As you might expect, O2 and its partners were enthusiastic about the venture. According to Shaun Gregory, managing director of O2 Media, the market potential is huge and this is a modern and efficient way to reach a mass audience in one go. Hal Kimber, head of CRM for L’Oréal, noted that the opportunity was very exciting and L’Oréal would learn a great deal which it could implement in future initiatives.
The use of text alerts for marketing does need to consider the potential customer and their use of tex- ting. A survey conducted in October 2010 by comScore, a marketing research company that studies online behavior, found huge differences in mobile behavior in different parts of the world. The survey included cell phone users in Japan, the United States, and Europe. The researchers found that in the European sample more than 80 percent of people sent SMS messages
to one another; in the United States the figure was
66.8 percent. In Japan, however, the figure was much lower—40.1 percent. Of course the lack of enthusiasm for sending messages does not necessarily reflect an unwillingness to receive marketing texts.
It appears that in Japan the emphasis is less on
the opt-in approach of Placecast and more on loca- tion- based mobile advertising, a more sophisticated way of changing the advertising that a user receives when using an application. For example, someone using an iPhone or Android app typically also sees banner advertisements. AdLocal (now part of Yahoo! Japan) has the largest share of Japan’s location-based advertising market (valued at US $1 billion!), and such technology can make sure that the advertising that the