Wireless devices have the capability to transform the advertising industry. Marketers have long wanted to be able to touch their target audiences on a one-to-one basis-and get those consumers to respond back to them in the same personal fashion. Today, though, most marketing is done with a big blanket. Does it really make sense for Nortel Networks Ltd. to brand itself during a football game? (Nope, I’m not buying any infrastructure today.)
But-if done correctly-mobile marketing can give consumers a way to tell marketers what they want and what they don’t want-and a communication medium to continually refine the process. For example, a 16-year-old Latina has a different set of requirements than I do; for one, she may want her marketing messages delivered in Spanish. She also probably wants a cool wallpaper to download; I want a 20-percent-off coupon for paper towels (a sad commentary on my life, perhaps, but true nevertheless).
If I set the parameters of what messages advertisers send to my phone, then I can access the marketing messages that are relevant to me (four tickets to the Sunday matinee of the movie “Cars,” please). And, just as important, I can stop those messages that I consider spam. (For example, I am never going to change the oil in my car myself. I did it once at age 18 to prove I could. I did. It brought me no pleasure. So it doesn’t matter to me whether Pennzoil or Quaker State is better. I don’t care. Their ad dollars are wasted on me. To drive home this point, please note that I had to do an online search to find brands of automotive oil.)
Mobile marketing will be most effective if done in conjunction with other marketing campaigns, according to Hernan Otero, head of NeoMedia, a company playing in the space. For example, a consumer watching a music video on TV could send a text message to a short code to get that music video downloaded to her handset. Mobile marketing can cross all kinds of platforms: TV, radio, print, billboards, Internet, the product itself-anywhere you can put a short code.
As with much in wireless, teens and young adults likely are going to drive the movement. Mobilitec, a content enabler, is studying some user experiences in this demographic. So far, “In every case, they said, `Market to me. Message to me.’ They’re a generation that has been brought up on advertising and they’re used to it,” said Margaret Norton, Mobilitec’s chief executive officer.
Read that comment again. It sounds like the golden gates of marketing heaven are opening for business.
