Losers and Lovers:
Mobile Phone Services Advertising and
the New Media Consumer/Producer
Christina Spurgeon
Queensland University of Technology
Abstract
How
do advertising practices need to adapt and change in order to
effectively engage new media consumers? Integration has been
an important, overarching industry response in recent decades
(Cappo 2003; Turow 1997). More recently, branded content has
attracted a lot of attention as an integrated technique that
is potentially well-suited to nationally and internationally
recognized brands (Donaton 2004). This paper considers ‘conversational'
interaction with consumers as another technique that has been
successfully used to market new media usage, most notably to
drive consumer adoption of mobile phone data services. It also
highlights the international significance of the mobile phone
as an immensely popular new media platform, but one which has
generally developed "under the radar" (Bond 1998)
of much academic and trade literature.
Recent developments in new media and communication studies provide
the theoretical basis for the typology of interactivity developed
here. This typology outlines a continuum of interactivity. It
provides a foundation for considering the way in which new media
consumer input is being used in new media services advertising.
This development is facilitated by the ‘conversational'
interactivity of new media such as the Internet and the mobile
phone. Enabled by the flexibility of new media and communications
networks, consumers can also now actively participate as producers
of campaign materials. They can now be thought of as producers
(Hartley 2004). Two case studies of recent successful advertising
campaigns for mobile services are used as exemplars of the ways
in which advertisers and agencies can actively seek out and
make use of consumer creative input within an active campaign.
Virgin Mobile Australia's 2003 campaign for SMS services,
which featured lovable loser ‘Warren', is compared
and contrasted with Hong Kong carrier CSL's ‘Lovers'
campaigns of 2002 and 2003 for mobile data services.
Advertising and New Media Consumers
Debate about how new media will impact on advertising in the medium- to long-term future has focused extensively on the new technological capabilities that enable consumers to avoid advertising (e.g., Cappo 2003; Turow 1997). The need for advertising forms to continue to evolve with new commercial media channels and platforms has also been acknowledged (e.g., Donaton 2004). However, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the full range of capabilities that new media actually extend to consumers, and how these might be used in advertising. Certainly technologies such as personal video recorders (PVRs) greatly increase consumer control over time shifting of programs. PVRs also theoretically support more sophisticated possibilities for zapping and zipping ads. While industry anxiety is understandable, many accounts of the impact of new media on advertising also betray a producer-centered bias. They tend to understate the significance of consumer interactivity in the business of new media. For example, the implications for advertising of affordable, high quality digital cameras are as important to the future of advertising as PVR technology. While PVRs render other people's content (including advertisers') more pliable, digital cameras mean consumers can now generate their own audiovisual content. Furthermore, as rapidly miniaturizing production technologies continue to converge with wireless communications networks, the world population of consumer/producers also rapidly expands. This article directs attention to another layer of convergence that is often missed, misunderstood, and possibly even resisted by main media institutions, and that is the closing gap between new media consumers and new media producers.
New Media and Communication Studies Perspectives on Interactivity
The centrality of consumer interactivity to new media business models is most obvious in Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG). For example, Sony's EverQuest, which is set in the persistent virtual world of Norath, has hundreds of thousands of players and an in-game economy that is bigger than many real countries (Herz 2005, p. 329). Consumer engagement in these environments is qualitatively different from that which is generally characteristic of mainstream media. In MMOGs players actively configure the text. While Sony may claim ownership of EverQuest, the reality is that authorship is in fact emergent, collective and distributed (Humphreys 2005, p. 42). Without the creative inputs of EverQuest's consumers there would be no viable game. Humphreys (2005) argues that the effective and affective productivity of consumers is at the heart of the MMOG business model. Player "investments", including the intensely social engagements generated in them, and the content created inside the games by players, are important sources of commercial value to publishers (Humphreys 2005, p.39-41). Whether it shapes the action in a reality TV show, facilitates mass customization of mobile telephone services, or gives rise to new peer-to-peer networks of social connection and exchange, consumer interaction is of central importance to the culture and economies of new media businesses. As Hartley (2004) observes, the new media value chain "is not just ‘user pays'; it is also ‘user makes'" (p. 131).
