 |
|
| |
Trading On MMS: Hook Mobile's 'Survivor' Tie-In
November 2, 2006
For all of its potential power as a media vehicle, content-swapping platform and marketing tool, MMS remains a channel principally for photo sharing. It is under-used by marketers and media distributors and pretty much un-promoted by the carriers themselves. And yet, most of the Tier 1 carriers have some interoperability either in place or coming by the end of the year, sources tell Wireless Business Forecast.
The network is effectively in place for users and media companies to use MMS as a publishing platform that has the unique power of activating the all- powerful peer-to-peer content sharing that supercharges viral distribution on the Web. But when will we start seeing high-profile use of the form?
The CBS "Survivor" series gives us an early look at what MMS could look like - a media-swapping platform. Hook Mobile and CBS' "Survivor" mobile trading cards series is among the first media extensions and marketing programs to leverage the interoperability of MMS messaging. The project lets viewers engage the TV show by short-coding 87233 with the keyword "TRIBE" to receive in return three MMS trading cards featuring series cast members and locales as well as possible instant contest winners. The viewers then can swap cards with one another by forwarding the MMS to others by phone or by managing their collection at a dedicated Web site (http://tradingcards.cbs.com). You can subscribe to weekly packs of three additional cards or buy bonus packs of 12 cards.
"We had an overwhelming response last night," says Casey Jones, founder and senior vice president/marketing of Hook Mobile the morning after the program launched on the CBS show. Hook uses its Mobile Asset Exchange platform ("M.A.X") to manage and distribute the program on the back end. While interoperability is now possible among the major carriers, "it's fairly complex beyond the text message to transcode the media files between networks," he says.
WBF tested the card program ourselves and initially had trouble getting the system to respond to our first short-code entry on two different phones and carriers. Eventually, we did receive our set of cards in Sprint's "picture mail" section. The cards are quite small and over-packed for the handset form factor, and cast faces are not always recognizable. Clearly, this is a medium that both the technology and creative sides need to polish over time. "It is new technology with MMS," says Jones. "There are definitely things we continue to look at," but he reports there were no specific technical glitches in the launch.
Hook Mobile specializes in the collectible-content model because it sees viral activity as a key to mobile content. "Peer-to-peer (P2P) content distribution will be big," says Jones. Hook brought the concept to CBS and "Survivor" as the show was moving into its 13th season with its "Cook Island" setting and cast. Jones believes MMS content swapping brings to mobile some of the core qualities driving the Web 2.0 phenomena, like social networking and viral distribution. "This brings not just to TV programs but to entertainment companies, brands and various entities with a real strong fan base a broader experience," he says. "We identified some ways we could innovate with P2P messaging using MMS. Trading cards are a natural extension of that."
This is very much a test case and a showcase for Hook Mobile and for CBS. "We're looking at how the typical user experiences this," says Jones, "how much they trade assets and are they engaging the whole experience? Longer term, it's a matter of seeing how much of that fan base is looking to engage in an extension on mobile."
The Engagement Thing
Engaging with TV programming via wireless is among the oldest forms of brand extension on mobile but, until now, it has been mainly in the form of voting in polls or downloading ringtones and wallpapers. Reality programming ("American Idol" and "Project Runway") has been the natural home to wireless interactivity because these are personality-driven shows. Viewers latch onto characters, and that intimacy works well on a phone that otherwise we identify with one-to-one communication. This season, Bravo's "Project Runway" lets viewers adopt one of the show's designer characters and hear from them via synchronized text messages during the programming. In addition to the revenue generated by many mobile messaging plans, real-time interaction also helps TV programmers thwart the dreaded time-shifting introduced by both TiVo and now the endless reruns of episodes on many cable channels. Real-time SMS programs help bolt a viewer to the premier showing of an episode, and they deliver TV programmers wider, more attentive guaranteed audiences for advertisers.
Jones says that unlike voting and polling, "mobile trading cards have the intention of extending the experience of watching the show. It's a little bit different." In many reality shows, there is audience drop-off throughout the season, and extending the experience of the programming may help buttress ratings throughout the run.
The new metric in media is "engagement," and not just ratings and popularity. If audiences are fragmenting across multiple media, then it is increasingly unlikely that advertisers or media companies will gather critical mass at any given moment. Ultimately, media companies will gather their audiences over time across various media windows and platforms (initial episode runs, reruns, online streaming, portable device downloads, etc.). The important measure of success no longer is audience size at any given moment so much as audience attention, and how much of the user's mind share and time have you pulled into your media property across the different touch points. Mobile has the potential to keep users "engaged" in a brand, even fleetingly with a wallpaper or a ringtone, so that the brand can cut through the media clutter.
Selling MMS
MMS remains a tough sell, even though interest is increasing. The platform is capable of sending rich-media messages and letting consumers share them fairly easily. Carriers need to work on making the sharing piece easier on many decks, because it still involves too many steps and technical vocabulary that can be disorienting. Consumer education is going to be a critical first step in broadening MMS adoption, Jones admits. "First, educate the mobile user to understand they have this capability on their phones," he says. Most new handsets sold have MMS, and Jones thinks there will be about 50-percent penetration in the market in 2007.
« Back to Press |
| |
|
| |
| |
|
| |
|
|
|
|
