by Marino Bresciani

I am start getting more and more surprised about how the big companies are gathering interest in the bluetooth marketing. In Paris, for example, you can easily find “interactive” advertising box that ask customers to activate the bluetooth on their mobile phones, in order to send them some interesting content: maps of the city, discount coupons, etc etc.

The following is instead a more subtle promotion: to promote popular reality show Big Brother 2008 on Channel TEN in Australia, advertising agency Marketforce in Perth came up with a unique bluetooth SMS campaign that really caught people by surprise. The ads embodied the “Big Brother is watching” slogan, which is the essence of the show. The campaign installed Blue-tooth transmitters in over 20 high-traffic bus shelters around town. The transmitters automatically sent two anonymous messages to any bluetooth enabled phones in the area.

The first message was tailored specifically for the local location, with something along the lines of:

I’m watching u. Ur at the (customized current location)

The second message is received 30-40 seconds later with the big reveal, saying:

Big Brother is back. 7 PM weeknights on TEN

Hopefully people won’t get mad at them.

by Marino Bresciani

This is an idea that came out from Volkswagen, and it is somehow an extension of their policy about polling about all the usual customs of the people. For example, Volkswagen knows that 73% of the people want to take the tiny soap and shampoo from hotel rooms. They also know that 60% of ice cream buyers prefer cones over cups.

On an apparent quest to learn everything, Volkswagen’s launched SMS polls on a big screen on Times Square. In this picture, for example, you can see how VW asks for people preferences inflight.

Results are generally announced one day after, which is a nice invitation for the people to return to the store soon in order to see the results…

By Chilldor

Tanla Mobile published a quite extensive research on mobile marketing. It seems that the focus is on the UK market but there is definitely something useful also for the operators on the Estonian or Baltic market.
There are quite a few interesting bits of statistics in the research – one of them, for example, is about the services an average UK mobile user uses via the mobile phone.

Those who are more interested in the subject, can download the full research here. It doesn’t cost anything, but you’ll have to register. Takes about 20 seconds

by Chilldor
A nice and simple idea for a campaign based on collecting letters. Inside the product packages are hidden all sorts of letters, on proper-size cards – nice to put in a row (while having a beer?).

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.

by Martin Koppel

Several times i have wrote that there are twice as much cell-phones than PC-s. Some brighter heads are also predicting that in the future mobile advertising will take a big share from internet advertising. It seems obvious – the number of cell-phones will increase faster, people have it all the time, easy to use device, well targeted target groups. It all seems so simple and beautiful, but what is the situation at the moment?

European research firm Vanson Bourne made a report on 50 global brands’ attitudes toward mobile marketing and these numbers don’t give any reasons to smile. It seems that companies have still some doubts and the main issue is how the potential customer will react, is it invading to peoples personal lives or not. Here are some key points:

* more than two-thirds of companies expected to spend up to 10% of their marketing budget on mobile messaging campaigns within two years

* 28% of brands were considering implementing SMS or MMS campaigns during the next 12 months

* 58% said that their mobile marketing campaign would use up to 15% of their total ad budget by 2012, 32% said this would happen in the next two years

* One third of all respondents said that they expected up to 10% of recipients of mobile marketing messages to undertake a financial transaction

* 52% said that they expected up to 10% of recipients of mobile marketing messages to request more information or a product sample

* 46% are concerned that mobile marketing is too intrusive

* 41% respondents were unsure that they could target campaigns specifically enough to avoid spamming problem

* 36% would require detailed information on how the user responded to the message

* 20% would want definite confirmation that the user’s handset had actually received the message

If we are looking what people are looking from google then it also describes the situation quite clearly. I can’t see any progress in past 3 years. According to the fact “twice as many cell-phones than computer” i would picture that the blue line should rise continuously, but in fact it has staid quite stagnant. So it seems to me that mobile marketing will stay as supportive action in marketing for some time, maybe Android will change something but we will see.

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.

by Chilldor

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.

by Chilldor
eMarketer has conducted a survey called Mobile Brand Advertising, which among other things also shows the amount of money globally spent on m-marketing.

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.

by Martin Koppel

It seems that nowadays marketing people have started to use mobile marketing more and more in their campaigns. Some proactive ones have even built the whole marketing concept on mobile marketing. It is mainly because mobiles provide more flexible and effective ways for marketers to get their information directly to the audience. The other side of course is that people can respond to the campaign or be part of it just using their everyday tool- cellphone.

According to MobiADNetwork Coca Cola has also realized the benefits of mobile marketing and used it in “My Coke Music” campaign. When Coca Cola slightly uses simple mobile marketing solutions to make their campaign more effective, then Hyunday got in use more advanced techniques. To attract new drivers in the 18 to 24 demographic mobile was a natural fit with this group. You can see the different features of that campaign from here .

It seems that marketing focus has starting to change the aim is on solutions that still can attract people and can deliver the message to target group, since traditional ways aren’t so effective any more. It will take a while before mobile marketing will be the boring and traditional way of marketing, but what interests me is, what comes after that…