Calling Up From Down Under
It’s no big news that the United States lags behind other countries in mobile technology adoption. Australian mobile marketing firm 5th Finger recently rolled out here intending to change that. Direct chatted with founder/vice president of marketing Steen Andersson and CEO Campbell Corfe about the challenges they’re facing in getting Americans to go mobile.
DIRECT: What are the main differences you’re seeing between the U.S. and Australian mobile markets? I would assume penetration is a big factor.
CORFE: Yes, in Australia the saturation of mobile phones is higher than in America. That’s going to change rapidly. The experience of spending seven years creating a market in Australia is applicable to our launch in the United States. Our lifestyles are somewhat similar. It’s a six-hour flight between Sydney and Perth, and a six-hour flight between Los Angeles and New York. The major difference is that there are 300 million people between New York and L.A., whereas between Sydney and Perth there’s three kangaroos and a couple of dogs [Laughs]. The scale is dramatically different, but we think the experiences will be similar.
DIRECT: Tell me about some of your previous campaigns, such as the Live Earth concerts.
ANDERSSON: 5th Finger partnered with VeriSign on that program. Consumers were invited to commit to change their lifestyle in some way, be it changing their light bulbs to fluorescent, or their type of car, or something like that. And those pledges would go into a central platform. It was run across seven countries, including the United States, and [netted] more than 1 million commitments.
DIRECT: How did VeriSign judge the ROI of that campaign?
ANDERSSON: It wanted to measure consumers’ general readiness to change what they do day to day. VeriSign was able to measure in some quantifiable numbers how many people responded by different media and what they would do. A database also could be built to reach out to consumers until the next concert.
CORFE: The responses were more robust in countries other than the United States. To that end, I think VeriSign is going to concentrate more on promotion and execution to create more excitement for future U.S. efforts.
ANDERSSON: The United States is in a different phase than other markets like Australia and Europe. The people who were promoting the concert series outside the U.S. had more experience with mobile calls to action, which really drives up the response rate. The producers for the channels broadcasting [the concerts], like Bravo, didn’t understand how frequently they should [put up a call to action] and so forth. There’s an opportunity to educate the right clients in the right way to build an exciting marketplace for the entire industry.
DIRECT: Do consumers need to be educated about why they should respond to mobile campaigns?
CORFE: Certainly. We can thank TV shows like
