Adva Mobile's Blog: Making Video Work on Mobile

Adva Mobile's Blog: Making Video Work on Mobile

Making Video Work on Mobile

Most musicians are correctly focused on making their music and thinking about the many possibilities to share that music to fans. Music videos are becoming increasingly important as a way to get fans excited about your music, and YouTube is one of the most popular sites on the web because of that. In the mobile space, according to a recent survey, nearly a quarter of smartphone users watch video on their phone at least once per day. Here at Adva Mobile we know that presenting videos on your mobile websites is a very popular activity and we know that fans really use this feature and watch your videos. Unfortunately, not all phones are alike, and many do not support certain video formats or player types. Adva Mobile is working to solve that, so every member of your mobile fan base has the ability to experience your awesome videos right on their phone.

Delivering video to mobile phones is complex, and until now we have been limited to linking to YouTube videos. Many of you are creating higher-quality, professional grade videos than what's typical on YouTube, and new web services like VEVO, Vimeo, Metacafe and Brightcove offer professionally created video on your PC. You are probably aware that Adva Mobile renders your mobile website correctly for most of the world's 5,000 phone types, but this also needs to be done correctly for your video. Each model of phone has its own requirements for web site display and each has unique requirements for showing video, since not all phones use the same video player. Video needs to be sent correctly for each type of phone, otherwise they miss out on seeing it.

We recently solved this problem through a test with Nellymoser. Many of you know that, for audio, we require you to upload audio in m4a (iTunes) format, because we know it is the most widely-accepted format for phones. But the video world is different. Each phone has its own player, which means you have to send the video to each phone type in its particular format in order for it to play on that particular phone. Nellymoser does this. Nellymoser provides a single point of entry to easily reach the mobile marketplace across the multitude of mobile networks, devices and content formats. Especially interesting to Adva Mobile is their ability to provide video content, in whatever format it is provided to them, rendered correctly for whatever phone type that receives the content.

For established bands, this is important because you now know that your high-quality video can be displayed to your fans on their mobile phones in the high-quality you expect. For emerging bands, it's important that you know that, as you migrate from user generated content typical of YouTube to more professional quality video, your mobile website is competent to serve up video to your expectations.

If any of you have this need today, please contact us and we will facilitate getting your video onto the Nellymoser platform and creating links to it on your mobile web site.

Making Sense of Mobile Commerce

We've been spending time working with Artists that are selling music and merchandise on their mobile fan club sites, and are learning a lot through the process. We've made some changes to the merchandise / commerce features of your mobile site we thought you should know about.

New Merch Page Design

We have made the links to Amazon and iTunes permanent. So, even if you add your own merchandise / music to your merch page, fans can choose to buy from you or from these other stores.

When the fan clicks on one of these links, we send them to the store, but also do a search query automatically so the fan is directed to your products. If you're not part of Amazon or iTunes, they'll end up on the home pages of those sites.

We fould some other interesting attributes of these sites as regards mobile, which we share below.

Selling Directly by the Artist - Physical Goods

This service has been with us from the beginning and has been the most straightforward. You put physical merch up for sale on your mobile site and the fans can buy it directly from you on their phones. They pay with Paypal and you get a notification of the shipping information and just send it out. You get 100% of the price - the fan pays that plus shipping plus small transaction charges from Adva Mobile and Paypal. We send you the money right away.

Selling Directly by the Artist - Digital Goods

We've just started having success with digital goods sales with Artists that use Bandcamp. When you set up with Bandcamp, you get a URL for digital goods downloads. There's a feature on the Adva Mobile merchandise portal that lets you send a confirmation email to the fan after the sale is made. When you set up this email, you include the link for the fan to download the digital song.

This works really well but isn't perfect. The fan can't download to their phone. They have to download to their desktop and then sync their phone. Also, the fan can forward the email to their friends, so some others can get it without paying.

