Ford’s innovative mobile marketing campaign in India

Okay folks, let me ask you a question.

You’re a billion dollar automobile company, you’ve just released a new, peppy edition of your car which appeals mostly to youngsters, and you want to grab the attention of young car enthusiasts all over the country. What do you do?

Simple. You do mobile marketing.

Ford did the exact same thing in India when it released its new Ford Ikon Music Edition car called the iKool. Ford used the services of MindShare, a mobile marketing company, to come up with a creative mobile marketing campaign for iKool. MindShare contacted Nokia and made an agreement to advertise on Airtel Live!, the WAP site of India’s leading mobile operator, Airtel. Airtel is part of Nokia Media Network and it readily agreed to this arrangement.

MindShare created an innovative, content rich WAP site for Ford iKool. Mobile users around the country were served with banner ads through Airtel Live!. Those who clicked on the banner ads were taken to the iKool WAP site where they had the chance to download mobile games, wallpapers, ringtones, and many more.

The response rate for this mobile marketing campaign was a terrific 8.58%. Especially, two content pages – “Services For You” and “News & Sports” – saw a phenomenal click through rate of 14%, which is unseen before.

Ford has actually set an important precedent, as far as I’m concerned. I still remember, when Ford came up with its new model called Fiesta in India about a year and a half back, it mostly relied on TV ads and newspaper and magazine coverage. Now, just within a couple of years, things have changed so much that it went straight to a mobile marketing company to get the job done. And the result was there for everyone to see, right?

Categories: Cell Phone Advertising.

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Mobile ads have better recall rates than TV ads

How do you judge the impact of an advertisement? How do you find out if it was effective or not? In most cases, you go by brand recall - the ability of the customer to recall your brand after being shown the ad a few times. Until now, TV was considered the best medium to place ads as it had the highest brand recall rates. But mobile advertising has simply changed everything.

According to reports from analysts, mobile ads have higher recall rates than TV ads. At the recent Mobile Advertising Degree conference, the representatives of Verizon Wireless emphasized the same fact. They also added that despite being costlier, mobile ads are preferred over online ads because they have a phenomenal click through rate.

This is incredible. I’ll explain you why. First, TV has a huge reach. Second, ads in TV are so common that people no longer consider them a problem. Third, a TV screen is more fit for rich ads and watching an ad on a TV screen could be actually fun.

Now, let me compare this with mobile phones. First, a mobile phone, until now, is not considered a primary advertising medium. Second, ads in mobile are considered intrusive by many, so you can’t expect mobile advertisers to start sending ads to all and sundry. Third, watching an ad on a mobile screen, especially a low end mobile phone’s screen, is not exactly a great experience.

Going by what I’ve said above, anyone can say that the odds are stacked against mobile advertising. But guess what? Mobile ads have a phenomenal click through rate of 2% and more, which is way better than online ads.

Now, just imagine. If these kinds of results are possible right now, what could be the case in future when we have more high-end mobile phones, richer ad formats, improved technology, and most importantly, an open-minded society which is not averse to mobile ads? All I can say is one word – unimaginable.

Categories: Cell Phone Advertising.

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Tesco Mobile’s mobile advertising campaign gets good response

Retail giant Tesco recently stated that it might consider taking its mobile advertising campaign to the next level soon, thanks to the positive response from its customers. The mobile division of Tesco, Tesco Mobile, has been running a trial WAP advertising portal since May 2007 and its growth has been impressive. Month after month, the portal grew enormously and last December, the portal had 30,000 unique visitors, which is very impressive. So, based on these results, Tesco Mobile has decided to embrace mobile advertising big time.

The click through rate (CTR) of the banner ads served at the portal was around 3% to 7%, which is again very impressive. The portal had a strong female user base which accounted for most of the clicks on the ads served. Most of these women are married and are responsible for household budget. So, naturally, fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) such as toiletries, kitchen accessories, and cleaning products were the most preferred ones among the ads served.

This again has proved the fact that when served with the right ads in the right manner, people are willing to give mobile ads on their phone a try. The only thing that matters is – relevancy.

Categories: Cell Phone Advertising, All things mobile phones.

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DIDMO wins Frost & Sullivan Mobility Award

DIDMO, a Scandinavian mobile advertising company, was presented with the ‘Entrepreneurial Company of the Year’ award for its achievements in mobile advertising by Frost & Sullivan Mobility Committee.

The Frost & Sullivan Mobility Awards recognize the best in the mobile and wireless industry and award them every year. This year’s winner, DIDMO, is very popular with mobile users all over the world. It offers free, ad-supported, full version mobile video games to users for a period of 24 hours. After this period, customers may decide to purchase the game or not. The ads are very engaging and are shown only for about four seconds. This has gained significant popularity among mobile users, which is evident from the fact that the average click through rate of these ads is around 5-10%. Just to put this in perspective, I’ve got to tell you that the click through rate of ordinary ads is around 1-2%.

In my opinion, recognitions like this will help a company sustain its position in the industry and make the industry more competitive, thereby bringing the best out of every company in the industry.

Categories: Cell Phone Advertising, All things mobile phones, Mobile Games.

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Five reasons why Facebook Ads is a bad idea

By the time you’re reading this post, Facebook would have undergone a huge transformation – from a social networking site to a social media cum advertising network. But then, if you have a user base of around 50 million active users, this kind of transformation is always around the corner.

Now, you must have read a lot of blogs and sites stating that Facebook can be the best target for advertisers, the click through rate will be high, blah, blah, blah. But I’m sorry to say – I differ from all of them. I personally think advertising on Facebook could be a bad idea. It could even be going the MySpace way – from a neatly designed social networking site to a spam-filled site which has ads by the dozen. Why, you ask me? Allow me to present my reasons.

1. Facebook is a social networking site meant primarily for students. Agreed, it has opened up to everyone now, but a majority of their user base is still students. So, as an advertiser, you cannot target them as they don’t have a regular disposable income.
2. The click through rate (CTR) of Facebook is just around 0.04%, the kind of stat you don’t want to see as an advertiser.
3. As of now, Facebook’s biggest strength is its spam-free, neat design which makes for a great networking tool. In fact, this is what separates Facebook from MySpace and other networking sites. By placing ads in there, Facebook could lose its USP and become just another social networking site.
4. The majority of Facebook users are university students, who are intelligent enough to not get sucked up by dozens of ads that pop up from the screen – a fact which is clear from their click through rate.
5. Last but not least, I, as a Facebook member, do not want advertisers to know about my likes, dislikes, preferences, and other things, at least not without my consent. If someone wants to know my personal info, they should get my permission. If I feel there is something valuable that the advertiser can offer me by knowing my personal info, I might think of giving him that. But, you just can’t expect people to say yes to advertisers using their personal info whichever way they want.

So, ladies and gentlemen – this is why I think Facebook ads is not so great an idea as it seems to be. I know a lot of you might agree with me and a lot of you would disagree with me, hell, some of you would even want to flame me. You’re welcome to do all that. Just go to the comments section and do whatever you want.

Categories: Cell Phone Advertising.

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