Upper echelons of the wireless industry have been having the same dream for years: an unassuming wireless subscriber is walking past a coffee shop and up pops a mobile coupon on their device for that specific location.
“If I hear it one more time, I’m going to puke. It just doesn’t work like that,” Vibes Media Co-founder Alex Campbell said during a panel on interactive entertainment Monday afternoon.
“You hear a lot of stuff a lot,” Campbell said. “Everyone wants this panacea.”
The wireless industry could use a heavy dose of reality, he said. “I think what we need in our industry is less talk about new technologies” and more about why all these companies want to do these things.
“There are three things that really make mobile different when it comes to marketing, timing, location and interaction,” Campbell said. “When you think of mobile, when you think of marketing, you have to think of interaction.”
How companies decide to interact with their customers runs the gamut. Some, like Clear Channel, go with keeping it simple, but well executed; while others think it’s the feature-rich media that will truly excite consumers.
Clear Channel has focused on SMS because it’s been much easier to get a return on text messages while it saves the “bells and whistles” for WAP sites, Zena Burns, online program director of Clear Channel’s online music and radio stations, said during the panel discussion.
“We’re focused on the basics right now,” she said. Clear Channel sells to advertisers with the “sexiness of WAP and the simplicity of SMS,” she said.
While many panelists agreed that SMS is pretty ho hum compared to the more rich offerings available to wireless subscribers, they can’t deny the ubiquity and simplicity of text messaging.
Marketers should be looking at what they can get within the current framework, Mozes CEO Dorrian Porter added.
“You’ve never been able to own a customer like this before,” Campbell said.
Many media companies aren’t accustomed to having direct relationships with customers and suddenly people are voicing their opinions straight to the source, said Endemol USA executive Jon Vlassopulos.
“Where you have a customer relationship, there’s an opportunity, but you also have a change in approach,” he said. “It’s still a very early stage market, so who owns what is still being worked out.”
Media companies are particularly good at acquiring those customer relationships, Telescope Inc. executive Jason George said, but once they get them they’re not sure what to do with them.
“It’s really thinking how you can engage the viewer,” Vlassopulos said.