Feature: Mobile marketing: Calling the tune

The growth of 3G services is creating an untapped opportunity for marketers to use mobile content in promotions

When you are promoting sales of mobile phone handsets, it makes sense to offer free content as an ideal way to demonstrate the technology. Haygarth’s pan-European campaign for Nokia highlights the capability of its handsets for playing video and music by creating exclusive content in association with Kylie Minogue.

As well as giving people the chance to meet the singer, the new activity includes the offer of exclusive Nokia Kylie handsets featuring pre-loaded exclusive video and music content – under the tagline of “Want to take Kylie home?”. Consumers can also download a full album and additional content from a promotional website that has been designed and built by Haygarth. “This campaign offers our consumers across Europe an exclusive opportunity to experience the great sound quality of the Nokia 5310 and 5610 XpressMusic handsets,” explains Caroline Frick, brand sponsorship manager at Nokia.

Mobile content, such as games and wallpapers, have become commonplace in promotions targeting younger and tech-savvy consumers. Free animal ringtones were popular in Kellogg’s SMS-driven on-pack promotion featuring a top prize of winning a day as a zookeeper. Consumers could also download one of 10 ringtones of animal sounds such as roaring lions and howling wolves. Running on 22 million cereal packs, it invited consumers to send a text to Kellogg’s dedicated shortcode to receive back an animal fact and a link to a WAP site where they could download the ringtones. Mediaburst, the mobile messaging company that worked on the campaign with Manchester agency Blue Chip Marketing, reports that tens of thousands of consumers participated.

However, Hugh Taylor, managing director of integrated online agency Grasshopper, believes there is much more that marketers can be doing with mobile content now. “The mobile platform is at last starting to deliver the vision and potential,” he says. “In terms of promotional use, the medium is still to be fully exploited – traditionally, ringtones, wallpaper and games have been the most popular assets. These have tended to be more reward-focused, such as gift with purchase. But longer term, the medium offers the opportunity to build long-term relationships with users and content that can be personalised for the end user.”

The growth of third-generation 3G standards, offering greater flexibility and services by making more efficient use of mobile bandwidth, means increasing numbers of people are now accessing the internet via their phones, opening up opportunities for enhanced content. The number of mobile broadband connections has risen tenfold in the past year and social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace have launched mobile sites, suggesting that, within a few years, mobiles will become as common an access point for the internet as PCs. “The early promise and hype of WAP totally failed to deliver and for many years the only addition to voice capability was SMS,” Taylor says. “The advent of 3G handsets and networks has enabled the mobile phone user to access and be exposed to multimedia messaging.”

Oliver Reynalds headed the third-party web marketing department at Gameplay and the development of one of the first PC-based SMS systems with mobile marketing group BWB. Now, as European sales manager of Premier Promotional Services and a board member of the British Promotional Merchandise Association, he sees that the opportunity for mobile communications is “vast”. “Many companies are ahead of their time with WAP sites, but as mobile network providers across the UK and Europe include packages for internet browsing minutes and the ability for broadband speeds since the introduction of 3G, it is becoming more accessible to access websites, email, SMS and social networking groups in seconds from anywhere,” he says.

Mars has integrated social networking and mobile content through a widget on Facebook giving people a chance to give gifts in the form of mobile phone vouchers or coupons, redeemable for chocolate. Mobile coupons have been evolving rapidly over the past few years thanks to specialists such as Trinity Mobile, Eagle Eye Solutions and i-movo, with ITV now offering viewers to chance to receive mobile coupons linked to products they have seen in TV ads.

David Pearson, director of movie marketing and promotions company Filmology, believes there is still the barrier that most consumers do not expect to be able to show their phone to gain a discount. “Web vouchers work because people can either print them out and take them to the retailer or service provider or enter a code online to take advantage of the voucher’s value, something that is possible via mobile phone but has yet to capture the public’s imagination,” he says. “Technologically, the process should not be too different to standard procedures, such as the new generation of ‘barcodes’ that are stored on the phone and are compatible with the majority of barcode readers at retail. But the challenge is simply that of public buy-in to the process.”