The high value interactivity of MMOGs approximates what Meikle (2002, p.32) has called "intercreativity". He borrows this term from hypertext inventor Tim Berners-Lee to distinguish the feedback loops of modern electrical media from the kinds of user productivity and interaction that new digital media support extremely well, for example, Internet-based open source cultures and gift economies. While Meikle recognizes that intercreativity is important to new media commerce - for example in the way that Amazon.com relies upon consumers to supply the content of book reviews - his attention is focused on the implications of new media for do-it-yourself forms of citizenship. This article extends insights from Meikle and others to consideration the implications for advertising of the do-it-yourself new media consumer/producer.
Letters to the editor, talkback radio, and SMS polling are, in Meikle's scheme, interactive. So too is a juke box (Meikle 2002) but these types of interactivity need to be distinguished from collaborative forms of interaction that are proliferating in new media environments. In other words, "there are different degrees of interactivity" (Meikle 2002, p. 30). Various typologies of interactivity have been generated to explain and define interactivity in a variety of contexts. Meikle draws upon Jensen's (1999) typology of interaction to distinguish between four types of interaction: transmission, consultation, conversation, and registration. This in turn draws upon Bordewijk and van Kaam's (2003) typology of communication patterns which was first proposed in the mid-1980s as a starting point for thinking about regulatory arrangements for telephone-based information systems and the variety of information and entertainment services that were beginning to emerge as a consequence of digitization. Because Bordewijk and van Kaam's typology can be extended and adapted to the mobile telephone environment with relative ease, it is used as the starting point in this analysis of interactive advertising. It also consists of four archetypal communication patterns: allocution, conversation, consultation, and registration (discussed in further detail below). Importantly, it also recognized that where analogue telephony and broadcasting systems were specialized, single-purpose communication systems, digital systems can be adapted to a multiplicity of purposes and have the capacity to support "multi-pattern" interaction.
The one-to-many communication flows of broadcasting systems have the key characteristic of allocution (as a general addresses soldiers). Telephone and mail services are conversational because of the explicit possibility of information exchange and reciprocity that they support. Users do not pay for the information supplied, only the means of transporting or receiving it. Print media and telephone information services were regarded by Bordewijk and van Kaam (2003) as involving consultative patterns of information request and response because, "the issue of information by an information service provider [is] under programmatic control of an information service consumer" (p. 579). This contrasts with registration, which is the trace that consumers leave when they consult or converse with information service centers, or which is required by network owners for billing purposes. Telephone, cable, and other utility customer management systems were the main examples of registration services that Bordewijk and van Kaam (2003) had in mind, although the range of registration applications possible in digital systems, due to the vast amounts of data that can be handled by them, now seems open-ended. The data-rich features of new media that enhance an advertiser's capacity to accurately measure direct consumer response to advertising, to customize advertising for narrow market segments, and to individualize targeted communication also make new media attractive IMC tools. However, it should be noted that the consequences of unethical or illegal mining of consumer data and the more general treatment of consumer inputs in the advertising value chain, are beyond the scope of this article.
Applying Bordewijk and van Kaam's (2003) typology to new services that have emerged since this typology was proposed, it is clear that e-mail and SMS text messaging primarily involve a conversational communication pattern. The pattern of subscription, premium rate, and other user-pay services is primarily consultative. These services can also make use of registration and conversation patterns. Likewise, digital TV, for example BSkyB in the UK, is also an example of multi-patterned interaction. It requires consumer registration to receive a service package. Allocution is the delivery mode for much content. A consultational relationship is established in the channel choices that consumers can make. The means by which consumers customize certain services (for example, by switching between different points-of-view while watching a football game) and influence certain services (for example, by influencing events in a reality TV show through SMS voting) can be construed as conversational engagements with service providers and content creators. This example also returns us to Bordewijk and van Kaam's (2003) key observation about the capacity of digital media to simultaneously blend of all four possibilities of interaction.
