Interactive Text Messaging: Making out-of-home fully interactive.

Consider the traditional media plan for a rotary bulletin campaign.  By blanketing any one city the advertiser receives great branding and the audience typically receives useful and engaging information.  To its disadvantage, this open-ended communication has lacked interactivity or dialog with the audience.  However, now the largest growing media spend is the Internet – but why?  Because it’s interactive.  It’s measurable.  It’s quantifiable.  Sounding familiar?   

Now consider, in the same rotary bulleting campaign, inserting a call-to-action that can provide real-time and on-demand information.  The user’s experience now becomes fully interactive, it’s measurable and it’s quantifiable.  With a mobile call-to-action in the ad, advertisers can instantaneously interact with their customer, build a valuable database of mobile users and track users’ actions long after they have experienced the ad.

Out-of-home advertising has yet to fully leverage this level of interactivity.  There are direct marketers that have invested in call center assets who post phone numbers to “call now” in their creative, but these tend to be brands that can execute a transaction and monetize the call.  Also, many advertisers post the URL to their web sites on signs, but this does little more than tell a consumer that there is an online presence and they can ’Google’ at a later time.  Furthermore, it is also rare that the consumer will actually stop and write down a long web address.  Thus, the advent of the short code.  A short code is essentially a shorter phone number designed to provide consumers an easy way to remember a number.  Think of a short code as the mobile phone’s equivalent to the internet’s URL.  Except consumers can text a “keyword” to the shortcode and receive a customized response.  The following chart details an example communication flow.

Most applications of SMS and short codes result in one line in the creative copy: “Text [some short keyword] to [a short code] and [get this offer]. For example:

• Text “more” to 12345 and receive a website address that you can go to later and register for more information
• Text “more” followed by your email address ” to 12345 to get more info emailed to you
• Text “code” followed by the secret code shown below ” to 12345 and win a prize
• Text “hunt” followed by the code below ” to 12345 and win a prize when you find all 10 codes
• Text “invite” ” to 12345 and receive an invitation to a special invitation only event.
• Text “song” to 12345 and receive a link to download a ringtone (or similar for a video or .mp3 song)
• Text “join” to 12345 and subscribe to receive a monthly alert about some topic or offer
• Text “save” to 12345 and receive a promotion code that you can show at checkout
• Text “enter” to 12345 to enter a contest and receive text notification if you win

As you can see, the possibilities for creative treatments are endless, ranging from requests for information and invitations, to contests and promotions. Utilizing SMS also lets you create a seamless integration between out-of-home, mobile and internet interactions. Out-of-home is used to communicate a branding message with a call to action. Mobile SMS is used to initiate the interaction with a direct response. And the internet is used to convey more rich multi-media information and enable ongoing email dialog.

SMS with Wave Omnimedia With Wave Omnimedia’s interactive text messaging platform, you can now seamlessly integrate SMS interactivity into your out-of-home campaign by simply choosing your keyword and designating the response.

As part of any campaign, the advertiser will receive a full suite of ROI statistics and response reporting from Wave Omnimedia.  Ranging from geographic regions where users are located, peak interaction times, number of total interactions and much, much more.

Call or Email them today and they will customize a powerpoint presentation with your company’s logo/identity so that you will be well on your way to selling a new and emerging technology.

Wave Omnimedia Group  |  info@waveomnimedia.com  |  214.296.2019  |  www.waveomnimedia.com