Chalk off another place where we aren’t being bombarded with advertising: now the hard sell has come to mobile phones as subscribers to O2’s i-mode online service are being greeted with a campaign for Cadbury’s.
The sweetener — pun intended — is that clicking on the ad banner running on O2’s i-mode homepage gives people the chance to win a cash prize of €10,000. To be in with a chance of scooping the loot, users must click through to the Cadbury-branded micro-site which has been created specifically to fit a mobile phone screen and then enter their details.
According to the Irish mobile marketing company Return2Sender, which created the campaign in association with Ogilvy One, this is the first mobile advertising campaign to run in this country. Donald Douglas, managing director of Return2Sender, claimed that advertisers are showing “substantial interest” in mobile marketing as a way of overcoming the limitations of direct response SMS. That’s hardly surprising given that just about every man, woman and child in the country owns a mobile. However, as yet just a proportion of this number accesses online services such as i-mode.
“To date planners haven’t really been able to work mobiles into their schedules but that’s all about to change with the arrival of links, banners, subsidised content, sponsorship and mobile search,” Douglas added. “In Ireland it’s estimated that over half of those with mobile phones can access the mobile internet so we expect to see a large number of companies integrating mobile advertising when planning campaigns over the next year.”
Colm Codd, head of new business at O2 Ireland, added that the current campaign would give all parties involved a chance to gain insight and learning.
By Gordon Smith
