When I first started out working in mobile the landscape was completely different to how it is today, there were no iPhones or Android handsets, GPS was just a twinkle in someone’s eye in Finland and about 5 people had 3G. This meant you were pretty much limited to the basics, SMS, MMS, WAP, Voice and Java apps. Although that might sound pretty crap it the good thing about it was that it taught you to think from the ground up and be creative with the features that nearly every single phone has today.
That’s why I’ve got much love for campaigns like the Nike ID MMS ‘footwear customisation’, everyone can get involved no matter what phone, the reach is immense (MMS handset penetration is over 95% in places like the UK).
I was very fortunate to work on the Vodafone account at Nokia Interactive (formerly Enpocket) which gave me access to unlimited amounts of MMS to test, innovate and just basically do cool stuff. We sent MMS communications to over 2 million customers each month (some examples in my portfolio) and it’s a great channel if done right, not just for ‘push’ advertising but ‘pull’ too.
Because we were doing up to 5 campaigns a week and really busy with deadlines etc, you tend to forget the significance of your work. And because we were sandwiched between two global mega-companies there were rarely any press releases or case studies. It’s a shame because we had campaigns that got triple figure response rates and uplift in services that no one talked about. If I would have had a blog back then it would literally have about 150 campaigns by now, however here is one I can share without any restraints.
The following campaign for Vodafone was created by the fantastic creative team at Nokia Interactive (who have now formed the mobile agency Movement London). Bit gutted I didn’t get to work on this one as I had already moved to user experience but it’s definitely one of my favourite campaigns to leave the company.
Vodafone ran their own set of concerts exclusively for customers called Vodafone TBA. We often did a large amount of activity at the events (ticketing, Bluetooth, etc) and built anticipation beforehand using messaging. Check out the video:
2009 is over and very soon the Mobile Data Association will be releasing its messaging figures for the year just gone. These are going to be much more interesting (to me anyway) than most years because of one thing – the iPhone.
In June last year, Apple released the 3.0 update which enabled long-awaited MMS functionality on the iPhone 3G. The newer iPhone 3GS shipped with MMS as standard. What affect will all these dormant iPhone have on
Lets take a look at the figures:
Video and Picture messages (MMS) usage stats for the last 3 years in the UK:
2008 total 553 million (+104 million from previous year)
2007 total 449 million (+113 million from previous year)
2006 total 336 million
These statistics can be broken down as follows in 2008:
Year on year growth (2008 vs 2007): 23% growth
As you can see the growth is pretty steady, which is great because it makes any spikes easier to spot. You would normally expect something in the region of +/- 10 million from 2008s figures for 2009.
I’ll check over the figures when they are released for any abnormalities, and do a bit of digging to see they can be attributed to the iPhone. The majority of the spike would need to be from O2 as they had exclusivity on the iPhone until late 2009.
A far cry from the MMS is dead talk hey?
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