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THROUGHOUT THE YEAR 2000, I ACTUALLY
enjoyed the stacks of e-business and other new
media publications that showed up in my mailbox,
even if some of them were 600-pages thick. Yes, they
could be burdensome at times, but I always enjoyed (and
still do, though not as often) stories about an innovative,
dare I say “cool” sounding dot-com or wireless venture
being undertaken by enterprising entrepreneurs.
Of course, being a marketing
person, I certainly enjoyed the
advertising stories. But what I
didn’t enjoy quite as much (and
still don’t) were the B2B stories.
They lack a certain “coolness”
factor that a hot new B2C music
start-up might have, for example.
However, there are important
things happening in the
B2B space, even in wireless marketing. We may not hear about
them as much, but B2B wireless ad campaigns have been conducted
that show promising results. Intraware, a provider of high-end
software to businesses, falls into this camp.
In April and May of 2000, Intraware ran a pioneering campaign
in the United States on mobile information portal AvantGo, one of
the first ad campaigns on the service. The company wanted
to reach IT professionals to generate sales leads
for its software. The leads would be followed up
with e-mail, phone calls, and in-person meetings.
Simple text ads that would be clear on Palm PDAs
were used.
The strategy seems to have worked, with the ads
reaching over 500,000 subscribers and generating over
20,000 leads with a high conversion rate (although the
exact rate was unavailable). The company says recordlevel
ROI results were achieved, reducing Intraware’s
member acquisition costs by 97%.
VINDIGO IN ACTION
Choose city and content
M-COMMERCE: M-CAMPAIGN WATCH
by David Cotriss
M-MARKETING EDITOR
Can Wireless Ads Work
in the B2B Space?
PDAs improve the potential
Barry Peters, director of emerging media for Lot21, the
agency that created and ran the campaign, admits that
part of the campaign’s success was due to the “wow” factor,
since this had never been done before. But perhaps
more important, there was a good penetration of IT professionals
with Palm PDAs, and the ads weren’t as intrusive
as flashy pop-ups would have been. When asked if
the same results would be possible today, Peters says yes,
since more targeting is available
and banners could be used,
even though costs would be
higher.
Bill McCloskey, head of new
media consultancy Emerging
Interest, notes that the PDA has
much more advertising potential
than a cell phone due to its
size, and that ads on AvantGo
and Vindigo (a similar service) are doing well in general. “The ads
on Vindigo are simple text now, and most are repeat customers at
standard rates,” says McCloskey. He adds that high-conversion
rates are possible with context-sensitive ads, as in this case.
“The total AvantGo audience isn’t huge, but advertising can be
highly targeted,” explains Jupiter Media Metrix wireless analyst
Joe Laszlo. “We’re also moving toward pricing based on
response, which can help.” Both analysts seem to agree
that venues such as AvantGo are good for B2B ads, along
with other tech portals such as CNET. They do point out
that not all B2B situations may be good for wireless,
stressing the need to evaluate each case and pay close
attention to targeting ability.
So while we may not hear as much about them or see
them as particularly sexy, B2B wireless campaigns seem
to have promise. Anyway, now I’m off to read that article
on the new wireless entertainment venture I
remember seeing…
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David Cotriss is WBT’s m-marketing editor. dcotriss@earthlink.net
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