I saw an article last week talking about how British Airways was offering a London guide application for mobile phones as part of its latest campaign to get people to visit London. I downloaded the application to check it out, and the content, as you might expect, isn’t great. But I really like this concept.
If nothing else, it’s an attempt at mobile marketing that understands users must be offered something of value in exchange for placement on their mobile device. The application’s got British Airways branding on it, but it’s not obnoxious. The content (as bad as it may be) takes center stage — and that’s the way it should be. A consumer inviting a brand onto their mobile device is a pretty significant step, and mobile marketers need to respect that. If your mobile marketing campaign eschews this in favor of just cramming something down people’s throats, it will fail. It’s that simple. Ask yourself, what benefit does this offer my user? How does it make their life better? And is does that benefit justify intruding on their device? If you don’t have good answers to those questions, you need to do some more work.
I’m sort of fascinated by this mini-app. I can’t imagine it’s the first one — is anybody familiar with any others? I saw a story on Textually about an SMS style service Topshop is running in the UK, which is a similar idea but with a service angle. The common theme here is that they’re offering something to users beyond some rather pointless SMS giving them 50 cents off a hamburger or letting them know t-shirts are on sale. It’s all about that user benefit — it’s not something traditional advertising has to deal with, but it’s paramount when it comes to mobile.
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