Sony BRAVIA’s mobile campaign targets just 5 million GSM WAP customers in India

Sony launched a video mobile campaign in India to promote its HDTVs last month. Despite achieving more than 300,000 downloads in 10 days and getting a 43 percent conversion rate, we cannot avoid thinking that the campaign strategy could have been more adapted to the Indian mobile landscape.

The campaign results are not bad, but in a country with a population of approximately 1.17 billion people, targeting just 5 million people seems not enough. While most of the mobile users in India have standard devices, the campaign featured a mobile website where the audience could download free videos about fashion and Bollywood content.

The WAP site was promoted through WAP banners and links on various mobile Internet pages, followed by an SMS campaign. Perhaps this strategy would have been more efficient in a different country, but India doesn’t have a wide 3G mobile market.

In order to ensure that everybody got the best video quality, 3^rd Space used its platform automatically optimized and a total of 558 different mobiles were targeted.

Our say:

The technology used for this campaign supported every handset, no software downloads were required and the content chosen fitted the audience like a glove. However, we believe that Sony could have got better results by launching a mobile campaign that would reach a wider part of the Indian society.

According to Warwick Hill, CEO of 3rd Space London, “Sony BRAVIA’s strategy is to reinforce brand, increase sales and achieve a better ROI than traditional print, media, Internet and banner ads used by many advertising agencies”

Perhaps the ROI achieved with this video mobile campaign has been better than having used ATL ads, but probably it could have been even better if Sony BRAVIA had looked to provide elegantly degraded branded content for those who do not have 3G mobiles. Doing so, Sony would get valuable campaign experience and would provide a richer feedback to the users.