Mobile Revelation ’05: Mapping mindsets towards a handset

The mobile phone as a marketing tool was the key topic of discussion at a seminar titled Mobile Revelation ’05 in Mumbai on March 4. Speakers such as Rajiv Hiranandani, country head, mobile2win; Neeraj Roy, MD & CEO, Hungama, Saugato Banerjee, head, consumer banking and marketing, Standard Chartered Bank and Prashant Narekuli, head, marketing & sales, Coruscant Tec, among others, delved on the subject during the course of the day.

Participants at the seminar came from a cross-section of industries including banking & finance, media, FMCG, retail and advertising, and seeing them make copious notes was an indicator of how important the mobile medium has become for corporate bodies, agencies etc.

India has 50 million mobile phone users at the moment, and the figure is set to increase to about 90 million in the next 18 months. Hence, it is not surprising that marketers, broadcasters and allied players feel the need to target consumers through the ‘little handset’.

“Even the state-owned Doordarshan is waking up to the possibility of increasing interactivity on its network of channels through SMS TV,” said Hiranandani, who focused specifically on ‘Mobile TV’ and how wireless services such as SMS, ringtones, singtones, wallpapers, games, contests etc could be used to drive viewership of a channel, and be a source of additional revenue.

A case in point of the effective use of these services, pointed Hiranandani, was STAR India’s reverse auction of Rs 20 lakh worth jewellery, worn by the female protagonist of the late-night show Kahin To Hoga on STAR Plus. “ In three weeks there were 6-million text messages,” he said. “STAR’s short code 7827 is very popular,” he added.

Rival Sony Entertainment Television, on the other hand, has used SMS TV to drive shows such as Indian Idol and Jassi Jaisi Koi Nahin Hai, while sister MAX has tied-up with mobile2win for its unique singtone feature, which allows viewers to download the song of a movie even as they are watching it on the channel.

Apart from general entertainment and movie channels, even news channels such as NDTV India use SMS on a regular basis, exhorting viewers to comment on stories, give their feedback on issues via text messages, said Hiranandani. “Currently, 1,700 towns in India are wireless-enabled, and the figure will go up to 5,000 by the end of this year. Which means that the potential for regional broadcasters is huge,” he said.

Neeraj Roy, MD and CEO, Hungama, drew on his experience of working with 300 brands at the company he founded five years ago to drive home the message regarding how marketers could leverage the power of the handset either for creating buzz, or for purely product or service-related issues.

An example of the former is the SMS campaign initiated by Hungama for international news channel CNN during the US Presidential Elections last year, asking viewers to ‘vote’ for the candidate of their choice, namely, John Kerry or George W. Bush. “The opinion poll helped the channel create buzz around the event and drive viewership for its shows around the elections,” said Roy.

Another instance involved Bluestar, where the company kicked off an SMS campaign to create a database of customers for its air conditioners by urging them to message ‘cool’ to the short code 4646.

Sugato Banerjee, head, consumer banking and marketing, Standard Chartered Bank, gave details on how mobile marketing had helped the bank save precious “manpower and money resources” and improve its “sales lead management”. “The genesis of the problem was that we were stuck,” he said. “Though mass-media advertising showed high impact in pre-ad tests, post the campaign, response generation and consequent leads were not commensurate,” he stated.

Standard Chartered then started using the mobile medium as an “ad-response mechanism”, especially, during the launch of its credit cards – Youth Card and Manhattan. SMS was also used to help credit card customers redeem their offers, thereby channelising manpower resources ‘at the backend’ for other marketing-related activities.

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