Waiting for the Mobile Bandwagon?
Ad Age’s Alice Z. Cuneo writes this week about “Why ‘08 Isn’t Mobile’s Year — Again” identifying five key challenges to mobile really taking off: Reach, Measurement, Complexity, Misnomer of mobile as ad medium, and No hallelujah moment. The latter being the culmination of success on the previous four resulting in a break out moment that gets everybody jumping on the mobile bandwagon. But if your audience uses mobile devices, why wait for the bandwagon to come around?
Whereas the complexity and lack of standards in implementing mobile can present some hurdles currently for some types of complex campaigns, there are hundreds of tactics that can be implemented right now, fairly easily and at relatively low cost, to explore a new marketing channel.
For many companies, reach stands out as the primary barrier to blazing a path through this new territory in interactive media. But to the fact that “just over 30 million phone users are on data plans” (from the Ad Age article), it’s important to read this as “there are over 30 million phone users on data plans.” Are they your customers? If so, don’t let the challenges stand in the way of getting ahead on mobile. If you don’t know, ask those marketing gurus you pay to find out.
Reaching the mobile audience now in simple ways, even with the workarounds that may be necessary on the back end, will get you on your customers mobile devices well before your competition. Popeyes restaurants, for one example, didn’t wait. They targeted the 18-24 customer via low-cost electronic coupons sent on-demand via mobile and had a better than expected response (read more at Marketing Sherpa). Driving by an outdoor ad and texting to get a coupon is a simple execution using existing capabilities. And they are ahead of the pack for future, more sophisticated mobile campaigns.
If your customers use web-enabled mobile devices, the time to capture their attention via this medium is now.
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