Devouring the Event Sandwich

               

It was billed as a event marketing “boot camp” and a deli broke out.  A deli of ideas.  Event Marketer Magazine Editor and Publisher Dan Hanover launched the Event Marketer Summit by talking about the “Event Sandwich.”   The idea being that the time prior to and following an event was as important as the event itself.  Then he broke it down into fifteen different segments:

     

Embracing Scale – Find new ways to meet people.
Tactic Agnostic – Plan your sponsorship around your goals and your objectives, not just a tactic.
Reconnect – Continue the conversation.
Hyper-Target – Break up your target customer into groups.  According to Dan, Xbox breaks up the 12-24 year old age group into 16 categories by genres they buy and interests.
Finding the Friction – How can the brand be the problem solver?
Episodic Planning – Making each link in the chain work together.
Digital – You can’t push someone to a generic web page and extend the life of the conversation, you need to build context.
Word of Mouth – Get to the right people and have them tell your story in their words.
Shades of Green – Everyone is trying to find ways to make their events more environmentally friendly.
Data Mining – Find out as much as you can about your customer and treat the data as an asset.
Trial Focused – Get people to try the product, don’t just hand out a bunch of paper coupons (see “Shades of Green”).
User-Generated Content – Let the user define the communication.
Conversion – Convert people into buyers.
Experience Profiling – Show the customer what they will buy and don’t show them items they won’t buy.
Schedule Slow Down – A week in four markets might be better than two days in fifteen markets.

 

So my thought is that mobile is the plate that serves the sandwich to the marketer and the customer.  In fact, allows you to add all sorts of sides.  It showed where integrating the mobile device into marketing is not a silo or a tactic but a necessity.  Nothing embraces scale, is as tactically agnostic or reconnects as well post event than mobile.  

      

Using 5th Finger’s Mobility Planning, we can build the campaign that serves a hyper-targeted audience, finds their needs and fills them and builds the chain.  It struck me that our work, particularly for the movie Coraline and the LG Action tour gave context to the conversation through digital and even extended the conversation.  

     

Want to go green?  Sending invites, coupons and other items to the device totally eliminates printing.  Our campaigns have built rich data bases that facilitate user generated content, convert people into buyers, get the customer to the product they want and can serve the five event or fifteen event marketing tour.  

       

So, while I like Dan’s Event Sandwich, it can’t be executed correctly without mobile. 

 

finger food vol. 1

finger food vol. 1

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KFC launches "Grillz" iPhone App

As part of their "Unthink" campaign which encourages people to think about KFC differently (they now have grilled chicken), KFC has released a KFC Grillz iPhone app. The app features different 'grilled' mouths that move in time with your voice, so you can hold the phone up to your mouth and talk with your new grill. 

Click here to view the app in iTunes.

5th Finger Powers Earth Day Promotion

5th Finger is working in partnership with 361 Experiential to promote LG's Mobile Phone Recycling program. Just Text CYBERGUY to 57895, reply with your name and address and LG will send you a pre-paid envelope to recycle your old mobile phones.You can also sign up to get eco-updates from LG sent directly to your mobile phone.

Will I need an umbrella today?

Some of you may have heard of Umbrella Today?, a service that alerts people when they will need an umbrella. People enter their location online and can sign up to receive a text message or an email on the days when they will need an umbrella. 

The service is a simple response to a question that often runs through people's heads before they head out the door: will I need an umbrella today?

 

Sometimes all it takes is a basic understanding of why people do things in order to give people something they will find useful. In this case, knowing that people often check the weather in order to be prepared for a rainy day led to offering a service that helps people be prepared for rainy days.

Not rocket science? Exactly. Umbrella Today? is a great reminder that not all ideas have to be complicated in order to be useful.

Smartphones denying down economic times

A snipit in The Economist this week highlighted that Research In Motion (RIM), the makers of Blackberry, posted a 26% increase in quarterly profit compared to a year ago. "It added 3.9m subscribers, bringing the total number of those who use the popular e-mail device to 25m".

The growth in the mobile industry continues to defy the economic slump. More and more users want mobile phones, and even better smartphones!

Twitter vs. SMS

We all know that Twitter and SMS were born for different reasons. Twitter came to us to provide a platform for microblogging while SMS was invented to let you send messages to your friends.

This title is a bit misleading because I am not trying to compare these two services(technologies) in terms of pros and cons or argue which one is better when it comes to mobile marketing. But I want to point out that there was a time when people would think mobile marketing equals SMS marketing, and one thing is obvious now: we don't live in that era any longer.

Other forms of messaging services such as Twitter are becoming more and more available on mobile phones thanks to the rapid growth of mobile internet and popularity of touch screen smart phones such as the iPhone.

My question is: Is SMS marketing actually competing with Twitter business now? or Are Twitter and other forms of HTTP-based messaging services going to revolutionize everything in mobile marketing in the near future?

Well, I have no idea. I could only come up with some silly example like Barack Obama might be paying a large sum of money for SMS services to reach out to people if there was no Twitter and his 768,759 followers on it.

