Data is Free

WPP just re-branded their mobile marketing arm as Joule. Everybody in the article who has a vested interest in making mobile marketing work has optimistic things to say. Others are expressing doubts.

Let's be clear about mobile: it is a different medium. Twitter works because it is fundamentally tied to SMS: 160 characters is all you get. Until there is an iPhone or a Blackberry in every pocket then SMS is the dominant medium, and all marketing campaigns need to be geared toward SMS if mobile is to achieve the scale that marketers need to drive $.

The other thing about mobile that is fundamentally different is that it isn't passive, it is active. What is the difference? As Andrew Grill at London Calling says:

• Passive digital footprint - data collected about an action with no client interaction
• Active digital footprint - data collected about an action with client interaction

An active footprint means the customer has given the marketer permission to market to them over their phones. These types of customers are inherently more valuable. The challenge for marketers is to build mobile experiences that incorporate permission-based advertising over SMS (and more robust channels if the user's phone can accomodate that).

Getting permission is hard, but it has to be done. Fortunately for savvy marketers a channel for getting those permissions exists: it is called Twitter. Tweet!