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ipsh!'s CEO provides examples of why you should consider a mobile marketing budget in your 2006 planning.

Close to 200 million people in the United States own cell phones, according to the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association, and they’re eager to test out their cool handsets today. They have already “texted in to win,” interacted with their favorite brands, let a friend in on the know, and purchased with the convenient push of a button. So what can we offer all these fidgety users right now? Probably more than you think.

Building an anywhere, anytime customer communication list
Similar to the way brands have grown and maintained CRM databases for emailing customers, brand managers are starting to leverage the immediacy and ubiquitous nature of mobile for new databases. Such databases have been popular for charting videos on MTV’s “Total Request Live,” and for driving customers into retail outlets to purchase products.

Consumers who sign up for email and even snail mail change addresses often. Due to number portability, consumers are rarely changing cell phone numbers. This means that mobile information is gaining tremendous value over other forms of identity.

P2P -- Reach out and touch someone
Brand Strategy called last year’s launch of Elizabeth Arden’s Curious the most successful fragrance debut in the last five years. Tapping into the teen love affair with mobile phones, the company invited young consumers to submit their mobile phone numbers and a friend’s online to generate a voice message from pop idol Britney Spears, as well as information about the perfume launch. The promotion, which generated huge buzz and sales, shot Curious to the number one spot in U.S. department stores over the holiday season. Apparently Brittany had a lot more time to call people before she had her baby.

This P2P formula, because it allowed users to refer friends to the Curious campaign, created yet another layer of virtual distribution.

When two’s a crowd
Companies like McDonald’s are using interactive two-way text messaging and short code advertising as effective branding moves across all media. In its recent RUMAC text-in-to-win campaign, McDonald’s invited users to text in “Mac codes” printed on millions of Big Mac boxes nationwide for chances to win tickets to a House of Blues concert. During this campaign, according to AdAge, McDonald’s saw a three percent increase in Big Mac sales.

Shortcodes are sort of like website addresses for opt-in mobile campaigns. They are usually a five digit number like 12345 or word grouping like IPSH1 that correspond to numbers on the phone dialer.

Short codes can help companies measure the effectiveness of ads placed in traditional media. By featuring a short code in a commercial, a company can better assess the direct response of consumers by measuring how many texted in the featured short code for a chance to win cash and prizes.

Rock Txt-n’ Roll
Concert-goers at festivals are being offered unique prizes and giveaways directly to their cell phones. This summer, 30,000 music fans were offered a chance to win concert prizes at Lollapalooza, a large-scale touring festival in the United States featuring 60 artists performing on six stages. An astonishing 10 percent of the audience -- that's 3,000 people -- participated in the “Txt-n’-Win” campaign. The increase in audience participation, compared with previous years, is a strong indication that people want to extend their concert-going experience beyond listening to their favorite artists -- they want to play around with their cell phones.

Digital coupon book, scissors not required
Mobile users can also get discounts and coupons on everyday items without ever looking through their Sunday newspaper. Mcoupon, a coupon received through SMS that users can redeem at the cash register, eliminates the need to remember to clip or print a coupon, let alone remember to take it along. Case studies show that coupons retained on phones as text or bar codes realize up to a 10 percent redemption rate. One example is Capitol Records’ recording artist Chingy. Mobile coupons redeemed at Musicland (Sam Goody) locations nationwide for his new album, Powerballin’, realized a 10 percent return in February 2005.

In the store
Imagine texting in a UPC code for any product in a retail store and receiving real-time price comparisons, mobile coupons and recipes in grocery stores. Stop imagining, it’s happening right now!

No more lines at the movies
Another creative and effective tool for mobile users to try, and for marketers to drive up sales, is direct purchases via mobile phones. This direct purchase technique has successfully driven ticket sales for movies. Before a movie’s release, ad banners and movie websites invite users to sign up to receive show times and alerts. On the day of the release, all registered users receive a text message, which contains show times for their local movie theater as well as the option to purchase tickets from resellers such as Fandango. Users can also hear a short movie promo message. This technique is also highly effective for concerts and live events. Fans can sign up to receive alerts for their favorite band and potentially purchase tickets before they go on sale to the general public.

