book and analyzed how changes in the mobile and advertising marketplace have impacted the recommendations in his book. We hope you have enjoyed this series. For us, it’s been an opportunity both to be impressed with how innovative Seth’s original work was and to see how far we’ve come as an industry. At Optism, we are firmly committed to permission-based mobile marketing. Read the rest of this entry »