Their eyes were aglow. Hundreds of affluent Chinese women, aged 18 to 29, took snapshots
of their coloured contact-lens-enhanced peepers with their mobile phone cameras and sent the photos to organisers of the 'Vivacious Eyes Mobile Picture Contest'. Staged from October to December through nationwide network operators China Mobile and China Unicom, the contest was the first mobile marketing campaign on the mainland to target that specific consumer demographic in so-called tier-one cities, such as Beijing, and tier-two cities, such as Xiamen.
The contest drew a large number of voters, with the winner receiving more than 9,000 votes. So it would seem the campaign succeeded in helping sponsor Johnson & Johnson Vision Care, maker of Acuvue Define colour contact lenses, increase its knowledge of its target market.
Through marketing initiatives such as these, multinational and domestic companies are discovering how responsive mainland consumers are to advertising and other initiatives connected to their mobile phones.
'More people are starting to see the possibilities of mobile marketing and China, with its mobile subscriber population expected to reach more than 500 million next year, is spurring that interest across the board,' says David Turchetti, chief executive of 21 Communications, the Acuvue campaign's mobile marketing service provider.
A surge of mobile marketing innovation is anticipated in the mainland. The Vivacious Eyes programme, for example, combined the Web, short message services, multimedia messaging services and wireless application protocol (WAP) for a fully integrated mobile marketing experience, Turchetti points out.
