Mobile Marketing Blog by InMovil Media

To give some more information about mobile marketing campaigns, I herewith show you 10 mobile marketing campaigns anounced by the MMA. These are interesting not only for brand promotion, but also for building communities at any organization.

1. Nike ID. Nike erected a large, interactive billboard in Times Square. Passers-by could use their cell phones to text in their own custom design and receive a free pair of Nike IDs. In Wheeler and Keenan’s video, individuals went nuts when they saw their own shoes posted live on the jumbotron in front of them. Though Nike gave away 3000 pairs of shoes in this promotion, I had the distinct impression that users were just as excited by their design on the billboard as they were by the free footwear.
2. Dove ‘Campaign for Real Beauty.’ Dove erected a large billboard of a happy, fresh-looking older woman with a text-to-vote number so that pedestrians could choose between ‘wrinkled’ and ‘wonderful.’ The billboard’s live ticker showed the combined results from both text and online voting.
3. Pontiac G6. This cameraphone promotion for the G6 encouraged consumers to look for G6es out on the street. By snapping a photo of a G6 and sending it in, a consumer was entered into a drawing to win $1,000,000.
4. American Express Wimbledon Sponsorship. The Wimbledon bleachers contain a captive audience of ticketholders. American Express promoted a contest in which any audience member could guess at the winners of the next day’s event, and thereby be entered into a contest pool. Wheeler noted that those people who entered were much more likely to come back for all 14 days of the competition. (Or was it simply that those who had planned to attend all days were more likely to participate in the contest?) Even better than brand awareness, American Express had a meaningful number of card applications submitted as a direct result of consumer participation in the mobile contest.
5. Lenovo Mobile WAP. After its aquisition of the IBM PC business, Lenovo ran banner ads on the USA Today WAP (mobiel website) site. The campaign’s clickthrough rate of 6.6% was roughly double the industry average. Lenovo also had an impressive 487% lift in aided brand awareness among consumers who clicked through to the WAP site.
6. NBC ’s Deal or No Deal. The Lucky Case Game integrates mobile into the TV show experience. Viewers can text in lucky case numbers and win cash prizes if there’s a match. NBC has also had some success with its model wallpaper for mobile. The multiple products are not only a good way to access viewers on multiple screens, but also a way to generate additional revenue. According to Wheeler, this mobile content revenue pays for the entire show’s production - and as a result, all of the normal TV advertising becomes gravy.
7. Axe. The company’s ‘little black book’ applet is a ringtone giveaway. Guys can choose tunes that they like, and then associate the tones with particular contacts (presumably, women) in their address books. This provides something of value to the consumer while reinforcing brand associations.
8. Nike Airmax. This aspirational advertising campaign shows athletes getting up early and doing their thing. The mobile campaign worked from this theme, enticing customers to sign up for a recorded wake-up call from a famous athlete such as Maria Sharapova. The campaign managers saw single users setting up multiple calls, and initially thought they were being used for crank calls - instead, they discovered that coaches and team managers were signing up their entire roster. This 8-week promotion exceeded its total target participation by 300% by the end of the first week alone.
9. Adidas 2D barcode Tagging. Mobile 2D barcodes, which turn your phone into a bar code scanner, are everywhere in Japan and Korea. Adidas used these codes on retail merchandise tags and clothing imprints. Potential customers could take a photo of the color code on a sleeve, and the handset would then load up the manaufacturer’;s WAP (mobile web) site. Over the course of the test run, 60,000 people participated in the Korean Adidas program, and Adidas had over 2,000,000 page views. (Note: It’s up to carriers as to when this technology becomes available in the US.)
10. Snakes On a Plane. This inventive mobile promotion may be my personal favorite. Users can generated a customized voice call from Samuel L. Jackson. To set it up, go online to select the recipient’s personal attributes from pull-down menus and submit the necessary phone numbers. As a recipient, it looks like the phone call is coming in from a friend, but when they pick it up, it’s Mr. Jackson. This was phenomenally successful in raising movie buzz, with over 4,000,000 phone calls made during the core promotional period.