Meikle (2002) subsumes intercreative interaction into Jensen's (1999), and Bordewijk and van Kaam's (2003) category of conversational interaction. In other words, Meikle does not differentiate between conversational and intercreative interaction. In this scheme, consumer conversations about advertisers, their brands, goods, services and agents, correspond to creative inputs in the marketing value chain. This accords with the value of consumer/producer activity to marketing as it has been described by Intelliseek principles Pete Blackshaw and Mike Nazzaro (2004). Blackshaw and Nazzaro (2004) are acutely interested in what they have termed, "Consumer-Generated Media (CGM)". CGM refers to all forms of online peer-to-peer communication between consumers about goods and services. According to Blackshaw and Nazzaro (2004), consumer word-of-mouth is the most trusted form of advertising (p. 8). As mobile phone adoption rates and blogging and moblogging activity show, it is also online and mobile word-of-mouth media that are growing most rapidly. Blackshaw and Nazzaro (2004) argue that this challenges traditional market intelligence gathering methods because tracking the "pulse" of public opinion can no longer be reliably achieved with pre-CGM mindsets and methods. CGM is a vast and valuable sea of market intelligence but, in the main, is:
"Unsolicited, unfiltered and outside traditional marketers' ability to contain or control it. It exists primarily as a medium that allows consumer to communicate directly with other consumers - not with the companies or marketers who are trying to capture their attention. Most importantly, is (sic) plays a growing role in shaping consumer purchase behavior, especially as consumers increasingly place their buying power and trust in other consumers rather than other forms of media and marketing" (Blackshaw and Nazzaro 2004, p. 5).
If this analysis is accurate, then conversational interaction is clearly going to attract more interest from marketers than is presently the case. It also means that the conversational interaction category of the typology outlined so far may not be sufficiently nuanced to support analysis of all the types of conversational interaction it now appears to include. It doesn't do justice to the full range of creative possibilities for consumer input in an increasingly mobile, networked, multimedia environment. This now includes direct response advertising (as discussed below), CGM, and activities such as creating avatars and other assets for use in MMOGs. For this reason Meikle's (2002) intercreativity proposition is used here to extend Bordjewijk and van Kaam's (2003) typology of communication patterns. Rather than subsuming intercreativity into conversational interaction, it is proposed as another category of interaction which shares the characteristics of conversational interaction, but which also allows differentiation between the higher value (in economic terms) new media creative inputs of consumer/producers from more mundane (but no less important) conversational inputs. Thus we arrive at a differentiated typology of interactivity that encompasses - on a non-exclusive basis - allocution, consultation, registration, conversation, and intercreation.
Conversational Interaction in Advertising
All advertising is interactive to the extent that it generally seeks to affect human behavior, attitudes, or dispositions. In analogue environments return paths are not generally embedded within allocutory media systems but that does not mean they are devoid of interactiviy. It means that conversational interaction is generated through other feedback systems that augment allocutory systems, for example, consumer, market, and audience research.
Advertisers have also used direct response mechanisms to establish conversational interaction with consumers. Direct response often uses allocutory media to invite consumers to establish a conversational relationship by phone or mail and, in the digital environment, through SMS, email, and the World Wide Web. Similarly, indicators such as circulation and readership figures, subscription and churn rates, and other feedback mechanisms associated with user-paid consultative media also mediate conversational consumer interaction with these media and the advertisers that also use them. Although these conversations are indirect and heavily mediated exchanges, they are nevertheless considered to be conversational forms of interaction for the purpose of this analysis.
