The Effective Mobile Marketing Awards are 10 years old this year, and reflect the ever-evolving mobile world we live in, with categories for Most Effective Augmented or Virtual Reality Campaign, Chatbot Solution and Voice Assistant App, among others. But what did the mobile marketing world, and our Awards, look like when they launched in 2010?
Well we had far fewer categories, and the names of some of the winners may surprise you. Our Most Effective B2C App winner that year was a typing app which goes by the name of Swiftkey, which has saved its users collectively millions of minutes with its clever predictive tech. Our judges were not the only ones who liked it. In 2016, Microsoft bought the company for a cool $250m. The Highly Commended in the same category went to another app that managed to exit for a decent sum of money – Shazam, bought by Apple for $400m last year.
In the B2B App category, the award was won by NXP Semiconductors for its iPhone app that enabled design engineers to find the right semiconductor for their latest project.
Mobile sites were still a newish thing in 2010, and the winner of the Most Effective Mobile Site Award was Marks & Spencer, and it’s tech partner Mobile Interactive Group (remember them?). One standout figure that impressed the judges was an order for two sofas placed on the m-site, totalling £3,280.
M&S showed its mobile credentials once again, picking up the award in the CRM/Enterprise Messaging Campaign category for its project to build an opted-in database of M&S customers who it could engage with via SMS in the days when apps were still in their infancy. In just over a year, M&S and it’s mobile partner Incentivated – sadly no longer with us – added 700,000 names to the database, an impressive achievement.
The award for Most Effective Mobile Ad Campaign of the year went to Procter & Gamble’s Pringles brand for its Pringoooals campaign, focused on the 2010 World Cup and which ran exclusively on Sky’s World Cup Score Centre and Sky Sports News iPhone apps.
Innovative Turkish mobile operator Turkcell picked up the award for Most Effective Mobile Operator Opt-in Subscriber Database Campaign – yes it’s a bit of a mouthful but it does what is says on the tin – for its campaign for brand partner Rabarba’s Clear, Cool Sport shampoo brand.
We also had an award for Most Effective Bluetooth Marketing Campaign. That one went to Unilever’s Cornetto brand, powered by Blis.
Ericsson IPX took the award for the Most Effective mCommerce Solution for its work with Swedish regional transport authority, Skane Travel. Buses in the region were being frequently robbed of the cash paid by passengers for their tickets, so Ericsson IPX developed a mobile ticketing solution which took cash out of the equation. It would be a neat solution today – 10 years ago, it looked even more impressive and innovative.
The award for Most Effective Location-based Service/Campaign went to McDonalds Finland and it’s tech partner Navteq for a campaign that used Navteq’s LocationPoint ad platform to drive footfall to McDonald’s outlets in the country. It delivered a clickthrough rate of 7 per cent, with 39 per cent of those who clicked through selecting the click-to-navigate option that offered walking or driving directions to the nearest McDonald’s.
From Finland to Japan for our next award, which went to Japanese Major League baseball team Seibu Lions and the Fancharge mobile marketing and engagement platform. The partners picked up the award for Most Effective Mobile Couponing or Barcode Campaign designed to encourage fans of the team to share their personal details, and then use these to drive engagement with them. The campaign generated an impressive 8,000 mobile responses from Lions fans.
Our final award, for Most Effective Sales Promotion/Direct Response campaign, went to Upstream Systems and African mobile operator MTN for a series of three campaigns which ran in parallel in Nigeria, Ghana and Benin, and leveraged the excitement around the 2010 World Cup, staged in S. Africa for the first time.
The campaigns offered the operators’ customers the chance to win prizes ranging from cash to cars for 90 days and were run at zero cost to the operator, with Upstream taking a share of the revenue generated from the SMS activity at the core of the campaign. The results of the campaign were commercial sensitive but shared in confidence with the judges and, as we put it at the time “blew their socks off”.
That was then, this is now. This year's Awards, staged in partnership with our Headline Sponsor, Dynata, are open for business.
To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Awards, In addition to the 30 main categories,there are also four special Best of the Decade Awards. These are the Most Effective Mobile Marketing Campaign of the Decade; Mobile Marketing Agency of the Decade; Mobile Marketing Brand of the Decade; and Disruptor of the Decade, which could be a person or a company.
The Most Effective Mobile Marketing Campaign of the Decade is open for companies to enter in the usual way. The other three, for the best Agency, Brand and Disruptor will be chosen by a public vote after nominations from the industry. If you would like to nominate an agency, brand or disruptor of the decade, please send your nomination to awards@mobilemarketingmagazine.com with a few words in support of your submission. Companies are allowed to nominate themselves.
The entry deadline for all awards is midnight UK time Friday, 26 July 2019, with an Early Bird deadline two weeks earlier, Friday 12 July. The cost to enter an award is £180 plus VAT per submission. There is a 50 per cent discount to enter any campaign into additional categories after the first category. There is also a £30 discount per entry submitted before the Early Bird deadline.
There are more details here. And you can submit your entries here.
