Keen-eyed readers may have noticed one or two of our ‘Mobile Marketing in the Wild’ features over the past few weeks, where we stumble across some mobile marketing activity and play the role of the consumer, interacting with it to see what the experience is like.
I must admit, I’ve lost count of the times these experiences have ended in disappointment. Anyone who, like me, can’t see a QR code without scanning it to see what happens will know that what happens more often not is that you’re taken somewhere completely wrong, given that you’re on a mobile, rather than a PC at the time. So it gives me a massive amount of pleasure, finally, to report on a great piece of mobile marketing that, try as I might, I could not manage to break or find fault with.
It started, as it often does, with me standing on a street corner having stumbled out of the latest pre-MWC drinks get-together (thanks for the tapas last night, CC Group) looking up the time of the next train home on thetrainline.com. What caught my eye last night was a banner ad for Currys/PC World, for a Vodafone Mobile Wi-fi product.
I clicked more in hope than expectation. To my surprise, it took me to a mobile-optimised landing page for the product. I clicked on the link and it loaded a few tech spec bullet points, together with the price and an ‘Add to Basket’ button. I ignored that and clicked on one of the other links for competing products.
Surely now, I thought, the mobile experience would end. In my experience – and this was certainly true of many of the entries that didn’t make the cut in our Awards last year – this is where a lot of mobile sites fall down. They are great to a point, but then eventually you click on a link that the brand didn’t feel was worth populating, so it takes you out to the full desktop site. Here though, no such disappointment. Whatever I clicked on led to another mobile-friendly page, designed to make it easy for me to spend.
So congratulations PC World/Currys and whichever agency worked with you on the campaign. We’re not slow to dish out the criticism when we come across mobile marketing done badly. It’s good to be able to report that in this instance, it’s done very well indeed.