The forms and practices of interactive advertising that this article seeks to draw attention to are those that recognize the increasing centrality of the producer/consumer in the business of new media. Vast new opportunities for enhancing conversational engagement with consumers, and between consumers, open up as media augment and adapt their activities with digital technologies, and as new media continue to come online. Major changes in classified advertising in the last decade provide an interesting and important example of the multi-pattern possibilities of communication that are now being explored by newspaper proprietors (Spurgeon 2003). Although proprietors' defensive desire to protect and develop their "rivers of gold" has been a major driver of these changes, they have also diversified the patterns of interaction between consumers, publishers, and advertisers. Other examples of multi-pattern interaction that are more explicitly concerned with taking advantage of the productive capacity of consumers include the major online search communities such as eBay and google that have developed around web-based channels of conversational interaction.
The particular advertiser and consumer/producer interactions described in the following case studies are exemplars of the types of conversational interactions being used in advertising to drive the development of mobile data markets. The first case of the Virgin Mobile (Australia) ‘Warren' campaign made effective use of direct response mechanisms. The second case of the CSL (Hong Kong) ‘Lovers' campaign also made good use of direct response mechanisms but took the creative inputs of consumers even further to shape the narrative of the advertising campaign itself. The commodity being sold in both cases was in fact access to conversational interactivity, and both campaigns worked with, not against, the capacity of mobile phone users to participate in conversations.
Direct Response as Conversation: The Case of Virgin Mobile's ‘Warren'
The Australian mobile services market is highly competitive with no less than five carriers and resellers vying for business in a country with a total population of 22 million. A member of the Virgin group of companies, one of the most recognized consumer brands in the world, Virgin Mobile launched in Australia in 2000 following a very successful 1999 UK launch. It has since launched in the United States. Objectives for the campaign considered here were to maintain sales in the pre-Christmas period in 2003 by launching 5 cent text messaging, "Virgin 2 Virgin" (ADMA 2004) in a way that also reinforced the brand message and made use of a direct response "mechanic". Sydney-based independent creative agencies Host and The Glue Society delivered on this brief with a small AUD$250,000 production budget and AUD$2.2 million media budget.
‘Warren' was a humorous campaign spearheaded by a series of 15 and 30 second television commercials (TVCs) that featured a geeky twenty-something virgin, called Warren, who was searching for a dream date. The campaign adopted an amateur, home video production aesthetic that parodied the dating service genre of promotional media. Warren was seen to use the ads to promote his most desirable features, the most appealing of which was the fact that he was cheap to communicate with - only 5 cents if you were a Virgin Mobile user. His various media appeals to prospective partners to "text me!" drew an enormous response from the target 16-24 year old group.
The
ads featured a telephone number (0403 WARREN) that consumers
could use to call or text Warren. Callers were answered with
a voice mail message that directed them through to the "hotwarren"
web site. Text messages attracted a number of different possible
text responses, depending upon which types of keywords were
used in the initial message. These messages also directed consumers
through to the hotwarren website that promoted Virgin services
and where it was also possible to post messages to Warren (which
included some 20 marriage proposals) and to participate in a
discussion forum with other Virgin phone service subscribers
and Warren fans.
Warren was also rapidly accorded celebrity status in Australian
popular youth culture for being a lovable loser, a development
that generated considerable additional media and public relations
value for Virgin Mobile. He made guest appearances on highly
rated music radio and TV programs to dispense his love advice,
as well as club and mall appearances.
Because of the direct response mechanism it was possible to
measure the immediate impact of the campaign. In the ten weeks
of the campaign some 600,000 calls or messages were made to
Warren. This converted to more than 2 million hits on the hotwarren
website by 150,000 unique visitors. Far from simply maintaining
market position Virgin found that it had significantly increased
market share, reduced churn, and generated an incremental profit
of $5 for every $1 spent on the campaign. According to Host
and The Glue Society the campaign paid for itself in the first
8 weeks (ADMA 2004). The campaign was judged to be highly effective
in a number of national and international awards because of
the extent to which it exceeded client expectations (summarized
in Table 1).
