Summary: The jargon is “mobile marketing” — marketers placing ads, coupons, reminders, and links in and around your cellphone apps. It’s the next wave of innovative marketing and will spread quickly. Why? Because it seems to work.
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Excerpted from Business Week, “Pandora: Unleashing Mobile Phone Ads: Kraft, Nike, and others are getting results advertising on Pandora’s mobile music service. Is cell-phone marketing finally taking off?” By Tom Lowry, May 21, 2009
It’s just a matter of time until mobile marketing will take off in the U.S. … for two reasons: Web-surfing smartphones are selling briskly even in a downturn, and applications for those gadgets … are proliferating.
People are spending a lot more time playing games, watching TV, and shopping on their phones. That’s what marketers call engagement, a fancy way of saying people are paying attention. Companies, of course, prize that, so they’re looking for mobile applications that are a good fit for their brands.
Which brings us to Pandora, a nine-year-old, free online service that lets users design “radio stations” based on their musical preferences. Since Pandora launched a mobile edition two years ago, it has signed up 6 million people…That has prompted the likes of Best Buy, Dockers, Target, and Nike to buy ads on Pandora and experiment with what remains a cheap advertising medium
“Marketers, especially consumer brands, have to take mobile seriously now. You have to be where your customer works, lives, and plays.”
Pandora has become a test bed because people who use the service tend to spend a lot of time playing around with it. They are constantly creating stations, rating songs, and scrolling through playlists to find artists they don’t know … on average subscribers use the mobile service about 90 minutes a day (though there are no independent numbers).
Advertisers are trying out Pandora in myriad ways. Sometimes it’s as a direct marketing tool. Domino’s, for example, puts up ads that urge people to call in for a pizza directly from their phones.
Other companies are using coupons. Docker’s offered a 20% discount if visitors went to the brand’s site and entered a promotional code .
Some companies prompt users to watch movie clips where their products are featured prominently.
If one thing has surprised advertisers, it’s how avidly consumers are responding. Target says 27% more people clicked on its ad for the release of Christina Aguilera’s greatest hits CD last fall than on any other mobile Web campaign. The ad urged users to visit a site where they could get a free Aguilera ringtone and buy the album…
Sonos, which sells home music systems, just wrapped up a campaign on Pandora. DeAnna Wassom, Sonos’ senior marketing director, says she has never seen better customer response in her 20 years in the business. The ads asked people to click through to a promotional video. Typically, only 1% to 2% of people click on ads overall. But nearly 5% clicked in this case…and almost 40% of those clicking watched the entire video. During the campaign, nearly twice as many people asked to be put on Sonos’ e-mail list as those signing up on the company’s regular site.
Most brands have no clue how to market on mobile devices. Many try to do too much, including making sites so technologically flashy that they crash phones. The key is to keep it simple … build special mobile sites, because regular ones don’t translate well to supersmall screens.
Edit by TJS
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Full Article:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_22/b4133052597112.htm
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