Cellphone advertising is witnessing the first few signs of how it has the potential to become big in the near future. Hindustan Unilever and Coca-Cola, two of the biggest advertisers in the country belonging to the fast moving consumer goods sector, have launched campaigns this month to tap mobile users.
Today, Coca-Cola announced a mobile campaign for its clear-lime fizzy drink Sprite. The campaign will encompass as many as 230 million mobile subscribers across all telecom operators in the country. Similarly, a week ago, HUL launched a mobile advertising campaign for its ice-cream brand Cornetto. Both these campaigns, executed by integrated value-added service provider for mobiles Oxigen, have gathered momentum.
The initiative by Coca-Cola comes after it discovered in an in-house research that there was an overlap between 230 million mobile users in India and Sprite consumers. It was also found that the largest segment of mobile users in India are college students with pre-paid mobile connections.
This mobile campaign has been launched at the peak of the summer season, a period of three months when 55 per cent of the annual soft drink sales happen. If the campaign runs successfully, it could give Sprite an edge over the other soft drinks for being the first-mover in running a campaign on cellphones.
"We already have a television commercial for Sprite running. This mobile campaign will give us the scale as it would reach out to all the mobile users in the country," the Coca-Cola spokes person said.
"Using the mobile medium is a more cost-effective way of having a one-to-one interaction with the consumer. Any ground activity or advertising through traditional media does not guarantee the kind of interaction that advertising through mobiles can provide," he added.
Pramod Saxena, founder, Oxigen, said, "Coca-Cola and HUL are the first two companies that have approached Oxigen to execute mobile ad campaigns. We see more players taking up mobile advertising as it reaches the end-user directly."
Currently, about 80 per cent of the advertising spends by companies is on traditional media such as television and print. For example, ITC spends just one per cent of its advertising budget on digital media.
However, seeing the success rate of digital campaigns, the companies are expected to spend more on digital advertising. HUL's mobile campaign for Fair & Lovely skin cream executed by Reliance Communications last year received about 45,000 responses in a month.
Spotting the sales opportunity that lies in the summer season for ice-creams, HUL also launched a "scratch and win" campaign for Cornetto in the beginning of this month using Oxigen's technology for mobiles termed OxiCash. It allows commercial transactions using virtual credit (like credit cards) won through codes printed on Cornetto packs.
The campaign by Coca-Cola comprises a contest titled "Sprite Kholega to Bolega". In this contest, all Sprite bottles would have a nine-digit alpha numeric code found under the crown.
When this code is sent as an SMS to a designated phone number, the buyer can win free talk-time ranging between Rs 50 and Rs 5,000. It would also provide a micro website for Sprite and related mobile freebies like ringtones through Oxigen's value-added service for mobiles named "Mobibuzz."
