• by May 7, 2001

A recent article at Clickz says that an incredible amount of hype has been generated about the potential of wireless advertising and marketing. At the same time, relatively little has been written about how to integrate this new medium with existing marketing channels.

The two channels seem to be very similar. Direct wireless marketing involves the delivery of permission-based marketing offers and content to wireless devices, such as cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), wireless Internet-enabled phones, and two-way pagers. These messages are "pushed" to individual customers by request rather than set up as "pull" advertising, which is displayed to a broad, passive audience in an attempt to elicit a response.

There are, however, significant differences between email and direct wireless marketing. Trying to recreate your best email campaign on a wireless device will likely fail miserably. Wireless marketing needs to complement the desktop version of the Web; it must focus on the immediacy of mobile interactivity.

Direct wireless marketing messages should include content that is relevant to the mobile environment. And that content should be based on time-sensitive or location-based information triggered by time, stress inventory, or location event.

Unique characteristics of the mobile environment:

- Messages should be relevant to people in transit.
- Message content should be optimized for the tiny displays of today's cellular phones, many of which have a 110-character limit.
- Wireless Internet access speeds are slow, displays are constrained, and navigation is cumbersome.
- Response mechanisms are very different on wireless devices.

Organizations that have frequent time-sensitive promotions, geographic or location-based offers, or news and information services, or if they need to turn over high-stress inventory quickly, will likely see benefits from executing integrated email and direct wireless marketing campaigns.

Finally, a recent report from Myers Reports Inc. entitled The Seamless Media Survival Guide, shows that wireless internet usage will outpace cellphone usage in the US by 2010

Myers bases its predictions on residential and wireless data from the Federal Communications Commission and says

  +-------+-------------+-------------+   |       |  Using the  | Hours Using |   |       |  Wireless   | Cell Phones |   |       |  Internet   |             |
+-------+-------------+-------------+   | 2001  |  1.6 hours  | 12.4 hours  |   |       | per person  |             |   |       | (per year)  |             |   | 2004  | 11.4 hours  | 16.8 hours  |
| 2006  | 27.6 hours  |             |   | 2007  | 75.0 hours  | 30.2 hours  |   +-------+-------------+-------------+   

Myers says that by 2004, there will be 203 million wireless phone subscribers:

US consumers spent 135 hours, per person, per year using the internet (wired or wireless) in 2000. Myers says that this number will rise to 165 hours in 2001, 245 by 2005 and 290 by 2010.

Click here to read Clickz story.

Click here for the Myers Reports data at emarketer.