Annual Mobile Marketer’s Classic Guide to Mobile Advertising 2009
Mobile Delivers Moment of Truth at Retail
By David Spear

In a past life while working in marketing at Coca-Cola Co., we deployed an extremely effective strategy based on the company’s vision to put a Coke “within an arm’s reach of desire” for everyone in the world. This strategy proved to be highly successful in expanding distribution to the far reaches of the world and providing special moments of refreshment.

Today, mobile is a wonderful medium that also creates a special “moment,” one that puts interactive value right in the palm of a consumer’s hand. And now that consumers can interact with content anywhere, anytime, mobile delivers the ultimate “moment of truth” in milliseconds well before anyone walks into a retail location. No doubt, there will always be that MOT at the retail shelf and point of trial. But mobile now jumpstarts the process by delivering the initial brand message to a consumer well ahead of the point of retail interaction.

Importantly, for those mobile campaigns that add highly relevant and compelling content, mobile becomes a medium of influential proportion. The good news is that mobile is so pervasively entrenched in all our lives that retail is just one major vertical where mobile creates intrinsic value.

Think about other vertical markets where mobile is successful – foodservice (particularly pizza), real estate, electronics, healthcare, automotive and broadcast television content. In all of these industries, companies are using mobile to deliver unique points of access, engagement and relevancy in true best practice form.

No question about it. If you are still skeptical of mobile, you are not alone. But let me pose a few rhetorical questions that may change your current perspective.

1. How is it that a simple mobile SMS texting game draws 10,000 to 20,000 opt-in users per day?
2. How is it that a mobile pollen counter can provide a health-conscious consumer with detailed pollen counts down to the ZIP code, instantly, anytime, anywhere?
3. How is it that an interested home buyer can now view and virally send all content for a listed home to a friend or spouse across town or 2,000 miles away?
4. How is it that select TV broadcast stations’ mobile pageviews dwarf their online page views?
5. How is that Hispanic clickthrough rates average three to 10 times higher than English-language campaigns on most mobile advertising networks?

The answer is simple. Mobile is the forward access point delivering these unique moments of truth and doing so in fun, engaging, and high payoff ways.

Mobile’s the real thing. Fact is, the power of these mobile moments is incredible. By its very nature, mobile is personal, intimate and quickly initiates a one-toone, trusting relationship with the user. I ask you, which other device gives an advertiser these sets of human dynamics – ready to be leveraged for the advertiser’s benefit – all in the palm of a consumer’s hand?

I think you know the answer – zip, nada, nothing else. And this is why we see the momentum with mobile marketing campaigns across the land.

Look around and take note of the many organizations that have the brands, properties and audiences to develop unique moments upon which mobile marketing can deliver.

I submit to you that the landscape is full of opportunities right in front of our eyes. All it takes is the fusion of creativity and the unique properties of the technology behind mobile advertising and marketing to deliver the right moment.