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?

Nike’s ID campaign where by-passers could via mobile phones design sneakers displayed on an electronic billboard and win brand new Nike sneakers. In the videos shown by Eric Wheeler (Ogilvy) and Gene Keenan (Isobar International) some people totally lost it, to put it mildly, when they saw on the big screen footwear designed by themselves. Besides the fact that Nike gave out 3000 pairs of sneakers during this campaign, the project was made especially exciting by giving people the chance to participate in it first hand.

“True Beauty” campaign by Dove – in the same way as Nike, Dove put up a picture of an elderly woman on an electronic billboard and by-passers could vote per SMS “wrinkled” or “beautiful”. The image on the billboard kept changing according to what kind of messages were sent.

Pontiac G6 promotion campaign, where people who spotted G6 on the street, had to take a picture of it with their mobiles and send it as an MMS in order to participate in the drawing of 1 million dollars.

The promotion of the movie “Snakes on a Plane” – the campaign participants could themselves design a phone call from Samuel L. Jackson and forward it to their friends. The receivers of the call thought that the call was from their friend but, when answering it, it turned out to be Jackson. The campaign was unbelievably successful in creating a positive “fuss” around the movie. More than 4 million calls were made during the campaign.
But in order to set up a phenomenally successful mobile campaign, you only need a bit of imagination!

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.

The buyer’s task is to:

a) collect all the letters in order to get the campaign slogan and text it (an automatic response message lets you know if the suggestion was correct).

b) if it is impossible to get all the necessary letters, the consumer can solve the task by offering the brand a new slogan.

The best idea is, of course, rewarded and when the slogan is really ingenious, also the advertising agency can benefit from it. For example, if you only managed to collect the letters o,o,o,o,b,h, then “boo hoo” could prove to be a very suitable slogan in a right context.

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).

Recently there has been quite a bit of talk about using text messages as mobile discount coupons. The main problem with sales campaigns based on the place of purchase is how to send the coupons to a certain group of clients and how to make sure later that each coupon is used only once.

Mobile coupon solution proves once more that the course of the campaign can be very successfully controlled by an added unique code – after showing the message, the code used in it loses its validity. As always the whole process is 100 per cent paper-free and according to my estimates it takes less than 15 minutes from the “production” of the coupons to the first purchase.

Compared to the year 2006, the amount of money in the mobile marketing is expected to double this year. Also the proportion of solutions listed under branding is increasing steadily. Yet, the domination of sales promotion is expected to continue due to the reactivity of the mobile as a channel.

I even dare to be more optimistic about the future, as the growth designed in that survey seems to depart from the present context. I believe that by the year 2011the straight forward classification of marketing activities into m-marketing and “other marketing” will be somewhat more difficult and, in fact, there is no point in drawing the line.