Mobile phones have been threatening to emerge as a serious personal advertising platform for sometime. Unlike your TV and PC you carry your phone with you at all times, usually switched on, and at least 95% of us have one. However, it wasn't until the iPhone and its contemporaries that the mobile internet was really shown to be a viable consumer experience.
"Push" strategies are relying on targeting mobile advertising by amalgamating demographics and location data. Therefore, you can push a BMW advert to a man, over-35 within 2-miles of the Twickenham dealership. Inevitably such push activity comes with the usual concerns over privacy.
The opportunities for 'pull" strategies are much more powerful in creating real customer engagement and word of mouth. The iPhone's ability to download apps and the open-source nature of these has facilitated viral marketing such as Carling's iPint which turns your iPhone into a virtual pint.
Now we have Blyk, a free mobile phone network for 16-24 year olds. For allowing advertising Blyk users can obtain free text messages and calls. For someone who has worked in the telco sector within the last 10-years it takes a while to get your mind round the fact that the business model can be subverted in this way. Yet even a year or so ago you would have been laughed at for giving away a PC (even the basic spec e-books from the likes of 3) with a mobile broadband contract. Clearly it pays to be open-minded!
My question is this. We know consumers are getting even more expert at filtering out unwanted advertising messages. With a advertising models like Blyk will its users simply learn to screen out the advertising as a necessary encumbrance to accessing the services they want? Sounds familiar doesn't it? Whereas with the model exemplified by the Carling app the opportunity for true consumer engagement and word of mouth is much greater. We just need to figure out how to measure their impact on the bottom line of the businesses we support.
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Posted by: elsewyoung | March 28, 2011 at 10:40 AM