Saying it with pictures
LIKE MANY CELLULAR technologies, the Multimedia Messaging System (MMS) has got a bad name. Introduced by the handset manufacturers to support sending audio and video between cellular subscribers, it's never taken off in South Africa, although in other countries, including the United States, it's achieved some popularity among consumers.
However, the opportunity for using MMS technology to deliver a marketing message is showing potential. Riaan Groenewald, executive operational director at Multimedia Solutions, says that there were a number of technical issues with regard to using MMS as a marketing technology – not least of which is ensuring that the message can be correctly displayed on every handset.
"While sending an MMS from a cellphone to another cellphone, the system is optimised to make sure that the message is received properly. It's much more difficult when the system sending the message is a computer and not a cellphone, as there are some fundamental difficulties in ensuring that the message is received properly," says Groenewald.
"We started with a service – in conjunction with Netcare – that allowed new parents to send an MMS of their children to friends and family. But scaling the system to cater for thousands of recipients through the networks' mms centre proved difficult."
Groenewald says Multimedia Solutions built a platform that created not just the mechanism for sending out bulk MMSs but also the campaign management system to ensure that the marketing is done effectively.
The MMS centres also handle each messsage individually and have to transcode each message, which makes the distribution of a large amount of messages problematic," he explains. The platform therefore delivers messages to the MMS centre in a transcoded format and in batches facilitating a smoother process in sending out large amounts of MMSs.
Due to those limitations, the company strictly controls the way the systems send messages, including ensuring that different companies don't overlap when they contact customers.
"Because we're the only company doing this on a consistent basis, we want to make sure that clients don't become irritated with MMS as a communications mechanism," says Groenewald.
"We also have rules in place that prevent companies using our service for 'shotgun marketing'. All the campaigns we work on are targeted at our clients' existing customer base. But even so, we still sent out around 30m MMSs over the past year.
"We see a few main areas where MMS has the ability to help companies in communicating quickly to clients. For example, a company can very quickly communicate specific specials to its client base and because it's possible to include an image of the item 'on special', the response rate is much higher than with either SMS marketing or print advertising. The idea is also to send entertaining content to keep customers amused as well as informed."
The next step for Multimedia Solutions is to use the MMS medium to drive content to targeted mobile sites. Such sites – they have a .mobi suffix – are designed to be viewed on the small screens of cellphones and make viewing Internet content on cellphones better than would be possible with full-sized Internet sites.
CEO, Eddie Groenewald adds that it's possible to take the concept of MMS further and use it to distribute barcodes, which could be used as discount vouchers, or even as tickets for events or transportation, as they could be read by any current barcode reader.
Because a ticket would be sent to a specific cellphone number it would be possible to reissue the ticket should something happen to the original handset.
Vodacom's Chris Ross says that while the growth in MMS has been slow, it's seeing massive growth in the system, and he says that Vodacom is using the technology to drive upgrades, as it's able to show clients a picture of the cellphone they could upgrade to.
For a technology such as MMS the visual capabilities are a strong point. However, should more companies adopt the technology, it could quickly lose favour in the eyes of consumers, as SMS marketing already has. Although Multimedia Solutions claims it has a leadership position in this market, it will need to keep producing fresh ideas to ensure it retains it. If it can establish a strong foothold in the ticketing market, it could be its entrance to the big time.
Finweek
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