The Shortest Distance Between Two Points

I was driving the other day and saw a billboard for an event in Vegas called “Singles in Sin City.”

The amazing thing about this billboard? The entire call to action was mobile. It featured an SMS short code – and nothing else.

No web site, no 800 number – just text. Check it out:

It got me thinking about how far mobile marketing has come in the last several years, and specifically how natural mobile commerce feels to the young men this event was clearly trying to reach.

Out-of-home (OOH) plays like this billboard are no-brainers for marketers trying to create targeted, precise, personalized brand impressions. Think about it. You’re single, you’re sitting at a traffic light, you like Vegas, you see this thing – hell, why not? Tap out a quick text, then continue on your way.

(Note: Waterfall Mobile does not advocate the practice of texting while driving, which might soon be outlawed by federal statute. And we’ve certainly never been guilty of that ourselves. Ahem.)

Some other examples of campaigns where SMS was the principal call to action:

• Earlier this year, Hawaiian Airlines gave away trips to Hawaii as part of a promotion with the San Diego Padres – and the opt-in was mobile.
• Our client Nokia ran an extremely smart campaign for Unilever in Brazil targeted at teens; this one featured a custom-edition phone called the Nokia 5200 Pink.
• MTV + Axe + mobile = “Hair Crisis Relief.”

Marketers have woken up to the fact that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line: a line that runs directly from your brand message into your target customer’s pocket.