Hyperfactory's Snakk signs up with Vodafone

Snakk Media, a sister company to mobile marketing outfit The Hyperfactory, has signed an exclusive partnership with Vodafone New Zealand.

The deal was announced at The Hyperfactory's Moveable Feast mobile marketing event held at the Auckland Maritime Museum today.

Vodafone NZ managing director Russell Stanners says the deal will bring an inventory of opportunities to the company's customer base.

Snakk Media's director of sales, Darnell Dixon, says mobile marketing is changing into mobile media. While it has similarities with online — in concepts such as search, CPM (cost per million) and CTR (click through rates) — there are also significant differences.

She says mobile media must focus on "what happens behind the banner". Consumers have to be taken beyond the banner to a mobile destination where they engage in numerous different ways.

"Make it count," she says.

She says doing this successfully requires detailed planning from strategy to analysis.

The partnership centres on bringing advertising to Vodafone Live!

The Moveable Feast was opened by US movie industry figure Rich Frank, vice-president of the American Film institute. Frank emphasised mobile marketing's ability to generate calls to action.

He gave an example of a Toyota campaign where a click-through would lead to an offer of a test drive and therefore a clear understanding of a campaign's effectiveness and return on investment.

He says mobile marketers have to work out how to appeal to "different types of people at different times of day on different devices".

Frank says the arrival of geographical positioning systems in mobile phones will add another element to this: a person watching a film trailer online, for example, could be offered a ticket to the movie and could then be offered a booking in a nearby restaurant and then a pizza oder for the kids at home.

The technology will know where people are and be able to react to what they are doing.

Stanners pointed out that there are 4.2 million mobile phones in New Zealand compared to 1.4 million home lines and 750,000 PCs.

Mobiles are very personal things, he says. The iPhone is further legitimising the trend to mobility, with 4 million sales in six months.

He says the iPhone's arrival has forced Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Motorola "back to the drawing board" and its ease of use will soon become the norm.

That said, he predicts Apple will not do to the mobile phone market what it has done to the MP3 category. He says Apple effectively created the MP3 as a category, while mobiles have existed as a category for years.

Stanners says convergence will also mean a collision of business models, with subscriber-based businesses vying with advertising-paid models.