Integrated marketing needs mobile
Wednesday, 11th June 2008
Posted by Horden Wiltshire, Chief Executive Officer
I recently spoke on a panel at Mobile Content World 2008 in Sydney with Dave Mallam (MD Cogs Media), Kerry Field (Director MindShare Interaction), Sasha Hunt (Head of Digital and Direct, BT Financial) and Cameron Wall (Technical Director, G-Nius Mobile Intelligence). The panel was ably moderated by Jim Shomos, writer/producer of Let’s Talk.
The panel session discussed “Using Mobile to Drive Brand Awareness” and all the speakers gave a different and relevant view on this topic. There was a broad discussion that covered everything from the challenges of mobile marketing campaigns in financial services, the different technologies and enablers for mobile campaigns through to the barriers to uptake for mobile marketing.
One of the comments I made during the panel was that from our perspective we are starting to see clients looking to integrate mobile across more than one element of the marketing mix. Over the last 12 months m.Net has integrated many mobile marketing campaigns into all the major media formats; television, radio, print, ambient, and web. We see mobile as having the potential to be the glue across the different media channels in marketing campaigns. Increasingly we see customers incorporating the mobile campaign across more than one channel. Recently we developed a mobile site for Toyota to promote their latest Camry range. The mobile site provided information on the range and allowed potential customers to register for a test drive. This mobile site was integrated into the television campaign via a key word that viewers could text to a short code. The same mobile site was integrated into a mobile banner campaign within the Yahoo!7 mobile portal. My belief is that this trend will accelerate over coming years.
All of the panelists in the session gave great insights into the market from their perspective and the audience were active throughout the discussion raising questions about the best ways to encourage education in the market place. One common theme throughout the panel and Mobile Content World more broadly was the high data plans from the carriers were one of the key barriers to customer adoption. The reality is that data charges are coming down quickly; even Telstra’s casual roaming post-paid plan has come down by 90% over the last 18months. The challenge however is that users still perceive that data costs are high. Based on overseas evidence I am confident this trend in pricing will continue and this augurs well for the future of mobile marketing in the Australian market.