Mobile marketing strategists, software developers, and mobile-savvy ad agency execs Tuesday debated best practices, methods and scope of the emerging wireless advertising sector and concluded that
different strategies are required for reaching different types of consumers at different times and in different locations.
Text messaging, in particular, is largely a teenage phenomenon, noted
Nihal Mehta, founder of San Francisco-based mobile marketing strategies firm ipsh, who opened the discussion during a mobile marketing panel at the Ad:Tech New York conference.
Regarding one
particularly successful campaign for the movie "What a Girl Wants," Mehta said, "we love teenage girls. Twelve to 16-year-old girls drive mobile marketing." They also drive brand awareness: 39,000
text messages offering movie discounts were exchanged between friends as a result of the campaign.
Other campaigns run by ipsh also incorporated viral marketing strategies. In April, ipsh started
a viral campaign featuring audio clips for Madonna's "American Life" album. People could send their friends messages giving them the option to listen to the tracks or even purchase the record.
Nineteen thousand people participated in the campaign.
"Text messaging is a teen phenomenon," said Mehta, adding that its no longer just happening in Europe. Later, he pronounced the younger Gen
Yers, "generation mobile."
Nathan Woodman, account director at MPG/ Media Contacts, demonstrated the effectiveness of viral messaging in Europe, showcasing a campaign that ran in Spain. Noting
that kids in Spain often went out to eat with their friends right after school, MPG developed a special coupon that could only be obtained via text messaging that offered discounts at McDonald's.
According to Woodman, the campaign was a huge success. "Just goes to show that you can hit a home run if your campaign makes sense. If your audience tends to use text messaging, then they'll respond
to a smart mobile marketing campaign."
Woodman underscored the value of delivering marketing messages via wireless devices. "Mobile marketing devices get users in an intimate, immediate,
non-intrusive, portable environment. It's a truly personal, dialogue-oriented medium."
"It's a new context for marketers," said Carrie Himmelfarb, VP Sales for Vindigo, a software developer for
mobile devices. "Not passive or push marketing but rather pull marketing," she said.
Himmelfarb's company Vindigo turns your PDA or Internet-enabled cell phone into a personal navigator,
empowering it with search capabilities, a MapQuest app, restaurant/bar reviews and listings, entertainment listings, as well as urban transit/public transport maps.
With Vindigo, advertisers can
target exactly where people are at a given moment, providing them with highly relevant content. For example, on Vindigo's food/bars channel, when a user searches for a bar, the information that pops
up is framed in a branding message for either Johnny Walker black label, or champagne distributor Moet.
Himmelfarb believes that advertising in such a personal space creates a delicate situation.
"We at Vindigo feel that the ad model should remain pull and not push for mobile devices," she said, adding that it should be a service for consumers and advertisers should pay for the right to reach
them and showcase their brands in a respectful, non-intrusive manner.