Mobisodes coming to a small screen near you
With live TV streaming starting to trickle in on select phones (Verizon’s VCAST), we sometimes lose sight of the fact that we can already send mass video to cell phones in what are called Mobisodes -- 15- to 30-second video clips sent to a handset from a website or in response to a short code.

Innovation works best with integration
The most successful mobile campaigns include integration with the mobile shortcode into print, online and broadcast. This strategy lets companies create a “surround sound” marketing environment that showcases their product in multiple media outlets, creating both visibility and interactivity.

The payoff for mastering the mix-media technique has already proven to be enormous. Users are getting hooked and texting in to offers online, at concerts, on radio, TV and billboards. One can only imagine what more is in store for 2006.

With the help of broadband penetration and behavioral targeting, wireless has the opportunity to surpass desktop internet.

Mobile communications has seen incredible advancements in the past years. For our industry, it's a wide open opportunity as there is little mobile advertising today and the devices are graphic rich, with high quality video and much more storage than just a year ago. It's pretty clear to me that it will be one of the next great places to apply behavioral targeting. Some of this may sound like the same old promises, but a closer look will show that behaviorally targeted advertising over mobile devices is something that the industry must start planning for now to maximize this huge opportunity.

Long before the dotcom bubble (okay, in internet time that might be seven years) there were a lot of great ideas about what the internet could achieve. Unfortunately, as we all know the timing was off and, in practice, those ideas proved disappointing to both users and the businesses delivering them. Back in the late 1990s, the online experience was pretty rough. Let's face it. It stunk because you were generally on a slow-speed connection at work and you were almost assuredly on a slow-speed connection at home. Remember, 56k modems were still "fast" in 1997.

People ask me all the time, what is it that changed online advertising that opened the door to the likes of Google, Yahoo!, behavioral targeting and other companies and technologies and enabled them to come into the fore in a meaningful and sustainable way? I think there's a very simple answer: It is the tipping point of broadband adoption.

Now we have greater than 50 percent broadband adoption in the home and nearly ubiquitous adoption by businesses. Lo and behold, a lot of very interesting applications people thought of back in the late '90s are pretty impressive -- some even indispensable -- when you have enough bandwidth for them to operate properly. Suddenly, it was a high quality experience.

The development of internet delivery over wireless devices has followed the desktop model pretty closely, just on a slightly extended schedule. I was working in wireless communications in the mid-1990s and in wireless data in the late 1990s, and clearly recall the excitement rampant in the industry about the bright future just around the corner. There were a lot of great ideas floating around about how the mobile phone was poised to become the ultimate personalized device. Instead of relating to content and media and applications through a place (often shared) like a desktop (that was often shared) you would do it through a mobile phone and receive an individualized experience wherever and whenever you wanted. Just like the desktop internet guys, the timing was off.

So what will help wireless media come to the fore? The same thing that spurred the internet: reaching a tipping point of broadband wireless adoption. We already see in places like South Korea and Japan where there is great wireless broadband adoption, there are a lot of desktop-type internet applications -- gaming, chat, et cetera -- used on a daily basis because the experience warrants it.

That's a pretty intriguing development for behavioral targeting for two reasons:
1. Wireless broadband is, with a few minor exceptions, a one-to-one mapping of devices to users, creating a very meaningful source of data to discover consumer interests.
2. The "traditional internet" problems of aggregation and segmentation exist in the wireless world on a much larger scale, and behavioral targeting is a very useful tool to solve those problems.

So, unlike the delivery of online media to the desktop, the opportunity is greater and, because the technology backbone of wireless internet access will be largely the same that it is for the desktop (i.e. Internet Protocol), the problems are less significant because they have already been solved. However, before everyone rushes to the promised land, wireless media does present some unique challenges to the advertising and media industries.

The first challenge is the mental barrier about personalization that the traditional ad community will have to get through: It is a uniquely personalized experience that will force everyone -- from senior-level marketers to ad buyers and publishers -- to think about fragmentation in a new way. They will have to create reach through aggregation techniques -- like behavioral targeting -- that are starting to reach broad adoption in the "traditional online" world. The good news is those that understand and embrace this difference, can seize the opportunity that much faster because there are no strong alternatives.

