Few ad agencies are as enthusiastic about mobile advertising as Ogilvy. In fact, this international advertising, marketing and public relations company claims to virtually own the mobile advertising space, at least in the UK.
Scott Seaborn, Head of Mobile Technologies at Ogilvy Group UK, says: “We have a lab, a place where creativity meets technology, where about 28 best-of-breed technical partners work to create ad applications for the mobile phone. In the last eight months, we have produced about 10 mobile applications for brands such as IBM, Fanta and BP.”
Ogilvy’s approach to mobile advertising involves much more than banners on a mobile internet site or text messages. “We always consider the unique elements of the mobile device when we create an ad application,” Seaborn says. He illustrates this with a mobile ad the company produced recently for Fanta.
“Fanta believes teens should have the right to play without their fun being stopped by adults and asked us to use the mobile phone to bring that to life,” he says. “We found that we could use the mobile’s speakers to target their audience.”
The result was the Fanta Stealth Sound System, an application that comes with eight different voice phrases such as ‘come here’, ‘go away’, ‘cool’ or ‘uncool.’ When you press one of the icons on your phone, it plays these phrases at high pitch frequencies, which only young people can hear. Adults can’t hear these sounds because they lose their ability to hear high-pitched frequencies with age.
“You use the sounds to communicate with other young people,” Seaborn says. “If you are at the dinner table and get some food that you don’t like, you can press the ‘don’t like’ button and your brother will hear the sound but your parents will not.”
The response has been fantastic, Seaborn says, with 400,000 downloads so far.
Promoting a phone’s utility
Ogilvy sees the mobile phone as more than just another advertising channel. Its ad applications are very much focused on utility and on promoting the usefulness of the device.
Seaborn gives an example to illustrate this: “For Kodak, we created an application called the Kodak Snow Insider, which is a guide to 40 ski resorts in five languages,” he says. “You go on a ski holiday, download the guide and it provides useful information related to your destination.”
Another “utility” ad application created by Ogilvy is the Guinness-sponsored Rugby 7s application. “Twenty thousand English fans were going to the Hong Kong Sevens rugby tournament, for which Guinness was one of the official sponsors,” Seaborn says. “We realized they were going to have problems speaking Cantonese to get around, so we built a mobile tour guide that spoke the language. So, apart from getting information about match statistics and team polls, you could, for example, use it to ask the taxi driver to take you to your hotel or to any other tourist destination.”
Seaborn says the mobile is the glue that connects all the other media channels. “We have a strategy called ‘engage, acquire, activate,’” he says. “The engage part is how you link the mobile phone across all your communication channels. So, you might have an SMS short code that goes onto your posters, newspapers and TV ads, and then the mobile becomes your central point for your campaign response. Once people start responding, we have a strategy for what to do next and how to engage them on an ongoing basis.”
Seaborn believes that apart from a growing trend of ad applications that will move into rich media-like videos and TV, the mobile internet is growing fast too – and not just in the developed world.
“I believe that in the medium term, mobile internet will eclipse the PC web,” he says. “Cuba is a good example of this. Last year, it launched its first mobile network and basically this meant that people skipped the laptop and computer revolution altogether and went straight onto the mobile internet. And this is happening all over the world, from South America to Asia.”
Seaborn says that Ogilvy builds mobile internet pages for all its clients and he thinks that with the introduction of HTML 5, the new hypertext language for the internet, the world “is going to see some really cool functionality on the mobile phone.”
Seaborn believes mobile advertising has a bright future with few obstacles in the way of growth. “We are having great experiences with mobile advertising,” he says. “I probably have 30 brands using mobile at the moment and all of them are successful.”
