Involve!

August 11, 2008

A few days ago there was a lot of publications about a ‘real’ interactive banner – campaign by Puca for Honda. Great job, fantastic experience for all the viewers.

Similar idea but in significantly bigger scale was used in Sony Bravia ‘Color Tokyo!’ campaign (by 777 Interactive). Selecting a color on your PC you could change the color of the whole Sony building in Tokyo. Imagine, you and your laptop can change Tokyo! What an excitement!

Both campaigns are successful because of one important factor – involvement. This is not enough today to give the consumer a chance to change a wallpaper on the screen, consumer wants to have a real influence on the reality. And this is what involves him/her (at the moment) the most.

Found today on MobileTechNews: Swiss Orange will introduce new model of SMS advertising. Instead of spamming the users, Orange will send advertising messages only to these clients who agree for it. The plus for client is special discount on the monthly invoice. So no more hard ‘push’ campaigns. That’s cool, however the future is still not so bright.

SMS advertising has for sure huge potential because of its reach, but also huge barrier because of its text specific. Some day I was told by some FMCG marketing director that the advertising starts when branding is there. And branding means logo for her. This approach is very harsh, but generally right. SMS is not a technology that can be used by every advertiser.

SMS is great for direct response campaigns. I.e. financial services campaigns in this channel may have great results, especially with click-to-WAP or click-to-call features.

What can we do in other branches? Can we run SMS campaign for every company? Yes we can, if we try to bypass the branding issue and start to use it more tactical (as an element of bigger campaign, as a trigger that start interaction, as a part of consumer journey). For sure we have to keep in mind SMS potential and try to find new ways of using it for the goodness of our brands :-)

More links:

http://www.amobee.com

http://www.marketwatch.com