Stephen Dunford, CEO of mobile idle screen marketing company Celltick, considers the impact of mobile marketing at the Beijing Olympics.

The numbers say it all: the Beijing Olympics are looking like the most
heavily-branded event the world has ever seen. Between 8 and 24 August,
the world is tuning into Beijing. An estimated 8 million consumers
will pass through the city to see the sporting pinnacle and immense
cultural show that the Olympics have now become. With each Olympic
Games host country striving to outdo the last, nobody is quite sure
what to expect, but they are sure to see a spectacle never seen before.

Advertising at the Olympics will be overcrowded, to say the least.
There are over 60 official Olympics sponsors targeting the 8 million
visitors that the city is expecting while the Games are taking place.
The anticipated global audience of 4 billion will be tuning into
digital media coverage via TV, web and mobile before, during and after
the event, in addition to experiencing brand outreach through official
merchandising.

Lost in the noise
For brands, getting through to the consumer will not be an easy task.
Consumers will be exposed to an average of around 3,000 adverts a day
during the Games and advertisers face a very real need to differentiate
in the way they get through to the consumer. If not, they will find
their messages become lost in the rest of the noise around the event.
For an elite sponsor, paying around 100 million for the exposure, this
is not a risk they can afford to take.
With this level of advertising noise in such a large forum, premium
brands and local businesses alike must find a unique way to engage with
the distracted consumer and capture their attention. To the consumer,
one billboard can look much like another. Print advertising can get
lost around Olympic news; online banners are already subject to
ad-blindness; TV commercials might be the ideal time to grab a snack
from the refrigerator so as not to miss a moment of Olympic history. To
raise the impact of their ad spending, advertisers need to enrich their
core advertising mix with a more targeted, relevant and personal media
channel that can identify and speak to a specific target audience;
namely, the mobile phone.
The mobile phone is an ideal medium to create this kind of personal
communication, particularly when advertising can be targeted to
individual consumers based on a combination of location specific and
time based profiling, in conjunction with user preference and
demographic data. Advertising is most powerful and effective when
speaking directly with consumers based on who, what, where and when,
not just at the Olympics.

Idle screen marketing
To capitalise on this opportunity, some brands are now giving consumers
the choice to receive advertising messages on the idle screen of their
mobile phones, in combination with meaningful and relevant content. The
idle screen is an interface that has historically been under-utilised
as a marketing mechanism, but is now beginning to emerge as a valid
part of the marketers portfolio. Without intruding on the
functionality of the mobile phone, idle screen marketing can deliver
messages to consumers in the one place they are most likely to check
several times a day.
This non-intrusive methodology generates its best
results when consumers are tightly segmented, getting down to core attributes which define their likelihood to engage with the brand,
including  their location, the time of day and their interest in the
product category. By doing so, brands can create and target a defined,
interested group of consumers, build a two-way relationship with
attention-grabbing innovative content, and ultimately, trigger a
significant increase in response rates.
The Olympic Games will be the most heavily branded event the world has
ever seen. It is no longer enough for brands to channel their resources
solely towards traditional advertising channels,  and those who choose
to do so will only fail to achieve cut-through in a crowded and
competitive marketplace. The future for big brands is to spread their
advertising budgets across more and more well-chosen channels in order
to maximise their impact on consumers, and the Olympics will
demonstrate clearly who is embracing the future and who is being left
behind.