Mobile marketer The TMS Way launches 3 new mobile coupon services

The TMS Way is a Hong Kong based mobile marketing company, specialising in brands and advertising agencies. The company is aiming to include merchants and retailers among its clientel by launching three new mobile coupon services. The services will deliver discounts, promtions, invitations and rewards to mobile consumers, directly from a mobile campaign.

The idea behind this service is that when a consumer sees a mobile ad they like, they can click it to recieve a mobile coupon. The TMS Way supports this service via SMS or email, and has placed it into banner ads, an email widget and a video widget.

The banner ad service is self-explanatory – users click the banner ad and recieve a coupon via SMS. The email widget required the user to fill in their email address top recieve the coupon. The final service allows users to click directly on a mobile video as it plays to recieve the coupon (through either SMS or email).

From the release:
“With the global economic downturn we currently face, marketers tend to be more careful in asking for measurable campaign returns whilst on other hand, pushing consumers to become more receptive on discount coupons. In this win-win situation, the mobile displays a major medium to communicate with consumers; that is if we respect the rules of personal media calling on requested content distribution against actual push spam. At TMS, we believe that the bridging of mobile offers to online campaigns is a great opportunity that every marketer can take a look for huge consideration” says Frederick Saurat, one of The TMS Way founders.

What we think?

The TMS Way claims to be targeting what it calls NorMobs (Normal Mobile users) with this service. In fairness, it’s got a lot of things right. The coupons can be integrated into pretty much any clickable content, so it caters for both smartphone and feature phone users. It’s a completely platform-independent system as well. The problem is that it’s completely pull-oriented - which is absolutely fine, but barcodes and coupons have been touted as the great pull service for ages now. New services need a bit more oomph. This service depends heavily on having an eye-catching or interesting advertising to integrate itself into. Never underestimate the ability of the consumer to just completely ignore all forms of advertising while they browse to what they’re really looking for.