Tag archives: US

Pos or Not?

In the US, MTV has launched an online project to raise awareness of HIV among the youth public. The site, called Pos or Not, is conceived like a quiz game: visitors are presented with a series of profiles (like in online dating sites) featuring some information about the person in the photo and a key question. Is the girl or the guy HIV positive or negative?

As in real life, it’s impossible to guess the answer. Your intuition can’t help you, so don’t take risks. The initiative is sponsored by the Kaiser foundation and tries to take advantage of the viral effect of the “game” prompting visitors on every page to pass the link to a friend. via Osocio.

File under: hiv, mtv, social campaign, US

New Ikea kitchens to dream

Forsman & Bodenfors did it again: another set of Ikea dream kitchens is online to be explored. We’ve already seen the great idea to navigate through the images, so this time they’ve decided to surprise (and impress) us with a great art direction that combines music & environments. From the Italian tarantella for the crowded family eating outside to the stylish swing for the gay couple, music plays a key role in the experience. Special effects do a great job for branding, small kitchen products are there, but I miss something about the kitchens themselves which end up being just the environment where the voyeuristic takes place. But maybe they are right. These are kitchens to dream, and just flying through them is teasing enough to start dreaming them…

File under: ikea, kitchens to drea, US

Product placement 2.0

Hollywood and Madison Avenue call it “brand integration”, but it’s just an euphemism used to hide product placement. The upcoming Tv season will be full of ads outside the traditional 30-seconds spots. The New York Times explores the characteristics of “product placement 2.0″ where “advertisers and their representatives are increasingly working with a show’s writers and producers and the network’s ad sales staff to incorporate products into the story lines of scripted shows as part of more elaborate marketing deals.”

File under: product placement, tv, US

Young users are the future of US mobile marketing

MarketResearch.com has release a new report “The U.S. Youth Market: How 15- to 24-Year-Old Consumers Are Transforming the Marketplace” in which it investigates the role of young users in shaping the future of mobile marketing. Teenagers and young adults are the most promising segments for the wireless industry, and marketers have to understand how to communicate with them using their favorite media: the mobile phone. Don Montuori, one of the editors of the reports comments:

“Companies that target the 15-24-year-old crowd need to realize that traditional marketing and advertising venues may not be effective for young adults. Along those same lines, marketers should note that women in this age group are more likely than men to use a computer, and more likely to own a cell phone and use it for text messaging.”

File under: mobile marketing future, US, young users

Snapple’s mobile marketing

Mobile marketing is landing in the United States. Forbes.com dedicates an article to Snapple’s wireless marketing initiative, and to the US marketers’ attitudine towards this new promotional concept.

File under: mobile marketing, US

SMS movie quiz game for the US market

ILoop Mobile has introduced in the US the first Instant Win and SMS Movie Quiz Game. The entertainment experience is crucial in the mobile environment, as Michael Becker, President and COO, ILoop Mobile explains in the press release announcing the service’s introduction:

“To realize this world we must have interoperability between mobile carriers. Interoperability is crucial to the future of mobile services. ILoop Mobile with its suite of products and services provides this interoperability and empowers ad agencies, brands and promotional firms with the ability to launch mobile content-driven marketing campaigns and social networks that leverage the popularity of text messaging and maximize audience response and loyalty”.

Text messaging is just now gaining momentum in the United States. Worldwide roughly 580 billion text messages will be sent around the world in 2004 versus 10 billion in the United States.

File under: sms movie quiz, US

Play it again, Uncle Sam

According to the The Yankee Group the U.S. audio accessory market, which includes ringtones, ring tunes and calling tones, will be worth $1 billion. Today’s global market is more than $2.5 billion. The Daily Herald dedicates today a good article to the ringtones mania in the United States.

File under: ringtones, US

Mobile marketing: why not?

112 Millon handsets can’t be wrong writes Lora Kolodny on Inc. Magazine. The cell phone is a new marketing medium, the next frontier in direct marketing, which allows to access a huge number of consumers. The article is nothing more than an introduction to mobile marketing for the American audience, its doesn’t say anything new, but it’s worth linking to highlight the growing interest of the media towards cell phones’ marketing potentials.

File under: mobile marketing, US

FCUK targets the US with mobile

Fashion brand FCUK is targeting US market with a mobile campaign. FCUK has become the first brand to implement a simultaneous transatlantic mobile marketing and CRM program, working with creative agency Marvellous Mobile and Enpocket. As explained in the press release, the UK and US cross-carrier campaign, integrated tightly with other core customer channels, allows customers to interact with the brand via text messaging and to win a variety of prizes including gift certificates and t-shirts. By engaging customers with the brand and the radio station through their mobiles, FCUK hopes to build a profile of its customers and target individuals with specialised content that is particularly relevant to them.

File under: enpocket, fcuk, opt-in, US

Premium rate SMS come to the US

Wireless communication is eventually becoming a serious stuff in the United States also. As Andrew Bud writes on New Media Age, US carriers are now making premium rate SMS available to marketers and content providers. The market’s potentials are huge, with 150 million people that could be reached in the next couple of years. The problem is, in my opinion, that someone will first have to teach US mobile users what SMS’ are. I have several friends who completely ignore the functionality and, if I remember correctly, a research by The Yankee Group considered “active” users people sending at least an SMS a week… If US carriers don’t care about SMS, why should users?

File under: premium sms, US