You're sitting watching X Factor when your phone bleeps. Hey! You've got a text. That's exciting - an unopened text, like an unsigned Valentine's card, is ripe with romance and promise. Will it be from your best friend? A potential employer? The dreamboat who you gave your number to in that bar back in 2004? Curiosity gets the better of you. You open it.
And, bloody hell, it's from O2! Who want to tell you! That you could win! TKTS!!! for Take! That!!! at the O2!!! ARENA!!!!! You become just a little sadder still, and the increasingly careworn fabric of your optimism loses yet another, quite irreplaceable, sequin.
Which brings us to mobile marketing. Now, mobile seems to have been the next big thing for a very long time indeed. There are four reasons I can think of why it hasn't taken quite yet: the economy (naturally); concerns that recruiters might actually be abusing an intimate medium; the reluctance of mobile service providers to sell much other than straightforward SMS technology; creative constraints in terms of content. Possibly, there's more.
So what can it be used for? Potentially, quite a lot, but generally recruitment has thus far limited itself to SMS response mechanisms. No-one (to my knowledge) has done much with MMS content distribution, bluetooth brochure distribution or location-based look-up (although this would be a wonderful application for any seriously multi-site employer, such as a large retailer). Nor has anyone done much in terms of web-to-mobile - combining two technologies on the one creative platform. But it can be done, as this striking effort from Orange in France testifies.
The biblical-looking chap pictured is Sebastien Chabal, half French rugby international, half behemoth. Chabal is a strong, scary man. And now he's decided to try his hand (foot?) at soccer. The film on the microsite sets up the scene, and then stops abruptly - you're asked to fill in your name and number. Then Chabal phones you to enquire whereabouts you think he should aim the ball; you tell him, and he does what you say. He scores, and in celebrating lifts up his shirt to reveal a message on his vest thanking you, and using your name.
It's all very ingenious. (Although I suspect the call from Chabal might actually be a recording, and you do have to give your answer via your phone's type-pad.) Bit like that Obama vid I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, but with more Gallic testosterone. Might not work without a French phone, by the way. But. Any ideas on how web-to-mobile could work in employment marketing?
Maybe in internal comms, you could have your CEO phone people to give more information on the new corporate values or a certain part of the organisational recovery package.
In a recruitment campaign, maybe the CEO could ask questions about a thing, and then you get called in order to give your answers? And when you get them right, the CEO takes his/her trousers off and shows YOUR NAME lipsticked on his/her underwear? Just a thought.
Incidentally, I first saw the Orange site mentioned on Adverblog.
An interesting article but one I would say encapsulates the norm rather than those agencies that have been in mobile for some time. At TMPW we have had a mobile partner in place for 18 months, we have carried out a range of mobile solutions in recruitment with the latest being a 2D barcode for one of our key partners who wanted to reach the kind of people who would understand the technology. I am pleased you think it is an important area, so do we, happy to talk you through some of the best of it.
Director of Media and Digital
Posted by: Marco Bertozzi | December 08, 2008 at 09:05 AM