Tag: mobile marketing

HTC mobile marketing scheme uses disguised ads

| August 10, 2015

The handset manufacturer is sending advertisements to its One users that look like notifications.

While most users of smartphones who use their devices to connect to the internet are used to being exposed to various forms of mobile marketing and somewhat expect to see it in certain places, what may come as a surprise for HTC One users is ads that are sent to them in the form of notifications.

HTC has recently taken on a new strategy that sends ads to customers who have purchased their smartphones.

What has yet to be seen is whether or not the users of the One smartphones resent receiving these mobile marketing ads that have been disguised as regular notifications. People who are seeing these new kinds of advertisement are users of the One M7, M8, and M9 devices. These devices are receiving the ads regardless of the fact that they were purchased outright without advertising any discount to the purchase because of advertising based subsidies, as is the case with the cheapest Kindle model from Amazon.

Some of the recipients of these mobile marketing notifications say that they look like movie theme recommendations.

HTC - Mobile MarketingScreenshots of the mobile ads do show that they appear to be recommendations for a new theme for the device that is based on the most recent Fantastic Four movie, despite the fact that it’s not what the notification is, at all. The release date of the film is displayed prominently in several places, as are the logos of the movie studio.

Not every owner of these smartphones are receiving the ad. Instead, they appear to be linked in some way to the BlinkFeed and Sense Home features. Users that have devices with other types of Android launchers do not appear to be receiving the mobile advertisement for the movie.

Back in June, HTC did say that it would be testing out some different BlinkFeed based passive ads as a part of its overall mobile marketing strategy. They discussed placing the ads next to the normal updates for news and social networks, but didn’t mention a full-screen style notification, as appears to be the case in this specific example.

Mobile search is changing the way we buy vehicles

| August 6, 2015

The internet has already altered the car shopping experience and smartphones have gone a step further.

A recent study conducted by Autoshopper has revealed that more than one in every three people who use the internet to shop for vehicles such as cars, SUVs and trucks, have conducted a mobile search on a smartphone or tablet while actually standing in a dealership.

That represents an increase of a massive 29 percent over the number of people who were doing it in 2013.

Considering the trend toward mobile search, that really doesn’t come as too much of a surprise. After all, earlier in 2015, searches over smartphones and tablets surpassed those that took place over PCs, according to statistics released by Google. It was that trend that brought about the massive wave nicknamed “mobilegeddon” in which Google – and then later, Bing – changed their algorithms in order to favor websites that were mobile friendly, when a search was conducted over mobile devices.

Now, dealerships are paying close attention to mobile search, as it is having a considerable impact on sales.

Mobile Search - SmartphoneSince Google results now favor mobile friendly websites, dealerships have discovered that if they want to be able to stand out to their customers, then this is the type of experience that they are going to have to provide. After all, the last thing that they want to do is have a potential customer standing on their showroom floor while discovering the offerings of a competitor on their smartphones because that rival had a mobile friendly website and therefore received better search results.

Of course, the experience goes far beyond search. As dealerships battle over customers, they are now trying to create a far more seamless experience between the device and shopping in person, so that the two will work together.

Not only are most dealership websites already highly optimized for mobile search, they are also designed to provide a much broader experience that will allow consumers to be able to view additional resources that will help them to make their decisions and to learn what they want to know about the vehicles that they are considering.