HarperCollins has launched an SMS fan club for author Meg Cabot, who writes the teen novels Princess Diaries, All-American Girl sequel “Ready or Not” and the upcoming “Avalon High”. In addition to advertising on several relevant sites HarperCollins has convinced the five major US networks (Verizon, Sprint, Nextel, T-Mobile, AT&T Wireless and Cingular) to host the service…no doubt all the carriers are keen to get a piece of the teen spending pie. “The interactive effort includes SMS-based promotions like sweepstakes, text-based trivia campaigns, book-signing updates, screensavers and voice tones from the author“, as well as messages from Cabot.
“Consumers can access the club at www.megcabot.com/mobile or text JOIN + date of birth + ZIP (e.g., 10/4/91 10280) to the short code MEG11 (or 63411).” That’s a fair whack of demographic info being handed over — age, location and reading habits combined with a phone number. HarperCollins will have access to “real-time reports of all activities as well as complete visibility of its mobile database of users”, and will target specific consumer segments based on the criteria given. In the terms and conditions of the site HarperCollins states members of the club will receive a maximum of two messages a week which may consist of “polls, votes, exclusive sweeps, offers from us and/or our chosen partners, opportunities to download free binary content (wallpapers, ringtones etc) and exclusive messages from Meg Cabot”.
It sounds like they’ve hit the mobile market nail on the head. There are the normal concerns about privacy and spam, but if HarperCollins acts in the appropriate way the fans should be pleased with the service, and the publisher is not only able to promote its products to an established fan base but also those of “chosen partners”, which will assumedly involve some benefit for HarperCollins. Messages from the partners will be welcomed as long as they are relevant to the demographics of the recipient — ads for Ferraris probably won’t cut it but maybe a line of makeup will.
The impressive thing about this release is not the technical side (which I suppose I should point out is handled by Flytxt) but the implementation. Easy sign-up, easy opt-out and compelling content combined with a strong marketing opportunity.
Related stories:
–Coca Cola Game Ads Indicate Future
–Get Read: Cell Phone Huge Target To Marketers
–Reuters Launches Premium SMS Alerts
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