Pittsburgh Penguins’ innovative text alerts program

The thing about mobile advertising is that it’s an inclusive market. While big brands fight over the coveted market leader position, small players can quietly carve a niche for themselves. If you’ve got something valuable to offer, you will certainly find takers. Take for example, a National Hockey League team which has struck the right chord with its fans big time via its text messaging program.

Pittsburgh Penguins, the famous NFL team, has been sending text message alerts to college students about its ticket sales, available tickets, discount offers, and other things for the past two years successfully. It all started when the team wanted to reach out to college kids, who form a considerable fan base. The team started sending text messages to college kids about the number of tickets available and the discounts offered and the response was pretty good. Encouraged by this good response, the team hired the services of Vibes Media, a mobile marketing agency, and came up with the idea of mobile based contests and giveaways. The response was brilliant as more than 80% of the fans responded by taking part in the contests. Now, Pittsburgh Penguins regularly sends team news, game recaps, and plenty of other alerts to more than 20,000 fans.

Already, popular brands like Pizza Hut have sponsored some of the text alerts and thanks to the positive response from the fans, the team is thinking of an idea to tap this market and earn some revenue through sponsored text alerts. Now, is that smart or what?

Categories: Cell Phone Advertising, All things mobile phones.

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