• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, April 30, 2006

Now that every marketer worth his or her salt has a short code, a wallpaper, and ringtone, we are entering into that challenging but exciting time in any medium when the players actually have to be creative.

I am one of those less-is-more kind of guys who is more impressed when someone innovates and dazzles within tight constraints--like the limited bandwidth, screen size and formats of a cell phone. This is where things get really interesting, where we start to locate the endemic strengths and qualities of a medium rather than simply transfer over formats of the last technology. Let Google and Yahoo, Verizon VCast and MobiTV squeeze Web browsing, search, digital downloads and TV onto the phone all they want. I imagine some of it in some form will work. More interesting to me is how marketers explore more gently the contours of the phone's existing uses and qualities, nudging rather than pushing the envelope.

Take for instance, ringtones, a genre many of us keep expecting (hoping) will tank any day now. They seem tiresome to those of us who just don't get the true power of what I call media identification--people using their media tastes as important social badges. Of course we all identify ourselves socially by our tastes, but ringtones make that self-labeling so explicit, so public, so annoying, that it is hard for hopelessly repressed types like myself to fathom it. The guys at mobile shop ipsh get it, however, and they really run well with it in the AxeBootyTones.com site. It offers young, horny (I'm guessing here, but you know... ) males a little black book of babes with attached ringtones. Each girl has a back story, a kind of dating type, and a high-quality tone you can send to your phone via SMSWAP push. You get up to three downloads free, so you can attach each tone, now identified with some female type, to your own contact list.

This program gets us beyond the ho-hum, another-branded-ring-tone syndrome in several ways. Let's deconstruct it. First, the content is top-notch, familiar classic tracks from the likes of Def Leppard and AC/DC. The sponsor is giving us something of real value, not just a throwaway tchotchke. There is even some kind of media partnership going on here, as the ringtones offer a link to the band's home page. And when was the last time any of us had reason to visit Def Leppard?

Second, by wrapping fun fiction around the tones themselves, ipsh has turned it into a real experience. Just leafing through the black book and seeing the images of these girls and their descriptions is a branded entertainment. More to the point for mobile marketers, this is starting to imagine a larger context in which the simple ringtone gains even more significance. If consumers are telling us they associate a dinky ringtone with some essential part of their identity, or at least the identity they hope to project, then let's make it even richer for them. Make the tones even more meaningful by wrapping scenarios around them. The fact is that you never hear that "Pour Some Sugar on Me" ringtone in quite the same way again after seeing Axe associate it with a sexual adventuress. The company has effectively deepened an otherwise superficial media experience. Well, "deep" might be going too far, but, you know....

And finally, the AxeBootyTones use the personalization impulse associated with cell phones to play on the target's own aspirations. It hands him the ringtones and the fictions to imagine himself a "player" when the phone rings. And yeah, that remains one of the adolescent male fantasies that last well into adulthood. After all of these decades, it is still amazing to me that the myth of the "little black book" (did anyone ever actually have one?) persists, but it does--and this campaign upgrades it nicely to the mobile phone era.

Lesson learned. Let the consumer tell us what meanings he attaches to media. Why interrupt that experience when, instead, you can understand and enhance it?