Imagine your phone buzzing in the 4th inning to tell you that Dodger Dogs are $2 off for the next 15 minutes. Would that make you get up out of your seat?
How ’bout if you can use your phone to enter a contest and win a coupon for a free bobblehead?All you have to do is show the phone to the guys at the concession stands…
Are you willing to give up your privacy for this? Because that’s what you’re doing. When you use a mobile coupon, the person who takes that coupon is also taking your phone data. As in, what phone you have. When that coupon was sent to you. Where you were when you got that coupon. How long it’s been since you got the coupon before you were motivated to act.
Greg Grunberg of Yowza!! on Mobile Coupons from Artesian Media on Vimeo.
Greg Grunberg, co-founder of Yowza!! (yes, it has two exclamation points, and yes, he’s “the mind-reading guy from Heroes”) talks about the challenges for small business, and what kinds of ad/marketing campaigns you can run in real-time using mobile coupons.
This took place on a panel at the OMMA Mobile conference at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles in October 2009.
And if we start tying that into your mobile browsing activity – say, if you were to SMS your vote for who struck out the most batters on cold Tuesdays in May in (and by so doing, agreeing to the TERMS OF USE that you probably didn’t bother to read), and then browse to a web page where you see the entries accumulating in real time …
Then the site owner (i.e. the baseball team or the hotdog manufacturer, or both, or both plus the ad agency and the cell carrier, and the phone manufacturer) can put a little tracking cookie on your phone.
You willing to let that happen? Would you even be aware of it, if I wasn’t talking about it right now? Check out the other video of Grunberg talking about mobile marketing and geo-targeting at OMMA Mobile. Yeah, that Greg Grunberg. The one from Heroes.
Apparently, before he became the mind-reading psychic cop who can also trap you in a fantasy world in your own head, Greg owned a chain of yogurt stores. And now he’s the co-founder of Yowza!! because he met a couple of guys on Twitter. The man is eloquent, well-informed, and obviously a competitor with Ashton Kutcher for Unexpected Celebrity Deep Geek Genius. On the show, he mostly looks anxious and conflicted, and frowns at people a lot as the camera zooms in dramatically at his eyes…
Anyway, I recently wrote a case study on mobile marketing for the NAA, and I took a look at the location-based couponing of companies like Yowza!! A lot of people are saying that location-based companies are going to blow up in the next year; if that’s true, then Yowza!! is one of the companies to keep an eye on. Obviously, Greg is something of a Renaissance Man, and if he is able to blend the ad/marketing power that he has from his celebrity presence, with what seems to be some fairly decent understanding of technology and media trends, he could really build this company into something huge.
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The title should read… GREG Grunberg.
Fixed.
Sorry. I was too obsessed with making sure the video fit into both the blog format and was optimized for mobile, to do my customary last-chance spellcheck.