by Lauri Kinkar

In order to refresh and gather some new thoughts I happened to read about a funny campaign by Nivea. The idea and realization are a bit more than a year old but still deserve to be dwelled on.

The code name of the campaign was “TXT your worst ever fashion mistake”. Nivea asked people to describe their most embarrassing style slip-ups ever. An exciting approach - talking about funny slip-ups unites people at times more than sharing success. If all the answers are published day-to-day, you get a nice Nivea community, with whom the brand can communicate also in the future.

The people with best style slip-ups were awarded with the opportunity to be made more beautiful by Hollywood stylists. Sounds tempting, doesn’t it?

Lauri @ suit and white socks (once, by accident).

by Chilldor

In MMS / SMS marketing it is a rather frequent question, why doesn’t MMS work as well as SMS. A British research company, Portio Research Ltd, which focuses on the mobile and wireless technology sector, has made a profound analysis on the topic - has MMS failed?

The representative of Portio Research, John White, claims that SMS is not as “sexy” any more as it used to be. As if SMS were a dated technology already. But numbers tell a different story: even today SMS makes up 75-80% of non-call-based services. Text messaging increases at an immense speed and the amount of mobile owners will grow in the next five years from 2.5 billion to 4.5 billion. By the year 2011 SMS traffic is estimated at 3 trillion!!

Next to that the use of MMS is really somewhat more “modest”, although we are also speaking about billions a year. Hence we have no reason to think that MMS has failed.

The mobile industry had unrealistic expectations with the introduction of MMS. That is the reason for the disappointment now. SMS is popular because it is simple. MMS should be viewed as mobile entertainment, not as a channel of communication. MMS is more complicated and more expensive than SMS, therefore it is unlikely that people would use MMS rather than SMS for sending simple information. The reason why in 2002-2004 the use of MMS vegetated is that at that time the necessary technology was not accessible for the masses. In addition, MMS was priced according to its size (KB) and that created confusion in the users when calculating the price.

Lastly, the popularity of MMS has grown, as all the networks are ready for it now, coloured camera-phones attainable at a more reasonable cost and the the prices of MMS are cheaper and more transparent. Compared to SMS one could certainly claim that MMS is a big loser. But when you look at them separately, in their own context, you might say that in case of MMS we are dealing with a very popular added-value service.