| Ad experts feel it gives
brand experience a totally different facet, by adding instant interactivity
to the package. Former Lintas boss and advertising and marketing guru
Alyque Padamsee feels that SMS can put television and the Internet
in the shade. He says: "The multipurpose interconnectivity-oriented
medium of SMS will present multitudinous opportunities for ad agencies
in 2003. It is sad that ad agencies haven't able to leverage the SMS
medium as much as they could have done."
The Entertainment Network India (The Times of India group) owned
indiatimes launched its SMS based service 8888 in March 2002. Officials
claim that the number of messages have crossed the 1.1 million a
day at present; and still growing at a healthy 15 per cent a month.
Similar services have been started by prominent among media broadcasters,
publishing houses and websites such as Living Media, NDTV, Radio
Mid Day, MSN and Rediff. Many of these are news, feedback, or e-mail
driven, while some like Aaj Tak (Living Media) have also used their
service for launching programming related contests.
Be it the telly, the newspapers, magazines, cinema, cricket, the
SMS based contests have gained in currency to push products and
brands across the board. News, dating, jokes, astro, ring tone downloads
and contests seem to be the top revenue earners.
The SMS traffic for the leading cellular operators has jumped to
an average of about four million messages a day, from the earlier
average of 7,00,000 to 8,00,000. Bharti Enterprises director, marketing
and corporate communications, Hemant Sachdev, "Potentially,
the Indian consumer has not been exposed to the entire gamut of
entertainment opportunities. Effective usage could increase the
ARPU (average revenue per user) substantially.
Sachdev states: "Wireless data (SMS, SMS-based data, helplines,
m-banking, value-added features such as fun messages, cricket updates,
astrology, infotainment, entertainment, stock updates, music downloads,
ring-tones and logos) would eventually outstrip the traditional
voice-based services. A tremendous growth of pace will be soon witnessed
in value-added mobile phone services such as anonymous SMS; encrypted
SMS; Lotto and sweepstakes; crazy ring-tones (animal sounds); personalised
logos and word logos; Wassup happenings around the locality; dream
analysis, astrology, predictions, compatibility and others."
Marketing consultants are also bullish about the medium. “We
recommend to our clients quite regularly to go for a sustained SMS
based campaign among other things because there is no clutter in
the medium right now. It is a virgin medium and evolving. Within
two years, it will become part of everybody’s media plan. Ad
agencies ought to look at it as supplementary to the conventional
media,” says Mumbai based Samsika Marketing Consultants managing
director Jagdeep Kapoor in a medianet release.
A medianet release also says that Indiatimes 8888 played an important
role in ITC’s launch of snack product Bischips. It was the
first brand to use mobile messaging platform of Indiatimes which
marked a break from traditional advertising to target young individuals.
Since ITC was eyeing the 15-25 year age group as the target audience,
SMS based promotion fitted even better in the game plan. The key
brand activities in recent months have involved names such as Levis,
Temptations, Kwality Walls, Close Up Lemon, Mountain Dew, Blaupaunkt,
Marico and Mcdowell.
Experts also feel that the key is to fuse content service with
domain specialisation who knew exactly how to package and deliver
the service.
“An advantage, which appeals strongly to advertisers about
8888, is that it enables them as well as consumers to communicate
on one platform. In fact, consumers can now be inspired to participate
in brand promotions, rather than being a target of one,” says
Times Internet chief executive officer Mahendra Swarup.
For example, the fraternity acknowledges that the biggest SMS hit
was scored during the cricket World Cup earlier this year in form
of the Predikta contest with SET MAX!
Television channels had realised quite some time back that promotions
based purely on unconventional media like SMS and FM can also get
tremendous mileage to the individual programmes. “That explains
the success of promotions we have had with programmes like Kahin
Na Kahin Koi Hai, Friends and Jeena Isi Ka Naam Hai,”
points out Swarup.
Star TV recently launched an exercise heavily dependent on SMS
for viewers to identify their favourite TV artistes in the recently
held Star Parivar event where viewers rated their favourite bahus
(daughters in law), saas (the moms-in-law), the vamps et
al. Star India CEO Peter Mukerjea claims that one million votes
logged in the 15 days that the polling ran.
Well, if you cannot beat them, then join them!
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