Mobile Marketing Should Be Easy for Consumers To Take Action

As mobile marketing becomes more and more popular, ad and marketing agencies gets heated competition. Oglivy Interactive did some quite impressive accounts. One that I really like is Dove 'Campaign for Real Beauty.' 

Dove erected a large billboard of a happy, fresh-looking older woman with a text-to-vote number so that pedestrians could choose between 'wrinkled' and 'wonderful.' The billboard's live ticker showed the combined results from both text and online voting.

The campaign turned out to be a successful one. 

Christine's net analyzed the following reasons:

• Relevant to the consumer
• Welcome invitation to participate
• Entertaining
• Drives a specific action
• Integrated where appropriate
• Connects what was previously disconnected
• Simplicity

Among all the above reasons, I found "drives a specific action" and "integrated where appropriate" as the two most crucial ones. The billboard ad apparently leaves people with two options---whether to think the woman in the picture is "wrinkled" or "wonderful". The message itself calls for a specific action---to choose between the two. When people text messages to vote, it probably won't occur to them other things or words. People will tend to choose between the two words since that's what is given. This makes it easy to make a decision and make the action easy to take too. 

In other words, a good mobile marketing campaign should not leave all the questions for the target audience to answer. A good campaign should be specific and make the action easy for the target audience to take. If the target audience only needs to type a eight-lettered word (wrinkled) or a nine-lettered one, they won't feel bothered.It's just easy. Again, marketers shall find an easy way to have the audience's voices heard. Mobile marketing needs to be highly interactive than treating text messages as a mass outlet, or asking the audience to passively receive discount information. It needs to be two-way. Get their voices heard, and the marketers will gain more awareness and eventually profits.

The second reason I agree on is "integrated where appropriate". Mobile marketing will be dead if marketers only use it to promote their products or sending out discount information. It should be actively integrated with other promotions like a billboard ad. Marketers want to connect dots together for the target audience. In this case, the idea of real beauty should be viewed on a billboard, and should be documented by one's text message. Once the marketers make the target audience to move their fingers and type the word out, the target audience will have a higher chance to remember the message and accept the products coming with the message. People will recognize Dove products as for women with real beauty.

I think mobile marketing should integrate with other forms of marketing, and should be easy to interact. What do you think?