The second challenge is how to think about what the medium is capable of. The knee-jerk reaction is to repeat the mistakes of traditional online, and stop at direct response. That's some 1990s thinking that deserves to have died. The industry must think about mobile devices more broadly as an access point to the internet that people are going to use an awful lot -- much more than the desktop. With the graphic richness of today's cell screens, it's perfectly possible to do large-reach brand advertising right from the start. Therefore, we need to think now about how to bring those dollars to the mobile medium.

There's no question that development of wireless internet was severely outpaced by the desktop. However, wireless is now reaping the benefit of that lag and, with the help of broadband penetration and behavioral targeting, has the opportunity to quickly match and even surpass desktop internet. Behavioral targeting is all about providing relevant advertising (content) to interested people. We should take advantage of the success of behavioral targeting on the traditional internet and explore how we can deliver a quality, relevant experience across all digital media, starting with mobile devices.

Text messaging in Europe has grown from 77.5 billion short message service (SMS) messages in 2001 to 138.3 billion in 2003, according to Jupiter Research. It's gaining popularity as a cheap alternative to phone calls, especially among young people. So naturally companies are inventing interesting ways to interact with customers through their phones.

Reach them where they are
Hibernian, an Ireland-based insurance company, decided to take advantage of this popularity to boost the effectiveness of its marketing efforts -- in particular, one campaign geared toward its youngest customers.

Hibernian offered a very targeted auto insurance product to a very niche market -- drivers who received their licenses within the past five years with good driving records. The company used traditional direct marketing methods, such as television, print and billboard ads to promote its Ignition auto insurance program. Ignition offers in- experienced drivers an interactive training course designed to improve driving skills.

The program appealed to a mass market, but only about 20 percent of callers reaching the contact center actually qualified. "Many of these people didn't match the criteria to be eligible for the Ignition program," says John Canacott, co-founder and director of Strength5, one of Hibernian's marketing firms. "And the call center was tied up with calls that weren't going to benefit anybody."

Focus on quality leads
Hibernian cut down on the number of unqualified callers dialing in by asking interested customers to respond via text message on their phones. Once users responded, the system immediately sent a text message reply to alert customers that a Hibernian agent would call them shortly.

The company then further narrowed its pool of qualified customers by using a two-way interactive alerting tool from Adeptra (which competes with Siebel, 724 Solutions and Centerpost) that prompted them to answer questions related to the new product via their phones.

If their answers qualified, they were transferred immediately to the contact center to sign up for the program. "So every time they took a call, they were taking a call from someone who matched the criteria," says Canacott. Hibernian recouped its investment in 15 weeks, he says. Revenue generated increased by 86 percent over the 15 weeks and net profits increased 150 percent. The number of total inquiries increased by 89 percent.

The tools helped Hibernian double its sales of Ignition and the amount of qualified leads it received. The contact center improved productivity by cutting two-thirds of unqualified calls before they reached agents. In all, 44 percent of advertising responses were sent by text message and 39 percent of calls screened through the alerting system were actually transferred to an agent. Hibernian plans to use similar means with other products, says Canacott.

Technologically advanced breakfast
In Italy, a similar interactive mobile campaign recently resulted in a 9 percent increase in sales for Dunkin Donuts.
Like Hibernian's business model, customers received coupons for Dunkin Donuts goods by responding to advertisements via their mobile handsets. Ads were displayed on store notice boards, billboards and on the radio.

Sales were reportedly up 9 percent within the first three weeks of the campaign. By enticing consumers to request special offers, Dunkin Donuts ensures that it achieves a great consumer push without running the risk of breaking down the client relationship by contributing to the wealth of spam.

Expert opinions
Both Dunkin Donuts and Hibernian leveraged mass-marketing channels to start a dialogue with consumers through the contact center, a crucial one-to-one touchpoint. But is the trend truly an opportunity for one-to-one advancement?

Lisa Regelman, senior business analyst at Peppers & Rogers Group, says that these companies are on the right track.
"SMS messaging, or text messaging, can be an opportunity for one-to-one enhancement, not necessarily advancement," she says. "Just as with e-mail and any other inexpensive direct customer communication, there's a tendency to be over-eager in communicating with customers merely because the channel exists. Successful texting often relies on making the channel available to the customer and then leaving it to the customer to initiate contact and give permission, rather than vice versa."