Ring up another win for technology

Tuesday, 7 August, 2001 - 22:00
WITH interactive television still marred by a variety of problems in Australia, mobile phones increasingly are being used to deliver innovative interactive solutions.

Following the popularity of text messaging during the broadcast of Big Brother and the success of a competition dev-eloped for Nova, Sydney’s newest radio station, brewer Guinness recently launched a promotional campaign involv-ing the new technology.

5th Finger chief executive officer Steen Andersson said Nova was targeted by 5th Finger because it was identified as one of the most groundbreaking stations in the market.

Nova’s SMS campaign required listeners to send a simple text message to the station to register their name in a competition.

“We believe in the value of SMS in a cross-media sense. We looked at who was pushing the boundaries (in the radio market) and we approached them and they responded positively,” Mr Andersson said.

“Adoption by radio demon-strates that SMS marketing is reaching the mainstream.”

The air-cast platform developed by 5th Finger also allows clients to simply collect and collate data on the consumers who are taking part in the competitions.

The information collected is subject to Australia’s new privacy laws, but clients nevertheless are able to glean valuable information about consumer demographics.

“Depending on the interactive activity you can track the time the entry came in and what people said. Up to 70 per cent of people put their name on the message, 90 per cent put their name and other information

and 1 per cent put in a lot of other data,” Mr Andersson said.

“Privacy is a major issue … it (the campaign) follows guidelines set down by the wire-less advertising association.”

The Guinness campaign is a point-of-sale promotion where consumers are given a crossword card when they buy a pint of Guinness.

“This is the first SMS campaign of this type. On the crossword there’s a little blow out which says you can use SMS to cheat,” Mr Andersson said.

“You SMS ‘12 across’ (for example) and you get sent back the answer.”

The SMS campaigns run by Nova and the SMS-enabled point-of-sale competition developed for Guinness are a comparatively inexpensive marketing campaign that offers the added bonus of delivering consumer data.

Mr Andersson said SMS campaign costs start at around $10,000, rising to about $50,000 at the high end.