Promo Interactive

We’ve all seen TV-to-text cross-platform campaigns, but seldom with such show-biz glitz. When the eco-conscious documentary “The Cove” won an Academy award in last Sunday’s ceremonies and the team responsible went on stage to deliver their short and sweet acceptance speech, one of the producers, Ric O’Barry, held up a sign asking viewers to “text DOLPHIN to 44144”. more

Suppose someone came to you in December 2006 and advised you to start thinking about a mobile brand strategy, and fast. The reason: a computer company was about to unveil something that would take marketing over wireless devices to a whole different level.

Come on, be honest. Chances are good you’d have nodded, maybe added mobile to your list of things to look into when you had time, and then forgotten all about it until Steve Jobs got up and introduced the world to the iPhone. And the brands that already had cellphone strategies in place—or at least on the drawing board—got to steal a few giant steps on those that didn’t.

Well, you just may have a second chance at being an early entrant, thanks to another company not known for phones. more

About two months after Pepsi’s Amp Energy brand began offering a free iPhone app that promised to teach men how to find social success with 24 different female stereotypes, the app has been pulled from iTunes because of an apparent flood of protests in blogs, in Twitter and on 24-hour cable business shows.

But the most interesting thing to me is that, having been damned because it did let one of its brands roll out this fairly cheesy app, Pepsi was then soundly damned because it didn’t—that is, didn’t insulate the parent company from this controversy but instead issued an online apology in a way that took it broader than just the Amp product line. more

Coupons.com, which offers members digital discount offers via Web and mobile phone, has expanded its platform with a new portfolio of services, including the ability to save discount offers to selected retailer loyalty cards, the company announced today.

The Mountain View CA-based company also unveiled enhancements to its popular Grocery IQ shopping list app for the iPhone, as well as an iPhone app version of its Coupons.com Web site and a new optimization of the http://www.Coupons.com site for other feature phones. more

When it comes to mobile marketing, two channels have gotten most of the attention: text messaging, because almost every phone in the nation can be reached via SMS, and for little cost; and specialized downloadable apps for smartphones, because they create the most buzz, tap into a relatively affluent consumer, and may—just may—earn a little revenue if people are willing to pay something for them in iTunes.

But there are other ways to get an explicit marketing message out to handsets, and research firm eMarketer predicts that one of them—ads displayed in various places on mobile content, including content pages, search results and as independent ads within text messages—will draw increasingly large budgets over the coming four years. more

I’ve just received congratulations on my successful high school graduation and been asked to share my memories of the senior prom. It’s a bit hard to think myself back to those days—to give a hint, the song for the graduating class of Manhasset High was that new hit “Bridge over Troubled Water”—but for the folks at David’s Bridal, I’ll try. more