Monday, April 9, 2001		Article

Salesman in your hand
By Julia Day

IT'S a disturbing thought: the cute, designer-clad constant companion that spends hours of every day clamped to your hand suddenly turns out to be a KitKat salesman. Welcome to the dawning of a new advertising era, where mobile phone marketing is about to make the "brand-in-the-hand" dreams of marketers the world over come true.

Nestle is launching Kit Kat-sponsored games on mobiles. McDonald’s, American Express, lastminute.com and even Britain’s Labour party have all started to target consumers through mobiles.

Mobiles offer marketers the ultimate direct, personalised, time- and location-sensitive method of advertising. But this method of marketing also carries the risk of brands becoming unwelcome intruders in people’s lives and presents a dilemma over direct and unmonitored advertising to children.

Any consumer backlash could damage the advertiser and ricochet on to the mobile network operator. And if consumers are unhappy about the content of branded text messages, or don’t want to receive adverts, who do they complain to? The medium does not fall under the remit of any established regulator.

But the bandwagon is rolling. Mobile phone network operators — anxious to recoup $ 31.46 billion spent on 3G network licences — handset manufacturers, Internet service providers, Web site owners, the advertising industry, the nascent mobile marketing industry and advertisers all have a vested interest in making mobile marketing work.

The European m-commerce market is set to soar in value from $ 287.43 million in 1998 to $ 20.44 billion by 2003, with advertising accounting for almost a quarter of that revenue, according to Internet investor Durlacher. Even conservative ad revenue forecasts are not to be scoffed at. Forrester Research estimates Europe’s mobile ad market will be worth $ 2.64 billion by 2005.

A new advertising model is needed to establish how to create, evaluate and charge for wireless campaigns, alongside discovering what consumers are willing to accept and pay for. The opportunity to send personalised messages direct to consumers - ones they are almost guaranteed to look at - could not have come at a better time for brand owners.

In a fragmenting media marketplace companies are desperately seeking new ways of getting their message across, particularly to the youth market, the most avid users of text messaging. Companies, including Coca-Cola, are pulling back from TV advertising and ploughing resources in to marketing which "adds value" to consumers’ lives: music, sport and entertainment sponsorships, viral marketing and initiatives that allow the consumer to interact with the brand.

A recent two-month trial by US mobile marketing network WindWire, involving seven wireless Web sites, 14 advertisers and six ad agencies with 22 campaigns and 105 ads, gives a taste of the allure of wireless for advertisers.

The campaigns inspired click-through and call-through rates up to 15 per cent, a 46 per cent ad recall rate and a 24 per cent-86 per cent likelihood to purchase after seeing the ads. It also showed 86 per cent of consumers want free or ad-subsidised content and that 64 per cent are concerned about privacy issues.

— GNS