The Coca Cola ad in Hong Kong which aired on television in late 2011, created a massive phenomenon.
Mobile marketing is now reaching the point that it has been around long enough that experts are starting to observe trends and are beginning to identify some of the commonalities among the successful campaigns.
The truly explosive strategies such as Coca Cola’s Chok! Chok! Chok! in Hong Kong do have things in common.
In the case of that ad, the soft drink giant aired an ad at 10 pm every night that encouraged viewers to pick up their smartphones and download the app so that they could shake the device and “catch” the virtual bottle caps that were falling on the smartphone screen. The goal was to catch them so that instant prizes could be won. The Chok! Chok! Chok! promotion was named after the local slang which simply means rapid motion or shake.
The exceptionally popular campaign was designed by mobile marketing company McCann Worldgroup.
The ads were an instant success not only among at home television viewers, but also in movie theaters and in front of massive outdoor screens. Hundreds of thousands of people took part in the ad campaign in order to try to win prizes. In fact, 380,000 people downloaded the app in the first month, alone.
Mobile marketing companies have been drooling over its success and have been carefully studying it in order to be able to discover what made it as appealing to consumers as it was. According to the chief digital officer at McCann Worldgroup, Mike Parker, consumers are out there and consumers direly want to reach them, “But people are so underwhelmed by banner ads on tiny screens. We are all still searching for the best way forward.”
It is expected that as more is learned about its successful application, mobile marketing will grow by more than 50 percent year over year, to the point where it will reach $40 billion by 2016. This, according to the figures released by Informa, a research firm. Though this sounds large, and it is a staggering growth, it remains a sliver of what television ads are bringing in. The global ad spending in that sector last year was $500.