We're working on a digital download service for music, ringtones, wallpapers, etc. directly from you to the fan. We haven't set up the system for the fan to download digital content and have the charges show up on their phone bill, because the wireless carrier takes more than 50% of the money from you. But we're interested in hearing from you if you want this.

iTunes

Since you need to have iTunes installed on your computer to make purchases from, and download from, the iTunes store, only iPhones support this in the mobile world. (Not a problem in the desktop world, as you can download the iTunes Application to any desktop PC.) I don't think you can download a song from iTunes to a Blackberry, Android, Palm, Windows or Symbian (Nokia) phone. Since we know the phone type of the fan when they are on your mobile site, we only show the iTunes logo on your merch page if the fan has an iPhone.

On my iPhone, when I click on the iTunes logo on an Artist merch page, it opens up my iTunes Application automatically and goes to the page of the Artist from the search string.

Amazon

Since Amazon sells both physical and digital goods, the Amazon link will always be on your merch page. Fans who click on this will be brought to the Amazon mobile site and a search string will bring them to your products, if you have products for sale on Amazon. Otherwise, they will go to the Amazon home page.

Amazon, however, will not allow a digital download to your phone! I think this is because digital songs from Amazon are in MP3 format and not every phone will play that format. They do have a cool feature though - they tell you they can't download it to your phone, but you can add it to your Wish List and then purchase it from your PC.

Summary

These early days of mobile commerce, as you can see, are complicated and not totally simple for you or the fan. We're working hard to develop a simple "Direct To Fan" purchase experience for all your items - digital, physical merch, and tickets. Meanwhile, innovative Artists are experimenting with mobile commerce through their mobile fan club and having success (sales!), and I encourage you to do the same.

Adva Mobile Voting Contest at the MIT In-NOW-Vation Event

Last Thursday Adva Mobile had an opportunity to showcase its VOTING feature at the MIT Enteprise Forum's In-NOW-vation event. This event was a showcase/networking event with 26 Boston area technology companies showing off their goods to an audience of about 250 worldwide MIT Enterprise Forum volunteer officers and a healthy group of Boston technologists, entrepreneurs, and Venture Capitalists.

Attendees were encouraged to vote in four categories:

• Best in Show (won by Zeo)


• Most Likely to be a household name (won by Everyspace)


• Coolest Technology (won by Infrared5)


• Company I want to have a beer with (won by MocoSpace)

We used the Adva Mobile Voting platform to vote. Attendees texted GETVOTE to 88704 (the same way you would do this at a live event or promoted on your Facebook page) and got a SMS link to the voting page. It looks like this:

During the event, we were able to show real time updates on a PC of how the voting was going. We could have put it up on a big screen, like you might do at a live event, but we just used a PC. It looks like this:

It was really cool to see how excited people got when they were using their phones to vote for their favorite companies. We did 3 shout outs during the event to remind people to vote, but as you can see from this chart, it was pretty consistent throughout the evening:

We learned that people with iPhones and Blackberry's and other smart phones had a better experience than feature phones, but everone could participate. We had a corner stand where people could come and get help - this was useful because it's still new (using your phone this way) so it was good to be able to help people who were trying this for the first time. (You could put a "VOTE HERE" sign at the merch table where fans could come for instruction if they needed it.)

About 60 percent of the attendees voted on their phones, so we think this was terrific engagement. It can definitely be used to engage your fans and collect their phone numbers for your mobile fan club, so be sure to try out Voting - another cool feature that's part of your mobile fan club.

Stars Go Dim Mobile Marketing Campaign Success

Stars Go Dim are prolific marketers of their music and it shows: Their music is featured on the Letters to God movie soundtrack, "Get Over It" was just featured on the AOL Music homepage, and they've been on MTV's The Real World. So when they wanted to get their mobile fan club rocking, they used the Contest feature of our mobile marketing service to get the word out and build their mobile fan base quickly.

Working with Adva Mobile, Stars Go Dim designed a marketing campaign around a free giveaway of SGD Content: an exclusive Stars Go Dim USB Thumbstick with music, video, pictures and a wonderful pdf file of song lyrics and the history of the band. Only 25 of these were created, adding to the exclusive nature of the prize.

