Virgin Mobile’s Facebook application to woo mobile users

They say you can’t put a price on friendship. But Virgin Mobile has just done that. According to their latest offer, your friends can help you earn free mobile airtime.

Virgin Mobile has designed a Facebook application called Fund My Phone, which is nothing but an improved, online version of Sugar Mama. The only difference is, in Sugar Mama you get free airtime if you watch ads whereas in Fund My Phone, you get free airtime even if your friends watch ads.

All you need to do is, add the ‘Fund My Phone’ application to your Facebook profile and ask your friends to take a look at it. For every minute they spend watching stuff, you get free airtime.

Virgin Mobile has called this a ‘natural next step’ in connecting to their customers. It believes that the strong interaction between Facebook members will help its application reach plenty of new users easily. The good response that Sugar Mama got is also considered a reason for this step by many in the industry.

I’d have to say this is a good idea, though I’m not sure if I can convince my friends to watch ads on my Facebook profile. However, we could make an arrangement. I watch ads on someone else’s profile and someone else, preferably a friend of mine, watches ads on my profile. And we both get free airtime. Is it a bad idea? What do you say?

Categories: Cell Phone Advertising, All things mobile phones.

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Sugar Mama and a few musings on incentive based mobile advertising

A few days back, I was chatting with a couple of my friends and out of nowhere we got into the topic of incentive based mobile advertising. As you know, there are some companies which pay you to get ads in your mobile phone. In case you don’t have any idea about this, I suggest you check out this, this, this, this, and this.

One of my friends brought up a valid point – what if they mishandle our personal information? I’d give it to him. After all, you give your personal information like your email id, mobile number, likes and dislikes, and preferences (to get targeted ads) to the company. So, such a doubt from my friend is completely understandable. I, however, brought up another point, which sort of clarified his doubts.

I talked about Virgin Mobile’s Sugar Mama. Sugar Mama has a loyal subscriber base of 700,000 people. Now, that’s no small number by any means. The concept of Sugar Mama is simple. Now, you need to understand why Virgin has had this kind of success with Sugar Mama.

First, people trust Virgin. Virgin has a strict privacy policy and they state clearly that your information will be used only for the aforementioned purposes and will not be sent to any third party under any circumstances. So, you can be sure that your information will never be misused.

Second, it’s a fair deal after all. You get ads. They are not normal banner ads or something, but they are interactive in nature. So, you are supposed to answer a poll or take a survey. It hardly takes you a minute to do so. In return, you get one minute of air time – free of cost. Sounds like a fair deal to me, what about you?

Third, you don’t get spammed. They get your preferences for a reason and that is to send you targeted, relevant ads. So, you’ll always be able to relate to those ads and make use of them. For example, a diehard rock music lover will never be asked to choose his favorite pop album in a poll. So, you can be sure of getting ads that suit your tastes.

As a result of all this, what have you got? A mobile advertising plan which has got a good user base of 700,000 people and growing. So, the moral of the story remains the same. Give people something useful and they’ll be with you.

Categories: Cell Phone Advertising, All things mobile phones.

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Debunking the myths about mobile advertising

Alright; I’m back in my pavilion. I was just reading some articles on mobile marketing and this one caught my attention. The author has written something about eMarketer’s Mobile Advertising Report. The report focused on the impact of mobile advertising in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) market and its possible implications in the US market.

Now, the article says that by subsidizing mobile data plans by advertising, mobile advertisers are trying to turn mobile phones into TV sets. I wonder how on earth he came up with this correlation. Even I feel bored to say this again, but then…

Mobile advertising has something called ‘opt-in’ facility. You have to opt in for a mobile advertising campaign to get ads in your mobile phone. In other words, you have the choice to keep your phone away from ads. Do you have such options in TV? Advertisements in TV, whether you like them or not, will always be there and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it. So, please don’t compare TV to mobile phones.

Some of you must have heard about Sugar Mama from Virgin Mobile, which gives you free talk time for watching mobile ads. Now, the author even mocks this by coming up with this gem.

“I’m sure you’re ad creative is impressive, but I’d venture to guess that they went there to get free air cell phone minutes, not view ads.”

Oh yeah? People don’t watch TV to view ads either, you know?. They watch sitcoms and movies, in which they are served with ads, which they cannot escape from. The point is - It doesn’t matter. People are open to mobile ads as long as they gain something from them.

At last, he comes up with something about Americans getting tricked by mobile advertisers.

“You may have tricked us with TV commercials and OLAs, but we typically don’t fall for the same tricks twice (except for George W).”

Really?

Categories: Cell Phone Advertising, Rant.

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