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There is a very strong case for using mobile as a means of marketing content, goods, services and even just brand building. SMS marketing campaigns have been successfully run, MMS ones are just around the corner and the potential of video and mobile TV to carry adverts is huge.
But there are limitations to doing it this way. For starters, what if you want to market beyond the relatively small user groups attached to mobile portals, contained within opted-in mobile lists or early adopters who want to watch TV on their phone? What if you want a more widespread and immediate way of selling?
Billboards. That's the answer. How many people walk past poster adverts and billboards every day? Millions. If you could only get them to somehow interact with the billboards with their mobile…
Fans of the band New Order already know how this can work in practice. When the Manchester crinkles rolled out their most recent album, the record company put up a poster outside HMV on London's Oxford Street advertising the new disc. Built in to this advert was a small device that could talk to almost any mobile phone using either infrared or Bluetooth. If the user pointed their handset at the red dot, the poster would send a snippet of Hooky and the boys playing to the phone. The idea was that the customer, on hearing how the band had taken their instantly recognisable sound to new heights, would rush in to the store and buy the CD.
And it worked, says Rachel Harker, co-founder of Hypertag, the company who's technology powered this small marketing coup. "Traditionally, to get content, even third party content, the user had to go through an operator portal. This means many people never get to see your content. The fundamental idea behind Hypertag is that you can build access to any mobile into an advertising hoarding, a bus shelter, a retail outlet or bespoke stands at an event."
As demonstrated with New Order, the user simply points and clicks and gets content or at least a taster of the content, which can act as a call to action to either then go to the portal to buy something or to the web.
"It is instant and the experience is very quick and, usually at that point, free. It is also independent of the network," says Harker.
The beauty of these off portal marketing methods is that it opens up mobile marketing to a much wider base of content providers. Typically, if you want to promote your content through a portal you have to employ a team of people to constantly lobby the operator portals to keep you as high up the list as possible.
"This is fine for massive record labels or other big companies that have the money and resources to do this, but it doesn't suit small companies, who are effectively not allowed to market this way," says Harker.
Off portal marketing - or off network mobile marketing as it should be known - is an ideal way to market content to users. It is immediate, can be ubiquitous if you put up enough posters and, according to Harker at least, produces quite a high conversion rate.
"We did a campaign for Nintendo where the user was asked to point the phone at the Hypertag box on a poster to get £5 off a game," she says. "We found that some one per cent of people who walked past the posters tried it and 10 per cent of those who got the voucher then went on to use it."
Compare this to typical responses to posters which the Direct Marketing Association puts at around 0.02 per cent and you can see that this is certainly a good way to mass market.
And you need not worry about the poor portal owners and mobile network operators losing out. These network bypassing marketing methods do in fact drive up mobile network use, says Harker. "For starters, it gets people used to using their mobile to get things. It is also free - certainly for the taster that you get - which also encourages use. Most of the promotions done this way are trials or snippets of the full service or content offering so they drive people on to the portals anyway to make the full purchase. This is simply a way of making people more aware of what is out there."
So everyone's happy then: the content providers have a new way to market their wares, the MNOs get increased traffic to their portals and the customers have a richer life as a result.
Author: Paul Skeldon
Information:
w: www.lucent.com
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