Mobile Direct Marketing in a Wireless World

Let's say you're walking down a city street looking for your bank's nearest ATM machine. Using speech recognition and GPS, you ask your cell phone to call your bank and, without touching a button, an IVR (Interactive Voice Response system), interfacing with your GPS-equipped mobile phone gives you turn-by-turn directions. Along the route, up pops a colorful $1 Starbucks' coupon on your mobile device's display and then, guess what, Starbucks is near your bank's ATM? Your smartphone contains technology supporting speech recognition, GPS and a graphical HTML display. Mobile carriers' profitability increasingly relies on customers purchasing higher-end mobile devices with Internet data services, whether to browse the Web, check your email or post to your blog. As mobile broadband 3G networks represented in the U.S. by AT&T/Cingular, and EVDO, deployed by Sprint and Verizon, proliferate, phone manufacturers and the mobile carriers will encourage you to purchase Web-enabled devices to run on their broadband networks supporting quick webpage loading including video streaming. Other technology companies, such as Apptera, already offer tailored nteractive "natural" sounding voice interaction. Other companies provide GPS integration and faster processors for loading larger graphical displays. Internet technology and mobile device manufacturers, jointly partner cellular providers who deploy these new technologies to deliver multi-media marketing content and applications appearing on your mobile device. The Northern California division of the Direct Marketing Association is devoting its August 15th meeting to direct marketing in the mobile space. If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, I highly recommend you attend. Meanwhile, I invite you to post your comments here about how expanding mobile technologies impacti global marketing.