Halloween – a wide open content opportunity missed

Rating: Providers have certainly missed a trick

On a day like today – Halloween – I’d expected to been bombarded with themed mobile content. Although Brits spend something like £150 million instead of £5 million ten years ago, I could find virtually nothing.

As a starter, I looked for a Halloween themed ringtone. Eventually I found a page on Springtones here. Yet despite the promises of freebie content, in fact the site pointed me straight back at Jamster.

I couldn’t even find a Halloween version of Michael Jackson’s thriller, so I had to content myself with Happy Holloween 6. But to purchase it required signing up for a month’s worth of Jamster ringtones.

Worse still there was no bundle. If I’d wanted a Jamster Halloween wallpaper or screensaver I’d have to join up again.

At this stage, I opted for trying to send a Halloween themed MMS message. Trawling Google, I came across a reference to a previous attempt at sending such a message using the site Mixipix.

Except that this year, there was no link on Mixipix’s front page to take you towards content that might possibly have had an association with Halloween.

In the end I had to resort to a picture of a women dressed in what looked like a devil’s outfit, to which I was able to add the word ‘wicked’. Adding suitable Halloween text got me pretty close to what I needed and only cost a mere 50 pence.

The curious thing is that the Asian orientated sites proved far more geared up to the occasion. In particular, sites which offered suitable Halloween style poems and rhymes abounded. Examples were Esmsfree  and Smsxone.

Think about all the extra revenues that could have been generated for the network operators and all the premium rate SMS messages that would have needed to be received to obtain the right Halloween content.

I think mobile content providers have been left with egg on their faces as well as their window panes.