Apps effective marketing vehicles: CTIA panelist

By Rimma Kats

March 23, 2010

Stuart James, vice president of Iconmobile Group

LAS VEGAS - Applications can serve as a highly effective mobile marketing medium, providing brands several opportunities in terms of mobile advertising and cataloging consumer goods.

According to a panel at International CTIA Wireless 2010, mobile marketing applications offer a varied and vast portfolio of available content. 

“RIM is the highest percentage in smartphone subscribers,” said Barbara Hartley, sales consultant at Unity Mobile, Orlando, FL.

“We have a robust SMS platform and we can help companies do their mobile campaigns or they can use the software and create it themselves,” she said.

“You really want to reach the masses and our software allows you to publish to different devices.”

Barbara Hartley, sales consultant at Unity Mobile

Unity Mobile’s complete mobile Internet publishing service consists of four things.

Using Unity Mobile's publishing service, a business can create a mobile-optimized Web site. Businesses can publish a mobile site using Unity’s platform which enables publishers to insert a code to existing Web sites, providing an automatic redirect to an optimized mobile version when a domain is accessed from a mobile phone.

Additionally, a business can preview and publish its Web site across all major device classes and manage the real-time analytics.

Mobile ads
Iconmobile Group created mobile video advertisements for Nike Basketball and The North Face.

To promote LeBron James’ “More Than A Game” World Tour, participants who wanted to star in a video with Mr. James could with the help of iconmobile’s enabled green screens.

Users saw their creations on their mobile phones via provided links.

“We want to do something innovative to give people an experience,” said Stuart James, vice president of Iconmobile Group, Santa Monica, CA. “We found that the tag reader outperformed by 50 times.

“Maybe because the audience was technical, but it was a higher percentage than what we were expecting,” he said.

Application campaigns
Iconmobile also did a campaign in China for Subway, where they introduced an iPhone game and coupon application.

A user who was playing was a delivery guy who had to deliver sandwiches and avoid traffic. Those who got up to the top tenth place would get a coupon for a sandwich.

The company also worked on a North Face campaign in China which reached 2 million unique visitors to the company’s Web site.

Additionally Iconmobile worked with T-Mobile on a green perks application which connects users with deals and discounts for a green lifestyle.

“This encouraged customers to save the environment,” Mr. James said. “The campaign was full of offers from companies who give environmentally conscious products.

“It’s about taking something that you wouldn’t associate with mobile and using mobile to augment more valuable utility then otherwise,” he said.