There was a “blink and you’ll miss it” mobile promotion during the Oscars – but a blink during one of the most watched TV events of the year is worth an awful lot. The acceptance speech for winning documentary “The Cove” saw one of the film makers raising a “call to action” banner with a mobile shortcode on it. And though the camera cut away almost immediately, the response has been significant.
What happened?
Have a look at this pic:
Texting this shortcode gives you the opportunity to subscribe to The Cove, and join a list of people demanding protection for dolphins and porpoises killed by fishing fleets.
This campaign is powered by Waterfall Mobile, a San Francisco based mobile marketing company. Waterfall has reported that this brief flash of the banner started a 5 hour spike in subscriptions to The Cove. According to the company, subscribers are still coming in at a healthy rate, helped in no small part by a surge of reporting on Twitter. Exact figures haven’t been released – but it is claimed that the subscriber list was in the 5 figures before the Oscar speech, and that number has doubled since then.
What we think?
This shows an interesting two-part marketing tool. The first was obviously the call-to-action on the TV screen – the combination of “text KEYWORD to SHORTCODE” with TV ads is now a standard mobile advertising technique. But the impromptu and slightly inappropriate flashing of the banner during the Oscars gave it an extra zing of flavour. And that caused the Twittersphere to grab hold of it. So while the initial banner may have spiked the subscriptions, the reporting of the banner on Twitter has caused subscriptions to stay healthy since then.
