Mobile Campus Puts Local Ads on Student Phones

In mobile marketing, it’s all about adding value. A Harris Interactive poll last fall found that 26% of users will accept ads on their cell phones if they also get free applications that make their lives easier or more interesting.

A company called Mobile Campus is adding that kind of value college by college, offering universities a free text-messaging platform to send SMS info about classes, sports teams and campus organizations. In return, Mobile gets the right to market, lightly and politely, to those students who opt in.

“We’ve created a channel that lets marketers reach this 18-to-24 demographic via a device that more than 90% of them carry at all times,” says Mobile Campus founder and CEO George Tingo. The service now has a user base of 30,000 students on 11 college campuses, including the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Florida at Gainesville, with plans to grow that base to 100,000 by the end of the year.

Students get the option to sign up for the free text service via on-campus recruitment or online. A Web portal gives them a list of sanctioned clubs and organizations allowed to access their school’s text platform—as many as 600 groups, in the case of the University of Florida. Users can also enter the categories for which they’d be interested in receiving text ads: entertainment, food and restaurants, sports, health and beauty, etc.

Students get two SMS ads a day maximum, always in their interest categories. The ads are usually for local merchants and retailers and offer deals, discounts and promotions exclusive to the Mobile Campus platform, in the form of mobile coupons users can redeem in-store via their phones.

“It’s got to be a financial offer or discount, not just a brand message,” Tingo says. “It’s got to be unavailable to the general public and better than any offer made to the public. If we’re not delivering value to students, we’re not going to stay in business.”

Local retailers can use the channel to drive store traffic during slow periods. One Domino’s Pizza operator used a Mobile Campus promo to bridge a sales dead zone from 7 to 10 on Wednesday nights, offering free Cheesy Bread or Cinna Stix without purchase. “Kids were lining up out the door,” Tingo says. Redemption rates vary from 2% to in some cases 30%, depending on the category and offer.

National marketers are also eying the channel. Dell Computer’s college division ran a promotion last fall that drove students to a Web site to win a flat-screen TV, photo printer or movie download. The contest was promoted via radio spots and print ads, with some success. But Dell also used Mobile Campus push the offer to 18,000 students in five of its academic markets.

The end result was a 26% response rate to the wireless promotion, says Amy Fowler, interactive marketing manager for the Dell University division. More than 5,000 students registered all the way through providing e-mail addresses to have the Movielink downloads awarded to their accounts.

“Dell got a higher response rate with us in the first four hours of the campaign than they did in 30 days of promoting it in print and on the radio,” Tingo points out.

Mobile Campus is now re-launching some customized Web portals for its client schools in partnership with online academic network Blackboard. By accessing these portals either from a PC or the mobile Internet, student subscribers will be able to get more detailed information about class assignments, drop/add deadlines and other rules and regs, and to access the same offers that go out via SMS.