All posts in Mobile Marketing

Brilliant idea from MINI, part of a campaign called MINI Getaway Stockholm 2010.

The concept is that iPhone users download the app and hunt a virtual MINI in the city, if you get 50 metres to the car, it becomes yours. BUT anyone else who gets within 50 metres to you once you have it, they takes it from you.

Cue people running around the city trying to get away from each other.

The person who has the virtual car by the end of the week wins a real MINI!

If this competition comes to the UK I’m going to go hide in the woods until I win the car.

By the way, the agency Jung von Matt is claiming this is the world’s first geolocation multiplayer reality game, I don’t think that’s true.

Campaign site: http://www.minigetawaystockholm.com/

[Via The Planning Lab]

It’s that time of year again – the nominations for the D&AD Awards 2010 have just been announced for the mobile marketing category.

If you don’t already know, the D&AD Awards are a bit like the creative industry equivalent of the Oscars or something, they’ve been around since 1963 and it’s seen as a pretty big deal in the advertising world.

HOWEVER, there is a growing consensus in the mobile agencies I’ve been speaking to that these awards are a pile of shit, mostly due to the methods of judging and the relationships that already seem to be in place by the people who make decisions. But it’s always interesting to see what’s out there, lots of stuff goes under the radar sometimes and it’s a good chance to catch up.

My fav entries have always been those that mix innovation, reach and results, it’s one thing to develop amazing mobile tech that works on 2 phones but it’s truly epic when you can create something a bit special that works on all handsets and gets people engaging.

This year there’s the emergence of another mobile category, Mobile Applications. It’s a bit of a strange one because many mobile marketing campaigns use applications…so where do they sit? In Mobile Marketing or Mobile Applications? There is already one example below which is the IBM Seer Wimbledon app, which features in the Mobile Marketing category. Why isn’t it in apps?

There are two types of award:

In-Book - This means that the work will be published in the D&AD annual and is the equivalent of a bronze medal.

Nominated – This is work that is considered worthy of the Yellow Pencil award and is the equivalent to a silver medal. Truly outstanding work is award the Black Pencil, which as you may have guessed is the Gold Medal.

Unfortunately the list of nominations for the mobile marketing category doesn’t actually have any decent info about the projects, so I though I’d do us all a favour and cover them.

Title: Red Flag
Client: The North Face
Agency: Ogilvy & Mather Advertising, Shanghai
Nation: China
Award: In Book

Outdoor clothing brand The North Face launched an integrated online and mobile campaign encouraging people to go out and explore new places whatever the weather.

Consumers in China and Bejing were given the challenge of planting a ‘red flag’ in each and every new place explored over the course of 18 days.

Participants used SMS to mark their location, this information was fed back into the campaign mini-site which included a map of challengers and up-to-date red flags.

The results were impressive, over 650,000 red flags had been planted by consumers in just 18 days.

Comment: My key take-out from this campaign is the SMS call-to-action which automatically provides the user location when they text-in. The most obvious benefit is that every phone is capable of taking part in the campaign and providing its location, without the need for GPS chips, applications or over hyped services like Foursquare. This information can then ultilised in a number of creative ways and mashed up with online services such as maps, social networks etc.

It’s actually quite an underused feature in mobile marketing, I hardly see campaigns utilise LBS SMS but it’s a perfect solution for allowing the user to provide their location without typing it in, they just fire off a normal text and the mobile operator passes their coordinates onto the brand. The main disadvantage is that the location provided by the operator isn’t as accurate as GPS but that isn’t always important.

Title: iidacalling
Client: iida
Agency: ground
Nation: Japan
Award: In Book

Iida is a new handset brand in Japan that caters more towards consumers who are more concerned with style rather than feature heavy mobiles. Iida wanted to target this audience with an interactive, innovative promotion that engaged consumers with the focus around ‘the ability to call’.

A mobile music generator called ‘iida calling’ was developed to allow consumers to create ringtones using their voice. This was then mixed with a famous DJ track and converted to a ringtone for the users to download as well as appearing on the main website. Each track was given a unique QR Code ‘sleeve’ and could be embedded and shared across the web and print, allowing others to download your mix by taking a picture of it.

The website was seriously engaging, the amount of content created by consumers and the way it was visualised was mesmerising. It was just a sea of on-screen CD sleeves representing thousands of ringtones, with each sounding different when you clicked play.

Within 2 weeks 18,000 tracks were generated and visits to the mobile and PC sites surpassed 2 million.

Comment: The first post I ever wrote on this blog was actually about this great integrated campaign. Even though the site was completely in Japanese it was still loads of fun to navigate and interact with the amazing visuals and music, I visited it several times over a few months because it was so cheery, surely a good sign when you don’t understand a thing on the site.

The mobile integration was outstanding, the way users created their custom track using a simple phone call was genius. Then of course you have the viral part of the campaign with users spreading tracks across blogs and social network. Win!

Read more…

There is a bit of a buzz going around the Internet with everyone trying to work out why the hell LG are willing to pay $10,000 for each of  five specific Chocolate handsets that are about 3 years old.

LG put out newspaper and online ads (below) across 12 countries with the five handset serial numbers. The competition ends today. Once you send your Chocolate back LG will do some verification, then send you your dosh and a brand new LG phone too.

Conspiracy theories are ranging from ‘the phones contain real gold circuitry’ to ‘they have experimental processors accidentally inserted into the phones’.

LG aren’t helping matters by being deliberately tight lipped over the matter.

This has got to be one of the best marketing campaigns ever. Lets face it, LG won’t ever find those phones across the globe since most people have probably thrown the Chocolate in the bin by now. If the phones were really that important then why would the competition only last 2 weeks?

So at the cost of creating the newspaper ad, LG have themselves some pretty big exposure on all the top blogs and forums. It’s just so simple. Read more…