For a chance to win this exclusive Stars Go Dim content, fans had to join the SGD mobile fan club (by texting in to SGD on their phone) and click on a link to participate in the contest. The Adva Mobile Artist Portal handled all of the details of the contest, including start date, end date, fan information collection, administration of the contest and reporting. At the end of the contest, the system automatically and randomly chose winners and sent them a text message telling them they won and how to collect their prize.

The contest ran for 3 weeks and was promoted on their Facebook and MySpace pages, and to fans on their email list. Stars Go Dim now have 87 new members of their mobile club (from zero at the start) and plan to grow their mobile fan club and incorporate mobile marketing into their ongoing marketing activities. And the lucky winners have one-of-a kind Stars Go Dim USB thumbsticks with exclusive content to show off at the next concert!

Adva Mobile Introduces Freemium Payment Plan

This weekend, we are making a major change to our mobile marketing service for music artists. We're moving to a “Freemium” model. Through surveys, communications with you, interviews with others in the industry, and advisors to us, you've told us that what we do is valuable and, like other marketing services, is part of the total marketing mix that helps you make money.

For the past 15 months we've been working through our initial service, adding functionality to help artists reach out to their fans on their phones. And, everything about it has been free. Today, we're taking an exciting step that will help us support the growth of Adva Mobile.. Over 700 of you have joined our service and I am pleased to announce that all of you will continue to receive all of the services that you currently use without charge. We've upgraded all of you to our Plus service. Beginning next week, for new artists who choose to upgrade to this level, they will pay $9.95 per month. It's our way of saying thank you to the pioneers of music mobile marketing -- that's you!

Our free service includes most of the features you have been using to promote your music on mobile phones, and is certainly the most comprehensive mobile marketing platform for music artists that we know of. As you grow your career and begin making money, you'll need more sophisticated marketing tools, and for that we will now charge a small fee. Also, as your fan base grows, you'll be sending out more SMS messages. You probably wonder who has been paying for all of those messages for the past 15 months, and it has been us. For some of you who are now sending out lots of messages as your fan base has grown, we now need to ask you to pay for those messages. Again, I want to emphasize that for the 700+ of you who have joined our service, you'll continue to have your existing services, including a limited number of monthly messages, all without charge.

To see the differences between the three plans we now offer -- Free, Plus, and VIP -- go to the artist portal at www.AdvaMobile.com, login, and check out Account Services.

Thanks again for using Adva Mobile, best wishes for your careers in music, and let me know what you think of this change and any other ways we can improve the service to help you create closer relations with your fans.



Jack and the Adva Mobile Team

Adva Mobile Artist Survey Results

Many thanks to everyone who participated in our recent survey. We were very encouraged by the general feedback that you appreciate the service, see value in it, and want us to continue providing a service for you, to reach your fans on their mobile phones. We also appreciate the comments related to simplifying the experience. We will be working on that as we continue to add new features and try to make the service simpler.

Your response to the questions “whether the service was valuable enough to pay for” was encouraging. We are looking to introduce a “Freemium” model, where some artists could receive basic mobile web and mobile marketing services for free and others could have more specialized services for a small price. While some of you indicated you would never pay for it, more than 85% indicated you would pay for it, or you would pay for it once it started generating revenue for you. That’s great news for us, since we expect mobile commerce to really take off in and outside the US in 2010, and that your fans will be increasingly comfortable with making purchases for your music, tickets, and merchandise on their phones.

Shortly, we're going to introduce a paid service to complement our free service. While going from a free service to a partially paid service may be a difficult transition for some, were committed to our existing artists and you will continue to have all the services you currently have without cost. Moving to paid services is good for everyone, since it will make us stronger and more valuable to you, the artist, and to your fans. The financial support we receive from those of you who choose to upgrade to the paid service will help us build a stronger platform and provide each of you with better resources.

We built our mobile marketing platform when we realized nothing existed to help artists connect with fans on their mobile phones. Our mobile fan club service will continue to be, built with your feedback. We want to hear from you about these changes and the many future improvements we will introduce to help you expose your music to more fans, market to them, and realize your dream of creating a career in music.

Jack and the Adva Mobile Team