Sales Promotion and mobile marketing are natural bedfellows. Put a shortcode and a keyword on a piece of marketing collateral or product packaging and you offer consumers an instant way to respond to your campaign. Many brands have found that when they offer consumers the option of entering a competition by text or online, text tends to win out.

So it’s no surprise then, that the Most Effective Mobile Sales Promotion/Direct Response Campaign category is one of the most hotly-contested in the Awards. Last year, the honours went to Pepsico and its agent Rabara for their ‘Pepsi Content in a Bottle’ campaign.

Pepsi had already run a number of text-and-win campaigns in the Turkish market, encouraging other brands to adopt similar tactics, giving away free talk time and text messages to encourage consumer engagement.

So Pepsi knew it had to break the mould, and come up with a new twist on the text-and-win concept. It researched its target audience to find out what would appeal to them before creating the promotion, and then offered prizes including pop music ringback tones, and free Premier League Football highlights subscriptions from mobile operator Turkcell. Consumers just had to text unique codes found under Pepsi can lids to stand a chance of winning.

The promotion ran for four months, and helped Pepsi to reach its highest market share in the country in eight years, with 3m people participating in the campaign, on average, four times each.

Pepsi beat off stiff competition from Found/Autoglass, for their ‘Smashing the Glass Repair Market on Mobile’ campaign. Found devised a strategy designed to provide Autoglass with an optimised presence across mobile search, and incorporate click-to-call functionality to capture motorists who need immediate roadside assistance.

The project combined simple, conversion-focused mobile web landing pages with a highly targeted mobile PPC campaign, including dynamic insertion of different click-to-call phone numbers, according to the referring search terms, and geo-targeting of ads for location-based searches. The campaign delivered excellent click-to-call conversion rates, right from launch.

Who knows what this year’s Awards program will throw up in this category, but if you have great work that you want to enter, you need to get your skates on – the entry deadline is 10 August, just two weeks away.

To enter the Most Effective Sales Promotion/Direct Respone category, or indeed any other, just head over to the Awards website for details, download the Entry Form, and get it back to us before 10 August. And remember, its completely free to enter, and you can submit as many campaigns as you think are worthy of recognition.

The Awards Ceremony takes place in London on 29 November. Good luck!