Opinion
How the iPhone could galvanise mobile marketing campaigns
20.02.2007Sue Moseley, Managing Director of Futures Worldwide The launch of Apple’s new iPhone at the Macworld expo last month has once again confirmed Steve Jobs’ reputation as a master of spin and PR. In a blaze of publicity, the iPhone was launched as a revolutionary device combining phone, web browser and MP3 player. Yet many have pointed out that countless multimedia phones combining these elements and more already exist. So what exactly is the big deal?
Apple devotes will tell you that it’s all in the detail. The iPhone combines several key features (such as the much heralded touch-screen) with the classic Apple design and interface (sleek, sexy and stylish) in an attempt to succeed where competitors have failed: garnering real consumer enthusiasm towards multimedia phones.
If the iPhone succeeds and has an iPod-esque galvanizing effect on the mobile phone market, marketers will have no choice but to incorporate mobile advertising into campaigns. Audiences will remain restricted at first due to the prohibitive price, but marketers will be quickly attracted by the much-loved early-adopters. They will also have their eye on the youth audience, whose much documented love of ‘cool’ when it comes to mobile phones will make the iPhone a ‘must-own’ for them.
A successful IPhone will allow carriers to provide advertising across mobile Internet, TV and radio to large audiences, at places and times where consumers were previously inaccessible to these kinds of messages (for example on buses or trains), with a sense of intimacy absent from other forms of mass media. Media owners have another channel on which to operate, as well as having the tantalising prospect of being able to provide their content through a mobile iTunes.
Of course, this is all speculation, as only a select few have had a chance to use the iPhone. Whether it lives up to its promise is an issue in itself. But if it does, expect some of these crystal-ball scenarios to happen sooner rather than later.
