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Brian Hecht is currently the CEO of Kikucall, Inc., a premier mobile services company helping brands, agencies, and media companies reach consumers through unique wireless promotions.
From 1996 until 2002, he was the CEO of enews, inc., the leading Internet-based magazine subscription agent. At the helm of enews, Brian managed a staff of nearly 150 and attracted investments from venture capitalists and strategic media partners, including Madison Dearborn Partners, Hachette Filipacchi Magazines, Time Inc., and Barnes & Noble. His client base included every major U.S. consumer magazine publisher. In 2001, Brian engineered the sale of the company to Barnes & Noble.
Brian is also an accomplished public speaker, and has made many television appearances, including Fox News Channel, CNNfn, and others.

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Forgetting the “Marketing” in Mobile? How Advertisers Can Gain Advantage in the Wireless World

Written on
Aug 14, 2006 
Author
Brian Hecht  |
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Forgetting the “Marketing” in Mobile? How Advertisers Can Gain Advantage in the Wireless World

After years of “coming soon,” the age of Mobile Marketing finally seems to be upon us. You only need to take a casual stroll through the mall, or a leisurely flip through the television channels to see the telltale signs of a tipping point: On a recent trip to the mall, I spotted a major retailer sporting window displays urging passers-by to enter a “text-to-win” contest by sending a text message from a mobile phone.

The consumer gains a bit of amusement, and the retailer gains a valuable name in its database. Most major film releases now advertise an opportunity for potential fans to download ringtones, wallpapers, and even movie clips to their mobile phones. And it’s hard to watch a reality television show without being urged to weigh in on the various contestants with American Idol-style text voting.

But is all this really mobile marketing? Is it living up to its potential? And is it really achieving any measurable results?

It’s still early days, of course. As marketers, we are notoriously reluctant to release confidential results of individual campaigns, so reliable data is hard to come by. Press releases only tend to advertise selected statistics from winning campaigns, ignoring the dozens of tests that may have preceded them.

Still, based on four years of working with marketers to develop mobile programs, I’ve developed a pretty clear idea of the main challenge that confronts mobile marketing. It’s a pretty simple theory, really. Too many mobile marketers are focusing on the “mobile” and are neglecting the “marketing.” It’s understandable. It’s easy to become enamored with the neat capabilities of a new technology.

But time and again, I see marketers spending 90% of their time, energy, and creativity on the relatively mundane mechanics of the mobile channel, and only 10% on developing a really great underlying marketing strategy. Shockingly, some skip the marketing strategy altogether. Marketers who adhere to the time-tested principles of good marketing are likely to yield useful tests and successful campaigns. Marketers who ignore those principles are, sadly, wasting their time and money. Inevitably, they fail.

I learned this lesson very early on. More than two years ago, my mobile marketing agency executed a test program intended get retailers interested in simple mobile coupons intended to drive incremental foot traffic at holiday time. The idea was simple: Consumers in a selected area (downtown Manhattan) would opt in to receive valuable “mobile coupons” by text message for the days leading up to the December holidays.

They would get a 10-day series of exclusive discounts for top brands and retailers. We successfully sold the mobile coupon slots to various retailers, each promising to provide a valuable offer to our enrolled consumers. We determined we’d need at least 5,000 participating consumers to make the program a success. The only problem was: how do we get consumers to enroll?

So we hired a lively (and expensive) street team to stand on crowded pedestrian corners with handbills touting free coupons for top retailers. The retailers were all named, complete with their glistening recognizable logos. We made it super-easy for consumers to enroll, allowing them to dial a 1-800 number, since this was before most people were comfortable sending a text message. Upon dialing the number, the consumer heard a brief recording with the terms of the program and, presto, they would be opted in. After a few days of street-corner marketing, we reviewed the results: they were truly dismal. The program was on the verge of failure.

Our team brainstormed ways to promote the program better. We sifted through dozens of ideas before we decided that the best strategy would be to borrow one of the oldest tricks in the marketing book: We decided to incentivize participation. We decided to paste one-dollar bills on the backs of the fliers we’d been using.





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