Although all of these programs were highly interactive, it was mentioned that WAP (mobile website) banners, bought via CPM, are significant in driving people to promotions and loyalty programs.

Why are these campaigns worth notice? They integrated all or most of these key success factors:

• Relevant to the consumer
• Welcome invitation to participate
• Entertaining
• Drives a specific action
• Integrated where appropriate
• Connects what was previously disconnected
• Simplicity

If your company has mobile on the agenda for 2008, please let us inform you how we can help you to make your mobile marketing campaign a success.

Many advertisers are in wait-and-see mode on mobile advertising. “At the moment, the level of transparency is not enough to drive significant budgets into this medium,” acknowledges Henry Stevens, director of media and entertainment at the GSM Association, a trade group that represents wireless service providers.

Even as ads on mobile phones become more common, advertisers are holding off on a full-blown embrace of the tiny screen as a marketing tool.

There’s no denying mobile phone users are seeing more ads. A Mar. 4 study by Nielsen found that 58 million U.S. wireless subscribers had viewed an ad on their mobile phones in the past month. The problem is that mobile advertisers don’t know what users are doing, if anything, when they see the ads. Until advertisers find out, they may hold off on committing more precious marketing dollars to the mobile medium. “Advertisers that are used to full accountability are left in the dark,” says Farhad Divecha, director at London-based ad agency AccuraCast.

The hesitance is understandable. In the online marketing world, determining how well a campaign is performing is easy. Web sites embed tracking software known as “cookies” on your personal computer. Those cookies monitor your browsing activity and pass the information to advertisers and the ad-placement networks that distribute their ads across the Web.

A Consistent Yardstick

The mobile industry has refused to facilitate this tried-and-true approach. Most wireless service providers block cookies before they can ever get to cell phones, arguing that to allow them would open a hole in their networks for computer viruses.

Complicating matters, what little data the wireless service providers do pass back to mobile advertisers varies widely in terms of what they measure. Mobile-advertising networks, in turn, crunch the disparate data in different ways to gauge the audience response to mobile ads.

One mobile ad network might report the number of phones that received an ad, while another might report how many users actually viewed the ad. The distinction is subtle, but important for mobile advertisers. Without a consistent yardstick, it’s hard to compare the results of a campaign.

Click here to see our mobile statistics tools how we can help you to have a consistent yardstick.

Wait and See

Even Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), which is determined to extend its dominance in Web advertising to cell phones, has no reliable analytical tools customers can use to gauge the success of mobile marketing campaigns. “The mobile ad space is nascent, and we are currently working to figure out the best ad formats for our advertisers and users,” Google spokesperson Daniel Rubin wrote in an e-mail.

As a result of these obstacles, there are doubts whether the mobile advertising market will fulfill robust predictions, such as a Gartner (NYSE: IT) forecast for US$11 billion in global ad revenue by 2011, up from less than $1 billion last year.

Measures of Success

In a bid to rectify the situation, the association announced in February that five of its most prominent members — Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) , Telefonica O2 Europe, T-Mobile International, FT/Orange Group and 3 — have formed a working group to define common metrics for mobile advertising. By year-end, these companies hope to develop a set of standard measures and then launch a trial in Britain. Using input from mobile ad agencies and wireless carriers worldwide, the group will attempt to define everything from what constitutes a click to how to measure different kinds of user behavior. “The experimentation stage is almost over and, in order to scale, operators need to work together (to fix this problem),” Stevens says.

Not surprisingly, we see the urgency in delivering more reliable mobile data to their clients. “We want to enable mobile advertisers to understand the added value of mobile ads more deeply,” says Bas Vervoort, vice president of InMovil Media. “We want to let our clients see where a propsect goes, which phones they use and when. To make sure our clients truly engage with their audience.”

Click here to see how we can help your company to reach your audience with mobile advertising.