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3 UK kicks off mobile viral marketing effort

on August 8, 2005 by Martina Comments

In the UK 3G operator 3 has partnered with viral content provider Kontraband to start serving viral ads to mobile phones. New Media Age (sub. req.) reports the funny content will be available using video shortcodes (so it won’t be 100% viral), but at least it’s a first in the viral direction. Anyway I will be curious to know the pricing model. On the Internet, what is viral, it’s free. But when it comes to mobile phones the word “free” almost has no meaning, carriers dominate the scene and want to make money anytime, anywhere, which isn’t something good neither for marketers nor end-users. Tag: mobile marketing, viral marketing

File under: 3 UK, mobile marketing, pricing, viral marketing

Smartphones and mobile advertising

on July 21, 2005 by Martina Comments

According to the numbers recently released by Gartner, smartphones will represent one fifth of all mobile handset sales by 2008. 3G eventually appears to be around the corner, and we need to start thinking about the real opportunities on a mass market scale the new technology will provide us with. After the failures in the early stages of the mobile market, mobile advertising is about to come back but, of course, we need to take into account the lesson learned from past mistakes. Basically the marketing approach to mobile phones should be “push” not “pull” but, with the growth of WAP 2.0 portals and mobile HTML browsers, this concept will evolve. I see a near future of “light” contextual advertising, while I believe we still have to wait a couple of years for mobile rich media. Of course the technology is already there to support streaming media ads and now even Flash animations, but marketers need to remember the “pricing” issue. Given the current prices of 3G connections in Europe (recently I spent 15 Euros with Vodafone to download 300 Kb!!!) making the user pay to watch your ads is a crazy idea that could absolutely damage a brand. So while we wait for 3G to reach the mass market with carriers applying fair prices, SMS and partly MMS will still remain the best mobile marketing option.

File under: 3g, mobile advertising, pricing, rich media, smartphones, sms

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