So, I did some research on Google with "Twitter vs. SMS" keywords and found some interesting blogs which I want to share:

Mellow Machines

The author has an interesting opinion. "Twitter as a service might not compete with SMS today in terms of reach and revenue. It might not replace SMS, but I think time and momentum are on the side of HTTP-based messaging cracking into aspects of the SMS market eventually."

He also shares a very interesting experience he had at iPhone developer conference (360|iDev) where Twitter was the central medium for attendee networking and meta-conversations during sessions.

I agree to his idea that HTTP-based messaging is becoming more and more mainstream. So the question is how we're going to embrace services like Twitter to our advantage so that we can re-sell its services to our clients as added value to our services.

Since I am a tech guy, this is the first thing that came to my mind "why not add twitter as additional entry source?" We currently have 3 different entry sources, SMS, Web and email. So why not twit? For example, we can use our moderation service to filter out offensive Twitter messages before sending out to big screens. Well, it doesn't sound that compelling, but I am just brainstorming.

Finally, watch this funny video too good to miss (also found on the same blog).

Relevant, useful and an extension of the big idea.

Think about the way you feel when you forget your phone or PDA at home for the day. Alone? Disconnected? Unprepared? That’s the true test right there. Mobile is more than just cool. Frankly, it’s a necessity. Mobile has gone from novelty to true utility for the 4 billion people who use it.

Just as the mobile phone has evolved, so has mobile marketing. With the advent of devices like DVR, and the wealth of information appearing on the Internet, traditional forms of advertising are losing the panache they once had. The tides are turning, and mobile marketing seems to be the channel that’s really staying afloat. Brands are starting to catch on and clients are starting to ask questions about mobile.

But in order for mobile to be successful, you have to think human about technology. You have to uncover insights and make demographic and psychographic conclusions that inform the mobile idea. To engage with mobile consumers, you have to think like them and bring their on-the-go mentality into the process. You start by analyzing the brand’s target audience. Who they are. How they connect with the brand. How, where and why they use technology. What kind of devices they use. 

The things we buy, the places we go, the activities we participate in— all these say something about who we are. Even the place where you buy your coffee suggests who you are, what you care about, and how to communicate with you. In the same way, we can draw conclusions about mobile users based on the technology in their pockets and how they are used.

Consider for a moment, some of the following profiles:

The Mobilista. This is a person who is constantly using the mobile phone to connect, and is an early adopter of the latest technology. He or she is constantly emailing, Twittering, and Facebooking. The Mobilista downloads applications that enable him or her to upload content and photos to blogs and photo-sharing sites like Flickr. For the Mobilista, mobile is a lifestyle, a way to fuel creativity and spark ideas.

The Searcher. On the other hand, The Searcher doesn’t use the mobile phone for connecting, so much as for collecting (information, that is.) The Searcher uses mobile to find information instantly—from directions, to restaurants, to the name of the actor that she just can’t think of. Searchers are they type of people who need to satisfy their curiosities immediately.

The Worker. This person is all about productivity, using mobile for work-related affairs rather than social or personal use. He or she checks email constantly and uses applications with practical uses like mobile banking and note taking. The worker, for all intents and purposes, is all business.

These are just a few of consumer profile examples. There are SO many more out there. But these profiles show that people can be grouped meaningfully according to utility. It could be to connect with others, access the web, remain productive, maintain community… the list goes on and on. But once you determine who you are talking to, you can figure out how to best communicate with them through the mobile channel.

At the end of the day, content has to be relevant, useful and an extension of the big idea. One of the most important things to keep in mind is that mobile advertising MUST ADD VALUE. If it doesn’t do anything for the consumer, it’s not going to do anything for the brand. 

If mobile makes sense for your target audience (and most likely it does), partner with a mobile specialist. Find someone who has been deeply engaged in mobilityand technology for a while, with their finger on its pulse and the ability to read technology in the moment and anticipate where it’s headed. So when it comes to mobile, if you’re going to put it in the hands of your consumers, you’ve got to put it in the hands of the experts. 

Join us @ ad:tech/ADSPACE April 22nd

If you’re heading to ad:tech San Francisco, then come on by and say hi at the ADSPACE panel on April 22nd where I’ll be chatting about the latest in mobile advertising and the new google adsense for mobile.

It looks like ad:tech is going to be great this year, with this new co-hosted conference called ADSPACE, a day focused entirely on contextual advertising and advertising applications.

The workshop is titled “Emerging Platforms” and will involve solid discussions on not just mobile, but also on the broad evolution of contextual advertising and the different formats that are now available across PC and mobile. 

Come on by if you want to hear the latest on digital advertising, mobile advertising, and what the big ad networks like Yahoo and Google are doing to evolve their mobile and PC ad offerings. 

It’s at 2:30 pm on Wednesday, April 22 and the workshop is titled Emerging Platforms. Click here to read more.

Steen Andersson