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.