Silken slip in

Some brands want to slip you a message via MMS audio-visual ad-clips on your cellphone.

It's intimate. It's immediate. It could just as easily be invasive and irritating too, but The Coca-Cola Company, Unilever, Adidas, Bacardi, Cadbury and other marketers are hoping fervently that there's a silken way to slip you a message on your handset you'd be only too pleased to pick up (or even respond to).

It all started as an SMS experiment, with "mobile coupons" and the like being sent across. But audio-visual technology "" MMS "" is here, and now goes under the catch-all term of wireless marketing. It gets a minuscule fraction of the ad budget, but if some of these brands manage to use the medium as a relationship forger (a big if, as of now), expect bigger bucks to go into it.

India already has 100 million mobile subscribers, and even though only a fifth of the handsets in operation are reckoned to be MMS-enabled, it's an audience that could prove quite valuable.

"The mobile trinity "" location, personalisation, and timeliness "" makes mobile any marketer's dream," says OnMobile's director, sales and business development, Amit Dey. Incubated by Infosys, OnMobile offers a variety of mobile solutions of value to telecom operators, media houses and content providers.

So far, though, wireless marketing has been elementary. The mobile phone has been used merely as the interactive part of a larger campaign, as a device to get in touch. Brands like Absolut, Bacardi, Coca-Cola and Frito-Lay have combined outdoor ads with SMS codes ("contact us"), for example.

"A multi-channel approach, including the television and numerous interactive web tie-ins along with a mobile component that may include texting, ringtones and wallpaper, completes the mobile marketing chakra," says Rajiv Hiranandani, CEO, Mobile2Win, pegging the mobile marketing pie at Rs 6 crore per annum, likely to hit Rs 20 crore in two years.

By then, audio-visual ideas may be setting phones abuzz. "Creative agencies and marketers have started thinking of ad campaigns for mobile audiences in formats like MMS or TV streaming," claims Hiranandani.

Dey agrees: "If you are a football fan watching the latest episode of Lost on your mobile phone, and during a one-minute ad break Rio Ferdinand shows you some defending tips, courtesy Nike, wouldn't it be great?"

Like Internet pop-ups, then?

Well, there's a difference, says Dey. "The whole premise of mobile campaigns is a targeted set of consumers who have agreed to receive the promotional offers." Opt-in audiences, that is. The trouble is that opt-in audiences, who agree to have messages sent to them (lured by some bait or the other), remain too small to excite marketers much.

But then again, a breakthrough MMS idea could change everything.

While technology makes plenty of razzle-dazzle possible, the real challenge is to craft integrative messages that use creativity to woo people into relationships that endure. And for that, marketers must put on their thinking cap.