UPDATE: Sony Ericsson Launches Mobizine To Push Its New Handset

Sony Ericsson has partnered with Refresh Mobile to launch a mobile music magazine. The ‘Mobizine’, named Soundtrack to Your Life, has content on music such as news, reviews, gossip and interviews. The idea is to push the launch of its new Sony Ericsson W810i Walkman phone, and it will also showcase the multimedia features of its new phone by targeting contextual mobile adverts to music fans. [Via Netimperative]
UPDATE, by James: More than anything else this initiative is a clear case of advertising as content, and vice versa. The move was suggested by Sony Ericsson’s media planning and buying agency (MediaEdge cia) and is viewed as a good (and cheap) way to target mobile users who are really into music. “By creating this Mobizine (and promoting it in the brand advertising) they have something that audience will download to their phone and therefore SE can subtly sell the walkman phone to them at low cost,” I was told by Simon Andrews of Big Picture, which works with Refresh.
As an aside, I’ve got a friend here in Australia who has a Walkman mobile and is very pleased with it. He bought it so he wouldn’t have to carry so many devices, and is happy with the memory size. There’s enough space for songs to see him through a day (at least) and he just loads it up with whatever he wants to listen to that day. Of course, all his songs are side-loaded, he hasn’t downloaded anything over the mobile network yet, but I guess there’s time…

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