March 16th, 2008

Gaming is new ball game for operators

By Annie Turner - BKI Media

Gaming can be a hugely powerful marketing tool for mobile service providers, but so far it has been used with mixed success. BKI Media believes there is a lot of confused thinking on the subject and here looks at who got it right, who got it wrong and lessons learned.

T-Mobile has been a pioneer of in-game mobile advertising since 2005 and is creative in using gaming as a way of publicising its own new tariffs and promotions.

The first example was during the run-up to and aftermath of the soccer World Cup in 2006. T-Mobile launched The Beautiful Game (a reference to football legend Pelé’s autobiography). T-Mobile’s game showed fans undressing and streaking across the football pitch – another 1970’s craze. The simplicity of the game was remarkable, the in-house advertising creative was original and it attracted a lot of interest in the media. Yet during the world’s biggest football event in the host nation, the uptake and use of the game remained low.

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July 24th, 2007

Getting Personal With Your Gamers

By Nir Hakarmeli - Director of Consumer Marketing

We are living in special times. Users are getting more sophisticated with each passing day and it’s clear that we can no longer approach them with outdated ‘One Fits All’ marketing tactics. The results speak for themselves. Users simply don’t react to generic campaigns. But there is more to this than meets the eye. By sending out messages that are not necessarily relevant for all users, a communication service provider is essentially saying ‘I don’t know you’ to the customer. ‘I don’t know who you are, I don’t know what your needs are, I don’t know what you like doing, and bottom line – I don’t really know how to talk to you.’ If this was a blind date it would be over in ten seconds.