Asia Pacific Leads the Way in Mobile Marketing

The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) recently announced the winners for its Fifth Annual Global Mobile Marketing Awards. As the MMA representative for Asia Pacific, it was very encouraging for me to see the overwhelming participation from organizations across the region. Five success stories from the region received six of the most coveted awards at the ceremony in Los Angeles.

The most successful mobile marketing campaigns are built on the understanding that the mobile channel isn't homogeneous. Instead, savvy brands and marketers know that it's actually a set of options, each with its own strengths and considerations that must be factored in to ensure an effective campaign. It was therefore interesting to see how some of the winning campaigns had the perfect mix of platforms and consumer insights required for the success of their campaigns in their respective local markets. Two such winning entries came from China and India.

PUMA F WAN, Phonevalley

Phonevalley, a leading mobile communication agency won for its innovative mobile campaign for the sports lifestyle brand PUMA. Titled PUMA F WAN, the campaign was based around the F1 race in Shanghai and started with the launch of a PUMA global mobile Internet site as an introduction to the PUMA brand and culture. To capitalise on advergaming opportunities, mobile users were given the chance to play a PUMA F1 battle car racing game that could be downloaded from the mobile Internet site. Players were encouraged to submit their scores by SMS and to forward the game to friends in order to earn new points. Every week the top three players were rewarded with sporting items.

As soon as players downloaded the mobile game, they were sent a PUMA MMS coupon, to redeem a mobile phone toy accessory in any of the 350 PUMA stores in China. A store locator function helped consumers identify the closest PUMA retailer and SMS short-codes were used to integrate all PUMA out-of-home and print ads. The site saw 85 million page impressions and the campaign produced 185,000 new qualified contacts for PUMA’s database. The cross media campaign was completely adapted to Chinese mobile consumption patterns (gaming and viral).

Reliance GSM – ‘Go For It’ campaign, Tribal DDB India

Another winning campaign that demonstrated a perfect combination of consumer insight and brand offering was the Go For It campaign created for the Reliance Communications GSM Service by interactive advertising agency Tribal DDB India. Tribal DDB India’s research pointed out the fact that, in spite of the availability of very sophisticated communication techniques, people still failed to socialize or communicate regularly with their friends and loved ones. There was a need to empower users to stay in touch with their world, in spite of their busy schedules and fast-paced lives. Armed with the above insights, Tribal DDB India decided to encourage users to call friends and relatives listed on their mobile phone books.

For the first time in India, people were able to experience a telecom service without actually buying it through a massive ‘Telecom Sampling’ exercise.  A sizeable mass media campaign encouraged people to call their long lost friends. The internet and mobile media were integrated to actually entice users to connect with their friends by making a free call. The BIG idea: allow people to make free calls to their friends from internet and WAP banners. A truly unique user experience was created, wherein people actually experienced the superior Reliance GSM network by making that phone call to their loved ones.

This innovative 'Click to Call' approach was a stunning success. With a campaign budget of USD 200,000, the challenge was 400,000 calls/connection. In the end, over 1,900,000 calls/connection were made. In addition, about 4% of the country’s active internet population sampled the brand's GSM offering. This creative effort created a database of roughly 3,800,000 mobile users across the country – with the major share being users of competitive mobile services.

With such extraordinary innovation coming from the Asia Pacific region, I personally can’t wait to see what the industry comes up with next! Watch this space for more such success stories from the region.