Wireless Promotion As A Marketing Strategy

A couple of years ago, you would have hardly considered integrating wireless promotion and advertising via mobile phones. Most of the ad and promotional campaigns were only undertaken by the mobile phone networks themselves. Well, maybe a few other big companies tried them out but we didn't exactly consider those as mainstream practices.

Today, however, reveals an entirely different landscape. Google has already entered into the mobile phone scene through HTC's Dream (better known as the T-Mobile G1 or Google Phone). Yup, the Big G, who's been stuffing its coffers through online ads, has started taking a shot at advertising in the mobile market.

Then, very recently, there's the high expectation that Apple's iPhone 3.0, will integrate something that your marketing department will surely love: "in-app" commerce. That means, you can sell products within an application. Imagine a user playing an RPG (role playing game) and would like to upgrade his character by buying certain items.

Another potentially great avenue for wireless promotions are those highly-addictive social networking applications. Products can also be bought in them as well. If items can be sold in games and social networking apps, then it shouldn't be too difficult to give them away as promotional give-aways there, right?

In the past, the presentation of give-aways were limited to an SMS-based environment. Thus, you sent SMS messages to register, submit your entry, or answer a quiz. You also received SMS messages for promotional rules, follow-up questions, or results. All these were done in a text-based interface... not very attractive.

Today's wireless promotions benefit from the latest technological advancements. Faster networks like 3G and HSDPA combined with graphical interfaces that are easily rendered by high-resolution smartphones allow wireless promotions and advertisements to be displayed in brightly-colored images and even videos.

It won't be long before other companies figure that running a promotional interactive game to promote a brand through a downloadable mobile application can draw the interest of prospective buyers. Let's just hope those companies don't include your direct competitor.