Table
1: Virgin Mobile's ‘Warren'
In June 2004 the campaign was awarded the Direct Lions Grand Prix at the Cannes International Advertising Festival. The triumph of ‘Warren' at Cannes points to an important shift in the status of direct response advertising that has been underway in the last decade or so. Once shunned by respectable advertisers as a questionable high-pressure approach, direct response has been rehabilitated in the mainstream of advertising as a legitimate means of conversing with consumers. Direct response ads are no longer the preserve of late night infomercials with their inducements of bonus steak knives but, as ‘Warren' shows, are integrated into the communication campaigns of a growing number of major advertisers (Gotting 2003; Neuborne 2003). Indeed, the very recent addition of the Cannes Direct award to the Cannes line-up is, at least in part, further evidence of this development.
While direct response is regarded in this analysis as a form of conversational interaction it must also be acknowledged that the conversation associated with direct response can be very short. This is because direct response generally aims to close specific transactions - sending an SMS text message in this case. The second case shows that, in a new media context, direct mechanisms can be pushed further to consolidate consumer engagement by stimulating a variety of consumer creative inputs for use in the execution of a campaign.
Conversing Creatively: The Case of CSL's ‘Lovers'
Hong Kong-based mobile service provider CSL is one of six service providers in the Hong Kong market. CSL commenced service in 1983 and is presently wholly owned by Telstra. Telstra is the dominant telecommunications carrier in the Australian market, and, for now, has the Australian government as its major shareholder. The Telstra expansion into Hong Kong has been controversial in the Australian communications industry and policy circles but is likely to be resolved when the Australian government fully privatizes Telstra in the near future. CSL has used its Hong Kong base as a launching pad for expansion into Taiwan and southern Chinese markets and territories, a challenge that will be made easier, in theory at least, by the roll back of restrictions on foreign investor activity in this sector following China's accession to the World Trade Organization (Einhorn 2002).
For
the time being, however, CSL returns are slow to materialize
due to a range of factors including heavy competition on price
in the mobile voice services market which means margins in this
market are very slim. Given these circumstances, Hong Kong carriers
have been leaders in the development of markets for mobile data
applications where the margins are better. While SMS has established
itself as the first ‘killer app' in many mobile
data service markets (most notably Japan and the Philippines),
at least in part because SMS is perceived by consumers to be
cheaper than voice, this has not been the case in Hong Kong.
Voice services have been so heavily discounted that price-based
incentives to use data services, such as SMS text, cannot be
created (Clark 2003). The absence of interconnection agreements
prior to 2001 also reduced the value of SMS to Hong Kong consumers
because cross-network SMS was not possible before this time.
Benefits other than cost had to drive the shift to data services.
Creativity and innovation in both marketing and the range of
data services associated with the brand was decisive in the
CSL strategy for capturing market growth (HKMA 2003).
There were three innovations in advertising associated with
CSL's entry into mobile data services in 1997. First,
CSL segmented the mobile market by developing three distinct
brands: 1010, 1+1 and One2Free. Each brand targeted a specific
demographic but only two brands have survived to the present
time. 1010 targets older business users, and the brand of particular
interest here, One2Free targets a younger, 18-30 year old demographic
("CSL Corporate Profile"). Second, from the outset
One2Free was supported by the development of value added services
designed to appeal to young users. These included data services
for ring tones and music downloads, voice greeting cards, dating
games, entertainment news subscription services, and graphics.
These services were followed in 2002 by multimedia services
(MMS) including video clip downloads and games. Third, the ‘Lovers'
campaigns were not just direct response campaigns. They also
involved the target market in the creation of promotional materials
as well as branded content.
