| WAP grows up |
| Wednesday, 23 February 2005 | |
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NMA - When Levi's launched its latest 501s marketing campaign this month, a WAP site was a central part of its digital strategy. This was good news to the many in the industry who have been predicting 2005 as the year the medium fully grabs brands' attention. By Justin Pearse. WAP use has been rising for some time. Last week O2 announced that over 1bn pages of mobile Internet content were accessed through its O2 Active mobile content portal in the three months to January this year. As Todd Tran, MD of mobile services company Minick, puts its, "People are surfing and spending."WAP has finally become a medium that consumers are comfortable with. The next stage is its exploitation by brands. The operator portals are still a relative no-go zone for advertising, as the operators are keen to avoid distractions for their newly avid users. Many believe, therefore, that WAP sites will increasingly become a part of marketing campaigns. "When we ran McDonald's Incredibles campaign, we used WAP to deliver content and there was no pushback at all from consumers. It went very smoothly," says 12snap MD Martin Copus. WAP Push is, of course, already used by brands in marketing campaigns as a mechanic for downloading content such as ringtones. But how long will it be before we see a WAP site as part of every campaign - not used just as a protocol to deliver content but as a content medium in itself? How long until every campaign for a new film has a WAP site the way it does a Web site? A bigger shop window A WAP site can easily be sent to a consumer by encouraging them - with a prize incentive, for instance - to text a shortcode to receive a WAP Push message with a link. This then gives the brand a far richer creative palette to work with than the 160 characters of SMS or the slideshow format of MMS. With the key to mobile marketing being to give the consumer something to reward them for interacting, a WAP site can offer a swathe of content. The Levi's site lets consumers preview the new TV campaign, as well as offering a range of mobile content. "We want to provide more content for people, rather than just pushing out messages via SMS," says Levi's head of digital marketing Helene Venge. "I'd like to see us do a new WAP site for each campaign. WAP has reached a level where it's available to large enough numbers of consumers and the latest phones manage it very well." Mobile marketing firm Flytxt is working on a number of campaigns with WAP elements, but believes it will be 18 months before every campaign has one. Director Pamir Gelenbe believes it will be an evolution of the continuing education process of clients. "If you're running a direct response campaign, you can send a bounceback SMS with a WAP link to capture data," he says. "Add information and you have a WAP site." It's this extra content that makes WAP so appealing in a marketing setting. Towards the end of last year, mobile marketing appeared in many ways to be slowing down, with innovation stopping at the now pretty generic text-and-win campaigns, while MMS was proving too expensive for brands. Using WAP content can create a far richer brand experience. "With text-and-win campaigns, once you've either won or lost that's the end of the experience," says Graham Darracott, partner at agency Graphico, which is working on WAP projects for several large clients. "We say to brands that if they have content consumers will find interesting, the best way to get them to interact is by sending them a link to a WAP site holding that content." Mindmatics creative sales director Amelia Gammon agrees the extra functionality makes WAP marketing so much more powerful for brands than SMS or MMS. "As soon as you get people to the WAP site you can move them to other areas, such as showing your product portfolio," she says. "WAP is just so much more interactive than SMS or MMS. We're seeing a big demand for WAP content from our entertainment clients." As Darracott points out, once consumers are on the site, data capture is much simpler and you can add advanced functionality, such as 'send to a friend' options, virally promoting the site. Lining up to launch This rich functionality, on top of consumers' acceptance of the medium and mass-market penetration of colour phones, is predicted to lead to a rash of WAP sites launched by brands this year. However, many believe it will be content sites - call them WAP portals or mobile Internet sites - that will drive the medium for the first half of 2005, rather than marketing efforts like Levi's'. "We'll see a rise in WAP marketing campaigns but it won't be hugely significant - maybe a dozen of the very large brands will launch," says Tran. "The first wave will be content portals, which have a revenue opportunity, with the brands following on." Last year, he says, Minick worked on fewer than 12 WAP portals; it now has 54 in development. Mobile marketing agency Marvellous Mobile is seeing so much demand for content sites that it has set up a new division, MarvMob, to concentrate on WAP design and build, to separate its activities from its marketing business. "We have 12 projects on the go at the moment," says creative director Jon Carney. "It's reaching the point where, like the early days of the Web, a WAP site is a must-have." There's no doubt that there's a real sense of excitement around WAP today, from its use in marketing campaigns to revenue-driving content sites. Hopefully this time the excitement is based on concrete reality rather than the empty hype of four years ago. © Copyright Flytxt Ltd 2006. Unauthorized use of any content constitutes a material breach. |
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