Integrating Mobile into the Mix<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

June 01, 2006

By Fawn Fitter

www.imediaconnection.com  

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ipsh! pulls off the first cross-continental mobile campaign as part of an integrated global marketing effort for Elizabeth Arden's Fantasy fragrance.

Say you're trying to launch Britney Spears' new fragrance, Fantasy. You know her biggest fans are teen girls. Where are you most likely to find them? That's right: on their mobile phones.

From personalized phone accessories to text messaging, the mobile market is sizzling among young women aged 13 to 24-- and that, in a nutshell, is why Omnicom's mobile marketing firm, ipsh!, was chosen to develop what it says is the first truly multinational mobile marketing campaign.

The campaign rounds out an integrated marketing effort developed by Goodby Silverstein & Partners for Elizabeth Arden that includes television and internet advertising. The mobile elements leverage the FantasyBritneySpears.com website. On the site, visitors can listen to the pop star talk about her romantic dreams, play a game where they hunt a crush with Cupid's arrow, and send e-cards with the site's fairy tale theme. Through late October, thanks to ipsh!, they can also download four free ringtones, letting Britney's soft Southern accent alert them to an incoming call with phrases like, "This could be your fantasy coming true" and "Hey, hottie, your phone's ringin'."

"What we know about ringtones is that they're incredibly viral," says ipsh! CEO Nihal Mehta. "People listen when a phone rings, and then they'll ask, 'hey, where did you get that?' and download it themselves."

While the mobile campaign is designed to drive awareness of the new fragrance, Mehta adds that it's also a fun bonus for customers who already have it and want to increase their interaction with the brand. "People love personalization," he points out. "For kids, it's 'I want this phone, this phone is me, it's in my pocket all day long, I want it to reflect who I am.'"

After just one month, Mehta says the Fantasy campaign is one of ipsh!'s top 10 successes in terms of traffic, with thousands of downloads around the globe.

Bringing Britney to mobile phones in seven countries on four continents has been no small feat. The firm needed to be able to deliver downloads through at least 20 different cellular carriers, each with dozens of different kinds of handsets. Pulling it all together required months of product research, including sending a product manager to Barcelona to assess performance in real time. In other countries, ipsh! recruited a bevy of paid volunteers to test every possible combination of phone and carrier.

"This is documented as the first cross-continental mobile campaign ever," Mehta says.

The ipsh! CEO confesses he's a little surprised by the mobile marketing campaign's success-- not because of any shortcomings in the campaign, but because he didn't grasp the enduring popularity of a pop star who hasn't released a record in three years. Still, he says, she's clearly a global phenomenon, and so are ringtones and wallpapers.

"The United States has been behind the rest of the world in mobile, [although] most of the world spending on mobile comes from U.S. companies," Mehta notes. "This shows that the United States is catching up and is a center of a lot of creativity, because this is where the brands are. This is a U.S. campaign with a global reach, and it's showing the world that we know what we're doing and that we're catching up."