By Noel Jeffrey
Package Design Magazine - May 1, 2009

It is a bold, new design frontier, but sending messages to mobile devices has already become a powerful part of many major integrated marketing campaigns. Messages can be text with a code offering a coupon or inviting people to a website, or an image with text and an offer, or a barcode with information and an offer, and lots more. Packages and labels have a strong role to play in this universe.

Mike Wehrs, the president and CEO of the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), believes that brand owners will be using these techniques to greater extent in the future in conjunction with their packages. "As the trend of consumer interaction with mobile devices grows, brands and marketers will try new ways to increase their awareness among their target consumer," says Wehr.

The MMA, with global headquarters in New York, has members that include agencies, advertisers, handheld device manufacturers, carriers and operators, retailers, software providers, and service providers. They are part of what the MMA describes as the mobile marketing ecosystem. It takes a number of players to reach that small screen.

"The always on, always available nature of the mobile device presents a unique opportunity for marketers to engage directly with consumers, enabling them to create a meaningful dialogue of interaction, while respecting consumer privacy," Wehrs points out.

Beer, vodka, safety
MMA's website offers over 70 case studies of successful and innovative mobile marketing campaigns, including consumer packaging. Three interesting ones are from Dos Equis for its beer, Absolut for a special vodka bottle, and Underwriters Laboratories to broaden awareness of the UL mark and its meaning to younger consumers. Please see the website, www.mmaglobal.com, for design and execution credits and full results.

For Dos Equis, the objective was to interact with consumers at a series of live events supporting the "Dos Equis Mysterious Nights" online promotion. Consumers were asked to try to solve the mystery of the missing Xs from the Dos Equis logo on its bottles and earn a chance to win $20,000. The program used a mobile application that allowed consumers to interact with each other and Dos Equis via text messaging on site at these promotional events. Consumers were asked to send a text message to Dos Equis with a note to someone in the bar. The consumer's text message was then displayed on a screen at the event in real time.

After receiving each text message, Dos Equis sent a response in text message to the consumer, thanking the person for their participation, and driving him or her to the Dos Equis website to participate in the Mysterious Nights promotion.

For Absolut, the promotion was targeted to a special edition bottle. For the holiday season, the company decked its Absolut Bling Bling bottle full of sparkly goodies and developed a special website for it. A mobile campaign was launched to have consumers associate luxury and exclusivity with the brand and to promote the blinged bottle to the desired target audience in China. It used an exclusive WAP campaign site promoting the special edition bottle via ringtones, wallpapers, drink recipes, and nationwide event information.

Wireless Application Protocol (commonly referred to as WAP) is an open international standard. Its main use is to enable access to the Mobile Web from a mobile phone or PDA. Meanwhile, to drive more traffic to the site, Absolut used WAP ads specifically to target business travelers or consumers with selected handsets in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangdong, Chengdu, and others. During the nine days of mobile media promotion, the targeted ad served achieved over 1,800,000 total targeted impressions resulting in over 3.2% click-through rate to the Absolut Bling Bling mobile campaign site.

Holiday lights can be considered household bling and the Underwriters Laboratories (UL) mark has assured generations of their safety. UL has a solid reputation, but the company found that while baby boomers and their elders were familiar with the iconic UL Mark—a seal of approval—younger generations had little to no awareness of UL and didn't understand its role in helping safeguard their homes.

To change that, using print ads, UL launched a digital program rooted in the seemingly simple task of finding and recognizing the UL Mark. Mobile sweepstakes entry was the centerpiece. Through the "Just Look for UL Sweepstakes," consumers were encouraged to enter the contest by submitting camera phone photos of products bearing the UL Mark to a special micro-site, UL@safetyathome.com, or to a short code. They could also enter by completing an online form at the site. For five weeks, consumers looked for the UL Mark in their homes, in stores, in media outlets and public events, and sent images of the UL Mark for a chance to win daily digital camera giveaways and a grand prize of $10,000 in UL certified products.

The variety of entries received during this successful campaign spanned from kitchen appliance boxes to office supplies to living room decorations to the insert cards from the magazine ads. Out of the 85,400 combined online and mobile entries, 11% of all unique sweepstakes entries were submitted via camera phone.

