“Mobile provides a unique opportunity for Nokia, and other OEMs,” said Nokia UK & Ireland senior digital marketing managaer Selena Harrington, speaking at this mornings Youth Marketing Strategy event in London. “We get to advertise on each others handsets, and effectively disrupt those devices with our message of switch over to a Nokia.”

Its a unusual situation because, as Harrington pointed out, you wouldnt see Kelloggs advertising Crunchy Nut on a box of Shreddies, or a Corona promotion on your bottle of Heineken. 

Nokia has taken advantage of the opportunities this opens up for marketing more than perhaps any other manufacturer weve seen – and understandably so, as they have the challenge of trying to win consumers over not just to their devices but in many case a completely new OS, in the form of Windows Phone.

You can see this at work in the Mystery Ad campaign with YOC, which won Most Effective Mobile Advertising Campaign at our awards last year. The rich media ads essentially replaced the interface of the users phone with a virtual demo of the Windows Phone OS, as if they were using the Lumia 800 handset.

Nokia has since applied a similar idea across its marketing efforts, with QR codes on its website which, when scanend with an Android or iOS device, provide a working demo of Windows Phone, as well as a demo app for its older Symbian phones to encourage users to upgrade.

 It also takes advantage of the situation to push device-specific ads to its competitors handsets, targeting common complaints with the OS – Harrington gave the example of ads pushing the quality of Nokias screens which targeted iPhones with display issues – which have landing pages geared to the device used – such as pushing Microsoft Offices availability to the fore for BlackBerry users.