The ‘Lovers' campaigns of 2002 and 2003 aimed to
increase awareness and market share of One2Free branded data
services. The first campaign was developed by Euro RSCG and
ran across a variety of media platforms. ‘SMS Lovers'
featured Taiwanese pop star Jay Chou, who not only provided
the dramatic talent and sound track for the campaign, but also
ensured that his association with One2Free was widely reported
in entertainment and lifestyle media. Celebrity endorsement
was not novel in the Hong Kong mobile market, having first been
used by Hutchison in 1994 with such success that other mobile
carriers subsequently followed suit (Ho et al. 1997).
What was new about the One2Free campaign was the effective use of direct SMS response to promote interaction with branded value added services such as games. In TV commercials, outdoor ads, online, in print and radio, SMS was shown to be the means by which a romantic relationship developed between Jay and a girl. Viewers were invited to SMS their own story lines for the love story that unfolded episodically over a number of weeks. The campaign was "such a hit" (Davis 2003) that CSL used viewers' suggestions to produce a three-minute mini-drama and video clip that ultimately concluded happily with the two new lovers riding off together on Jay's scooter. This production was quickly absorbed into local popular culture and played for quite some time in karaoke bars and on cable music channels. The campaign was claimed by CSL to have increased One2Free's overall share of the SMS market by 30%, and to have lifted the number of One2Free subscribers using SMS by 60%. It also shifted One2Free brand awareness in the target demographic so that it came to be perceived as the leading lifestyle mobile brand (see Table 2). These results also delivered major local marketing and advertising awards to CSL.
Table 2: CSL's ‘Lovers'
In 2003, CSL re-produced its SMS strategy to promote a new array of services that used MMS-capable handsets. This time Leo Burnett developed the campaign. Once again Jay Chou featured as the face and voice of the One2Free brand. The ‘lovers' theme was also used but this time direct SMS response was more purposively used to capture creative consumer input for use in the campaign. In the weeks leading up to the campaign launch mobile users were asked to select a new girlfriend for Jay by SMS voting. The audiovisual content of the campaign went on to portray Jay in a love triangle, which again evolved in installments that could be followed in TV commercials or on MMS-enabled phones. The girl that Jay ultimately ended up with was determined by the audiences who voted via SMS to resolve the love triangle, and simultaneously had the opportunity to win MMS-capable handsets and other prizes (Hargrave-Silk 2003). CSL claims that this campaign similarly achieved for MMS what the earlier campaign had achieved for SMS.
Mobile Phones - A New Mass Conversational Medium
The
mobile phone is the means by which electronically mediated conversation
is being made accessible to more people than ever before. Over
half of the world's telephone subscribers now have mobile
voice connections. The mobile phone is recognized by the International
Telecommunications Union as one of the fastest growing communication
technologies ever, outstripping even the internet in many places
and responsible for remarkable increases in teledensity in many
regions of the world (ITU 2002; Rao 2003). Teledensity is a
per capita measure of telephone connections and correlates closely
to economic development league tables, with the wealthiest countries
in the world having the highest teledensity ratings, while the
poorest have the lowest. For example, mobile phones are claimed
to have lifted teledensity in the Philippines from 8% (or 8
telephone lines per 100 people) to over 35% in recent years
(Telecom Asia 2004). It remains the case that these increases
are often concentrated in urban and metropolitan centers and
that the gap between urban middle classes and rural poor grows.
There is nevertheless considerable variety in the patterns of
mobile phone diffusion between and within countries. For example,
the Hong Kong market for mobile voice services was mature as
early as 2002 with 94 mobile phone subscriptions per 100 inhabitants.
This compared with 49 mobile phone subscriptions for every 100
inhabitants in the United States in the same year (ITU 2002).