Wehrs says: "In all these cases, the main common thread is that these brands recognized the interactive and personal nature of mobile marketing and how those traits can be key in connecting with the end-user. As brand owners start to share details of successful campaigns, the value in terms of ROI and personalisation capabilities will become more apparent."

Barcode breakthrough
Mobile marketing also has extended its reach to food traceability. YottaMark in Redwood city, CA, offers an Authentication Platform as a SaaS (Software as a Service) that allows codes to be traced or authenticated anywhere, anytime by anyone, with just a mobile phone or through the Internet. YottaMark's system, called HarvestMark, is one of the first companies to offer this tracking service to producers, distributors, retailers, and consumers.

Recently, the company has gone a step further. Elliot Grant, YottaMark's founder and chief marketing officer, says, "We just launched the first real cell phone camera based traceability solution in the U.S. You can point the G Phone camera at one of our 250 million item codes, and instantly get trace back data."

As an example, if the clamshell of strawberries at your local market has a HarvestMark label with barcode, and you have a G phone that reads barcodes, you can scan the barcode and immediately trace the history of the food back to the grower. That's not a guarantee of food safety, but traceability is certainly an essential step toward food safety. And, as a marketing tool, it can enhance the brand in the eyes of the consumer.

"Imagine if you had this capability during the peanut butter scare. You could source your product in seconds and achieve peace of mind," Grant says. Grant says that currently T-Mobile is the carrier offering this kind of device but he expects more phones with this capability to be on the market soon. "It's a powerful application," he says. "The user doesn't have to type in the numbers or codes. When you can read a barcode you can do lots of things. For example, you could offer price comparisons or coupons or take consumers to a website."

Text messages and images
Wikipedia says that text messaging is the most widely used data application on the planet, with 2.4 billion active users, or 74% of all mobile phone subscribers sending and receiving text messages on their phones. Until recently, it was the only tool available to mobile marketers who wanted to reach people on their cell phones. Now, in addition to reading barcodes, new technology allows marketers to send images as well.

Using proprietary patent-pending technology, Mobile Posse, McLean, VA, has commercially launched graphically rich and interactive idle screen programming in North America. Currently, the company serves leading wireless carriers including Verizon Wireless, Alltel Wireless, Cricket Communications, and Revol Wireless. These mobile carriers are offering their subscribers various opt-in opportunities for messages, coupons, and more.

On its website, www.mobileposse.com, there are news releases describing recent campaigns, including one last March for fast food chain Dairy Queen, which ran on the carriers with which Mobile Posse partners. The idea behind that campaign was to promote a new menu to people at strategic times—when they are likely to be getting hungry, around 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. This campaign claims an average click through rate of 22%.

"Companies invest tremendous design resources in brand and packaging innovations. Because Mobile Posse enables delivery of rich, graphical, full-screen advertisements to mobile phones, our platform is an ideal means to introduce an updated brand or product design to mobile consumers today," says Jolene Wiggins, the company's director of marketing and communications.

An idle-screen mobile marketing campaign might feature a product preview or new promotional message, such as "Look for our new easy pour bottle!" The campaign might also include an integrated sweepstakes rewarding selected consumers with product samples or a special discount. "The flexibility of idle screen advertising also allows it to be an effective complement to various other elements of package design," Wiggins continues. "Branding, coupons, recipes, and more can be quickly and accurately repurposed."

Words of caution
Like the fax marketers before them, mobile marketers need to be aware that consumers are paying for text and image messaging. Fax marketing abused consumers to the point that legal action became necessary. Email marketing is now more often then not perceived as spam.

MMA's Wehrs concludes: "The key to ensuring that mobile marketing is never perceived as excessively or inappropriately intrusive is to ensure that the consumer is always in control of whether they want to be interacted with at all and should they change their mind, that they can terminate the interaction. Restraint is another discipline that marketers must practice, not inundating consumers once that dialogue of interaction has been established, ensuring that the communications are always relevant, and offer something of real or perceived worth, whether that be in terms of information requested, product enhancements, discounts or entertainment."

"There's going to be a lot of experimentation in the next couple of years," YottaMark's Grant concludes. "Mobile marketers have to be thoughtful about privacy and spam. The challenges will be to work this out. Some people, of course, will push the boundaries."