Office Depot’s announcement of new mobile marketing services caught my attention today. These new services include the launch of a mobile store locator, RSS feeds, text message coupons and offers, and mobile sweepstakes capabilities.

I doubt anyone’s getting exited about Office Depot RSS feeds on their mobile device and I’m not alone. According to Steve Levy, President of Market Research in Eastern Canada for IPSOS Reid, 27% of Canadian marketers agree that mobile marketing will be very important in the future with 9% indicating they are practicing it now.

One way of getting excited is by hearing about successful Mobile advertising strategies, so I decided to search for case studies and came across this excellent post by Karerina Khudolenko about the success of a Mobile advertising strategy that was employed by Coca-Cola.

Titled ‘Soundwave’, the campaign ran from May 1- July 19 in Greece. The campaign achieved a remarkable participation rate per consumer of close to 3 times the European market average! ‘Soundwave’ got more than 100,000 unique users and over 700,000 messages were received. These are outstanding numbers considering the population of Greece is just over 10 million people!

The campaign’s success was no doubt secured by a strong brand, simple concept and quality prizes. It’s an obvious winner, so being cynical by nature, I searched for more and found the following examples of interesting mobile marketing campaigns:

Client: Johnson & Johnson Acuvue Hong Kong

Objectives:
· Target consumers who are often difficult to reach through traditional channels
· Be both informative, memorable & deliver J&J the desired ROI.
· Create a new exciting destination for young women to engage
· Define brand & product info in a “NEW, FUN & EXCITING” way.

Solution:
A. Video footage available for streaming and download including exclusive made-for-mobile celebrity beauty and make up tips from “make up designer to the stars”, TVC out-takes, exclusive content, branded games, wallpapers, CRM, viral “challenge-a-friend”.

B. Tactical & Strategic Mobile Media Banner Ad Placement. Mobile Banner Ads placed on target locations & audience-relevant sites.

C. Direct to Consumer Communications via Outbound MMS Blasts to

Results
· Over 630K people viewed mobile banner ads
· 10% click-thru rate AND completion of mobile registration form
· 6% of ALL total target female audience engaged with the brand
· 15K unique visitors in FIRST 7 DAYS
· Over 75% of ALL viewers visited Branded Game area
· O1 Branded game DOWNLOADED EVERY 2 MINUTES
· Over 40% of game players returned to register details–
· Females accounted over 76% of people that viewed & downloaded product information
· 31% of visitors between aged 36–45

Client:Visa

Objectives:
· Increase the brand awareness of Visa in China;
· To encourage consumers to familiarize with Visa’s main features and financing concept.

Solution
Drive traffic to download a hilarious Visa TV commercial, mobile ads were served at specific time period and Users were directed to the Visa Campaign site to browse or download the TV commercial simply by clicking Visa’s banners or text ads. A frequency cap on the number of click for each mobile user has been applied to optimize the overall mobile ad campaign.

Results:
· During this Campaign, over 2,950,000 total targeted impressions were served
· 4.2% click-through rate
· For every 2.02 clicks, Visa TV commercial was downloaded once.

These are strong numbers and compare well to traditional media. Could Mobile Marketing be on it’s way to consistently strong and cost effective performance or are these isolated successful case studies? In addition, how are Google, MSN and Yahoo positioning themselves to become leading mobile advertising players?

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