Fast & Frolicious: Text Campaigns Big & Small

I think shortcode text marketing campaigns are a vastly underused/underappreciated form of actionable, location-based marketing...particularly in the US. For marketers who know anything about CRM these campaigns have the potential to provide supervaluable relationship marketing leads. It's shocking how few brands do anything with shortcodes and text (or mobile in general).

That said I learned about 2 campaigns on opposite ends of the reach spectrum this week. One supports a national movie release and one supports a hyper local customer relationship campaign by a frozen yogurt shop.

Text FAST to UFILMS (834567): Universal Pictures is once again running a major text campaign to support their Fast & Furious street racing franchise. The 4th installment, simply titled Fast & Furious, opens in US theaters on April 3rd. The shortcode is prominently placed on all outdoor media (larger than the URL). The shortcode returns a link to a content rich, graphically compelling WAP site featuring movie info, trailers, a picture gallery and downloadable graphics, tones and games. Consumers can also provide their phone # to enter a sweepstakes to win $10k or a Subaru STI (yes I entered). On the last Fast & Furious film (Tokyo Drift) Universal also tagged the product and advertising of many of the film's promotional partners with unique keywords...we'll see if that materializes this time round.

Text YOGURT to 69302: Froyolife, my local frozen yogurt 2.0 place is capturing the mobile #s of local shoppers so the retailer can send them updates about new flavors and sales promotions. If they know what they're doing on cold days they will blast messages compelling users to come into the store with 20% off coupons and on hot days they'll MMS foodporn images of icy cold mango yogurt. This is actually the smallest brand I've ever seen using a shortcode campaign...I wish them luck and I hope it starts a trend.