Rapid growth of mass markets for mobile phones is most striking
in regions of the world where rapidly developing consumer societies
are concentrated. In the Asia-Pacific region communications
is one of the major categories of advertising expenditure, particularly
in Hong Kong, Korea, Thailand, the Philippines and Singapore,
for a range of reasons including:
• The rapid development of mobile telephone service
- Highly competitive markets for these services
• The expansion and deregulation of advertiser-funded
media industries in these markets (most notably in Thailand,
Singapore, and Indonesia)
• Emerging consumer markets, with many Asian countries
experiencing double-digit growth rates in advertising spending
• The opening up of China to the global economy.
It is
interesting to consider why consumer demand for mobile telephones
has been so strong. Although the mobile phone supports multi-pattern
interaction, it is probably reasonable to assume that consumers
find the conversational possibilities of interaction they afford
to be the main attraction. This would explain the strong demand
for mobile voice services. However, as the CSL case illustrates,
these services do not necessarily deliver the highest rates of
return to carriers mainly due to the highly competitive character
of these capital-intensive industries and markets. Greater returns
are to be made from adding value to them (e.g., Jayaseelan 2003).
As the cases suggest, the potential is available now to explore
the productive capacity of mobile phone consumers in the processes
of developing value added data services. If, however, present
trends in premium rate mobile data services are an indication,
carriers and content providers do not yet appear to fully appreciate
the importance of consumer creative input to sustainable new media
business models.
Premium rate services are those telephone-based value added services
that attract time or volume-based charges for content in addition
to carriage charges. Setting aside the impact of content charges
on the possibility of these services supporting authentic conversation,
it remains the case that these services often involve a shift
away from conversational patterns of interaction (as in SMS) to
consultative, if not allocutory patterns of interaction (as in
ringtone downloads, text news, sport and market information services).
The purpose of this observation is not to attach a hierarchy of
value to the typology of interaction being used here, or to suggest
that conversational interaction is good or better than allocution.
Nor is it to deny the enormous success of consultative value added
services, especially ringtones and music downloads. It is simply
to draw attention to the possibility that short-term trends in
mobile data services might be running counter to larger historical
trends in consumer preferences for conversational interaction
and media. This may explain why it is that in most markets consumers
have generally resisted value added mobile data services. The
notable exception is SMS, which has been popular in most markets
but not in Hong Kong for reasons already considered. The CSL case
shows one way advertising can help carriers move through this
conundrum. Exploring the conversational end of the interactivity
continuum makes use of consumer inputs in the development of advertising
materials and related branded content. The distinction made here
between conversational and intercreative interaction challenges
advertisers to think about what might be done beyond direct response
to engage consumers using other, emergent possibilities of interactivity
that are also supported by new media.
Both ‘Warren' and ‘Lovers' show how direct
response advertising has helped to stimulate demand for SMS and
other mobile data services. They show that advertising has contributed
to the ongoing evolution of niche mobile media services in at
least two ways: by promoting the use of mobile data services;
and by expanding upon direct response mechanisms to capture consumer
conversational inputs in the campaign execution process. They
also draw attention to the mobile phone and the various evolutionary
paths it is traveling in different parts of the world as it becomes
a networked, wireless, multimedia device and internet gateway,
which is also being conditioned for real world navigation by GPRS
and global roaming functionality (Aitchison 2002, p. 370). The
challenge for advertising is to encourage advertisers to take
a consumer-centered approach in working with this new medium,
to open up the conversational possibilities it affords, not to
shut them down. This is risky because intercreativity necessarily
requires ceding a degree of control to consumer/producers. However
there is no certainty either in alternatively seeking to establish
and maintain a one-sided producer advantage in interactions with
consumers.
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About the Author
Dr. Christina Spurgeon lectures in Media and Communication in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. This article is based on research for a larger project supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery grant, "Internationalising Creative Industries: China, the WTO, and the Knowledge Based Economy". I am grateful to my co-collaborators, John Hartley, Stuart Cunningham, Stephanie Donald, and Terry Flew for their input to this article as well as to the Editors and reviewers of JIAD who provided extremely useful comments.Email: c.spurgeon@qut.edu.au
