| Pushing mobile marketing through the next frontier |
31/10/02 |
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For Immediate Release : Thursday 31 October 02
Source : New Media Age
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| Pushing mobile marketing through the next frontier 1Mobile devices have become a great medium for building one-to-one relationships with consumers. WAP push and multimedia messaging are two technologies that have great importance to the world of marketing and advertising, because they enable new forms of promotion that go beyond today's simple SMS text alerts. |
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Multimedia push technology will give mainstream brand marketers the ability to reach important markets with highly-targeted, personalised, interactive and engaging propositions. To date, SMS has been a very successful but functionally limited marketing tool. The strength of text lies in its immediacy and its simplicity of use. It works fine for simple information transactions but it weakens as a vehicle for interactive marketing. SMS requires users to remember, type and send text strings to content providers to request and interact with services, and the content it's able to bear in return is very limited. WAP push retains the key virtues of SMS - immediacy and ease of use - but augments these qualities with delivery of richer content such as audio, pictures, and video straight to phones (WAP push is in fact a key mechanism for much MMS content, like photo messaging). Pushed content can be sent to opt-in subscribers without them ever needing to explicitly request it or seek it out. This addresses the Achilles Heel of the early 'mobile Internet' experience; most users had neither the patience nor the inclination to spend minutes and multiple clicks looking for what they were interested in. Instead, push takes users straight into the content that they've registered an interest in, which drastically simplifies and speeds up the user experience of mobile data with one-click access to a huge range of rich, useful and timely entertainment, information, marketing and advertising content. Major consumer brands will use push and Multimedia to power product promotions that will help them recoup the sales revenues which are increasingly being lost through the rising youth uptake of mobile airtime and text messaging. In other words, as kids spend more on their mobiles, they're spending less on traditional goods such as clothes and music. Youth brands can use push to regain some of this revenue. Brands will be able to push their discount promotions on products straight to target consumers, through clickable alerts that link to promotion sites, or by delivering offers of instant in-store discounts. For example, a major sportswear brand launching a new trainer could push a picture of the product to the phones of subscribers who have registered an interest in its promotions. On top of that, a coupon can be pushed to the phone with an on-screen barcode redeemable by the first 50 people that buy those shoes. The barcode would then be scanned at the store straight from the user's phone, enabling the discount. You can expect to see push being used to promote films and album releases, and to support TV, entertainment and sporting events before the end of this year. There's no doubt that text-based phone marketing will continue to thrive for the foreseeable future. But as the number of colour screen and push-capable handsets continues to rise, it's inevitable that push will become the de facto mechanism for mobile service development and marketing. Nigel Oakley is the vice president of marketing EMEA for Openwave.
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| If you are using text messaging in your business and would like to have your story included on the site please contact Juliet@themda.org |
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