by Branimir Parashkevov

Everybody likes to see/experience ads, which are not very annoying and still very easy to remember. It’s even better when they are requesting a certain level of interaction that gives us, as targeted people, the feeling of participation or even collaboration. Such innovative ideas are the main target of The International Advertising Festival.

The 55th International Advertising Festival has passed recently and it pronounced this year’s winners of the prestigeous golden lion statuette. The Media Grand Prix award went to Forsman & Bodenfors Gothenburg for their innovative and interactive MMS campaign, created for AMF’s pension plan.

AMF Sweden let consumer take a picture of himself and send it to AMF through MMS. Then, the sender was returned an MMS with a picture of himself, but 30 years older. As a result, the consumer is more attracted to adopting a pension plan. This was a brand building exercise for AMF resulting in 300.000 uses(Sweden has 9,1 million inhabitants) within the month of the campaign, while the target was 50.000. Isn’t this a really successful campaign?

by Marino Bresciani

Here’s a cool marketing idea from Nike: bespoke shoes based on your own mobile phone snaps.

This is a part of a mobile campaign called PhotoID. Buyers can take a cameraphone snap of “brightly coloured subjects, such as street graffiti or clothing”, MMS it off to Nike and get a message back showing a pair of Nike’s 1985 Dunk high-top customised using the colours in the photo. Anyone who’s really taken with their shoes can then buy the customised footwear.

You can see a video of the service in action over at The Guardian. If you want to give it a go, you need to MMS your picture and the word “DUNK” to the following numbers: Denmark: 1231, Finland: 17163, France: 31000, Germany: 99666, Spain: 5222, Sweden: 72445, Norway: 2201, UK: 88247, Italy: 3464646402.

by Marino Bresciani

Here’s a cool marketing idea from Nike: bespoke shoes based on your own mobile phone snaps.

This is a part of a mobile campaign called PhotoID. Buyers can take a cameraphone snap of “brightly coloured subjects, such as street graffiti or clothing”, MMS it off to Nike and get a message back showing a pair of Nike’s 1985 Dunk high-top customised using the colours in the photo. Anyone who’s really taken with their shoes can then buy the customised footwear.

You can see a video of the service in action over at The Guardian.

by Chilldor

Recently I came across an article in Red Herring about risks of walking and texting.
What was done to remedy it? British directory assistance company, 118118 wrapped the lampposts with cushions so people not looking ahead would not get hurt when hitting posts. Incidentally cushions had big 118118 logos printed on them!

Following Youtube video shows this humourously albeit without logos:

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.