Kerala Tourism to advertise and build community on mobile

Kerala Tourism, which uses TV, print, Internet and below-the-line advertising to build its brand and promote tourism, is now ready to carve out its presence, build its brand and generate leads through the mobile media.

To begin with, it has planned to launch a three-month long pilot project to gauge the potential of mobile advertising. On October 15, it will unveil a special channel, called Kerala Tourism, on the mobile social networking and content sharing portal, MobShare.in, instead of launching a dedicated mobile site of its own. A channel on MobShare is similar to a brand page on Facebook, where a brand can share information in the form of text, photos and videos.

To promote the mobile community, a banner advertising campaign will be carried out and services of mobile ad networks such as AdMob and mKhoj will be used. These networks will serve banner ads across various mobile portals. Whenever a user clicks on the banner ad, he will be redirected to the Kerala Tourism channel on MobShare.in.

Speaking to afaqs!, Sanjay Vijayakumar, chief executive officer, MobMe, the company which owns MobShare.in, reveals, “Apart from extending the brand presence on the mobile medium, the aim of the pilot project is to learn how consumers can be engaged with the Kerala Tourism brand on mobile.”

He adds, “Based on the pilot project, a larger advertising campaign will be devised after three months. The banner advertising campaign will be targeted at consumers in India and Germany (which contributes a large chunk of tourists in Kerala).”

MobMe will coordinate with Stark Advertising, the agency which handles the creative duties of Kerala Tourism, and Invis Multimedia, a Kerala based company which developed Kerala Tourism’s website, keralatourism.org, and still manages it. It will develop the content for the mobile channel as well.