Advertising consultant Kathryn Koegel recently served as a judge of the GSMA Global Mobile Awards. She writes for Advertising Age that she learned a lot about how mobile advertising is being done around the world. What did she discover? That folks are doing much more interesting and creative things using simpler tools than marketers are doing in the US.
The problem, Koegel says, is that in the US advertisers are obsessed with fancy iPhone apps that really don’t do much to promote the brand. what she found globally was that companies could promote involvement using simple SMS text messages and creative approaches that led to publicly visible activity.
That doesn’t mean that apps aren’t a good idea, just that they need to accomplish something. She points to a Japanese campaign that uses the GPS and motion sensor in the iPhone to lead people to try to catch virtual butterflies by waving their phones about in public areas. “Catching” the butterflies leads to delivery of coupons to participants.
Because things come in 10s, Koegel gives us 10 lessons to be learned from the competition that I found fascinating. Well worth the read.
In closing, she talks about the winning mobile campaign from the competition – one that sells Cornetto ice cream in Turkey through the use of a video game projected on the wall of a building in Taskim, Turkey’s answer to Times Square. People compete by controlling game characters on the side of the building using text messages from their phones. If they complete the task, they win free ice cream to be collected on the spot. Take a look at this video of the campaign.
What kind of mobile marketing could you think up?
Cornetto Ice Cream Wall Projection Mobile Game