Groceries at the supermarket… 40 euros. Pay everything with you mobile phone… Priceless. Well OK not priceless, but certainly convenient.

There’s been a big controversy around this type of payment for a few years now. The neo-Luddites argue that cash should not be replaced and some companies worried about security and the implications of it. Truth be told, once the infrastructure is in place, everyone will use it. There’s no doubt about it.

According to the latest study from Goldmedia consulting, there is a huge majority in German who are willing to get tickets (plane, train, concerts) via mobile phone. So it’s just a matter of time.

People will decide
In places like Japan for example, is common since 2004 to pay with your mobile phone. The testbed of the world is way ahead of mobile technology for their own good.

On the other side of the world, like some villages in Africa, mobile minutes are treated as currency. So I cannot help to find it funny that you can pay cab ride in Nigeria with your mobile phone but not in New York.

Some companies are already looking into the future. With an initial investment of $70 million Euros, Nokia is playing with the idea of a mobile-phone-payment solution that could be knocking your door sooner rather than later.

Here is some stuff you should be able to pay:

• Music, videos, online game subscription or items and digital goods.
• Transportation fares (plane, bus, subway or train) and parking meters.
• Books, magazines, tickets and other hard goods.

Personally, I don’t walk around with a lot of cash. Most of my daily transactions are done electronically. My phone has replaced, my camera, my watch and the newspaper… Why not my wallet! It’s one less thing I have to carry with me, specially in places like Barcelona full of pick-pockets. Hope it comes to Germany sooner than later.

If you have a smartphone, video is certainly nothing new. Most smartphones offer the possibility to play local video or over the internet. The promise of faster connections seems to be around the corner, but we know already than in places like Japan (the mobile test bed of the world) superfast connections have made possible TV Channels on the mobile phones. It is not surprise that advertisers are eager to recycle their Ad spots and get them mobile. However this is not a good idea for a medium so personal, intimate and in which relevant content is expected. We’ve learned our lessons from the internet and we know that the 30 sec spot will not work.

MTV Networks is finally waking up to the fact that TV alone won’t cut it. They’ve already lost a lot of their audience by lagging behind during the whole Internet revolution. This time around they want to make sure to stay on the cutting edge once again. As part of their research on VOD (Video on the demand) together with MobiTV, MTV just aunched “The How To Show“. Made exclusively for mobile phones, this show brings celebrities to showcase their trade. You’ll get to see the occasional 20/30 sec spot to begin each episode. But since the whole thing still an experiment, I guess we can forgive them for the moment.

Some stats for the skeptics

According to Nielsen’s Three Screen Report 13.4 million Americans watched 3.3 hours of Mobile video in the 1Q of 2009 and the numbers will increase when bandwidth become faster and more available. Teens for example, between the ages 13-17 are avid viewers of mobile video reporting an average of 6.5 hours of video on their mobile phones each month. These figures makes them the premium target group for any mobile video campaign.

I couldn’t find the stats for Germany (reliable anyway) for video usage, but in a country with 80 million people and 70% market penetration, that’s a hell of a lot of users! Pretty sure a big chunk is watching video.

Why Mobile Video and why now? Obviously a video still the most compelling medium to reach any audience because of the storytelling power it can provide. However, television is static and turn the user into passive recipients of content. Not good. So, imagine how powerful it could be to create videos that are relevant for users and how companies can establish a REAL dialog with their consumers. The next logical level would be to be contextual, followed by more personal and relevant video content delivered to you. Content that is associated with the brand of your choice and that follows that sense of “Forever there” that consumers are looking for from their favorite brands. Nobody seems to listen that the time has come for companies to give meaning to their brands and stop trying to compete for attention. In this context advertising is no longer a competition about who can scream louder, but who can be present at the right time, at the right place and who can actually give something back in return for the loyalty. The 30 sec spots while convenient for an Ad agency to recycle and play it on your handset is not only intrusive but sadly ineffective. We are at the stage now, where the new medium tries to adopt the format of the old medium(TV/Internet), but new uses for mobile video is just around the corner. I’ll keep you posted

Proving that advertising is more about engaging people than click-through rates, the New york agency Ringleader developed an ad campaign using Click-to-Call to create some buzz for the horror film “The Signal“. The most notorious part of this film is a mysterius transmission sound that turns people into serial killers.  The campaign gave the option of clicking on a number to listen the distinctive horrific sound (of course the campaign was mixed with other elements like video and a mobile website to create the total experience).

Another good showcase for this technology was seen in the campaign developed for Nickelodeon’s go, Diego, go presentation at Rose Garden auditorium in Portland last year. The Click-to-Call was used in combination with a promotional code to receive a 3$ discount to see the show.

The Click-to-Call apps

Several apps are now dedicated exclusively to provide you with a large database of telephone numbers for you to call. Apps such as the Yellow Pages, German Telefonbuch, White Pages, Qype… available not only for the iPhone, but also for other platforms like the Blackberry, Android and hopefully the anticipated Palm Pre (though too early to say).

The most challenging aspect of Click-to-Call is not how many clicks you get or even how many calls, but how many of these calls will convert into actual sales. To measure this efficiently is at the moment is not very clear and from what I understood very expensive to correlate.  According to Richard Rosen – “Call measurement requires an investment in dedicated phone numbers and some type of usage charge in order to prove ROI to an advertiser. Pay per call requires an entrepreneurial investment by providers in the phone lines in hopes of generating a premium “per call” fee to recoup those costs”. Richard Rosen is the owner of the consulting firm Calling Strategies which specializes among other things in Call Tracking.

In the next post we’ll be talking about the use of video as an advertising tool on mobile devices.

Iqbal Quadir tells how his experiences as a kid in poor Bangladesh, and later as a banker in New York, led him to start a mobile phone operator connecting 80 million rural Bangladeshi — and to become a champion of bottom-up development.