Over the last year, the youth market experienced one of the largest upsurges in cell phone usage, so it's not surprising that mobile marketing and advertising have been particularly successful among teens and young adults. As a result, the mobile campaigns making headlines tend to be television, media, retail and lifestyle brands looking for a teen or young adult demographic: Absolut Vodka, Britney Spears, Coldplay, Disney, Nike, Radiohead, Starburst…the list is long and growing.

So, does this mean that mobile marketing and advertising aren't beneficial for reaching the business professional or B2B audiences? On the contrary. With the strong growth of smartphone and wireless PDA sales, more and more companies are realizing that mobile campaigns may be the best answer to reaching the business audience, as these devices are most often owned by tech-savvy professionals.

With Gartner's prediction that by 2009, one in every four new mobile phones will be a smartphone, marketers and advertisers should be particularly interested in this development, especially since smartphones offer features that enable delivery of rich, interactive marketing and advertising to users. Currently, the majority of mobile phones don't offer much more than text messaging capabilities; and the tiny ads and videos configured to these very small screens on the device can be frustrating for device users.

However, Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) capable devices, such as advanced feature phones, smartphones, and wireless PDAs offer a much wider variety of alternatives as a result of significantly larger screen sizes. Companies such as American Airlines, EDS, The History Channel and Mercedes are already benefiting from the types of rich, interactive marketing and advertising campaigns that MMS affords.

Campaigns
Recently, Microsoft was looking for a way to enlighten users of earlier versions of Microsoft Office - particularly "expert information workers"—on the new features and functionality of Microsoft Office 2003 that would help them work more effectively in today's business environment. Microsoft specifically wanted to reach a tech-savvy, professional audience with their message.

The solution was a mobile, interactive marketing campaign for smartphones, PDAs and wireless PDAs that included two mobile advergames; one a "Concentration" style game and the second a "Jeopardy" style trivia game.

Results for the "Concentration" style advergame were stunning. Nearly 65,000 subscribers downloaded the game, with individuals playing the game an average of four to 10 times. Users were simultaneously interacting with the Microsoft brand and absorbing the key product benefit messages embedded in the game content.

"We were pretty blown away by the success of the campaign, in terms of the click-through rate, the number of downloads and the number of times people played the game," said Kate Brustad Madrid, product marketing manager for Microsoft's Information Worker Division. "Also, there was a feature that allowed individuals to opt-in to receive more information about Microsoft Office 2003 and we saw opt-in rates that we haven't experienced using other media."

Other companies are realizing the power of marketing toward the trendsetting audience of smartphone and PDA users through different techniques. Nokia reached business professionals by offering an optimized mobile Web site with free white papers in exchange for their e-mail addresses. HP drove qualified traffic to a webcast on Enterprise Computing by promoting the webcast through MMS mobile banner advertisements that employed a calendar reminder feature and the ability to sign up via mobile email.

Less Noise
So, why is this medium so conducive to reaching a business audience? As I discussed in the first part of this series, businesses are discovering that for less money than traditional advertising, they can reach a more targeted and responsive audience. When users view material on an MMS-capable device such as a smartphone or PDA, they are often accessing the data on the go - at the airport, on the subway, waiting for appointments to begin, etc.

More traditional advertising methods, including the Internet, must compete with a lot of "noise" (dozens of Google ads, flashing banners and highlighted links) that have the potential to distract the message recipient. In contrast, mobile marketing provides companies with an extremely effective, flexible and cost-conscious way of targeting a highly desirable demographic of consumers when they are most open to receiving the message - during their downtime.

Thus, the user spends more time interacting with the content. In fact, this is one reason we have found surveys to be one of the more popular types of MMS campaigns for companies looking to secure qualified leads through the AvantGo mobile Internet service.

On average, companies that use AvantGo to conduct surveys (usually without any incentive for the user) have experienced an 18 percent conversion rate of respondents to qualified leads. When users are interacting with content on their downtime they are more likely to provide information about themselves in order to receive content and offers that are directly relevant to their interests and buying patterns.

As the adoption of handheld technology among professionals continues to rise, MMS represents an invaluable branding opportunity and it also can be a powerful extension to advertising initiatives. The potential to influence and interact with this influential, captive group is too good an opportunity for businesses to pass up. The fact that this group chooses what content they want to see, and when they want to see it, makes them even more open to the messages advertisers need to convey.