MobileMarketer.com: There Is No Such Thing as a Mobile Campaign

Just read this great article on MobileMarketer.com, and it got me thinking…

In my last position, I once went off on a three-day rant because someone suggested that we create a video landing page. There was no campaign that actually required a video landing page, no story that needed video to be told. No…they just wanted to “try” video.

People: The medium is NOT the message. The medium is the medium. And the message is the message.

My point (yes, I actually do have one)…don’t “try” mobile because you want to try mobile. Develop your campaign – your offer, your target audience, all that good stuff – and include mobile as a channel within your campaign.  Figure out how it fits best in that 360-degree campaign plan. Support your national TV spot with a text campaign, an iPhone app, a mobile site where folks can register for your sweepstakes.

See, I did have a point. And the article states it a lot better and more articulately than I do.

If you run mobile as a standalone campaign, it is doomed to the graveyard of “Yes-I-tried” mobile case studies….

Examples in the article are credited with effectiveness because…

Because all of the above short code examples are not run as one-off campaigns but as an always-on, cross-media channel.

And cross-channel, undoubtedly is the way we should all be planning, because it’s how consumers are shopping these days.

A recent Forrester Research consumer survey found that more than half of consumers buying in bricks-and-mortar begin their research process online.  Cross-channel shopping is expected to top $1 trillion by 2012.

Although consumers are actively cross-channel shopping for their considered purchases, brands and retailers fail to create a seamless multichannel shopping experience.

The shopper is way ahead of us simple media folk: they are channel-agnostic.

And there you have it. We need to be channel-agnostic. Our job as marketers is to present the right offer at the right prospect at the right time – in the way and via the device upon which they choose to receive it.