From "MMS Takes off?", at The Mobile Technology Weblog:

"Compared to a response rate for an advertising campaign, 0.25% is certainly poor (from what I know about average rates)... but this isn't really the same thing, is it?

IMHO two better comparisons might be:

How many people go onto the Channel 4 chat-room after watching a given programme?

How many people write into programmes to get information packs by post?

I don't know what the rates for these are, but they seem like a better comparisons: they're calls to action, undertaken at the expense of the viewer, and involve stepping out of the medium currently being accessed (TV) and using another (internet, the written word)..."

Comments

[Russell Buckley]

Hmmm. I take the point, but I'm not sure I agree with your comparisons either :-)

There's a big difference between viewers being *urged repeatedly* to phone/sms/mms into a show and being told (usually in a low key voice over during the credits) that they can send in for an info pack.

A more valid comparison is surely something like Big Brother where similar levels of urging are made.

I can't be bothered to do loads of research into voting, but a quick look suggest the following:

BB 2004 Final = 8.3 million viewers

In the final week a total of 6,366,325 votes were cast.

Rather more than 0.2% methinks.

Now, there could well be other reasons why the Johnny & Denise call for action was less compelling. And certainly penetration of MMS compatible phones falls short of text compatible phones.

But for such a huge discrepancy,
the complexity and cost of sending an MMS must take the lion's share of the blame.

[Tom Hume]

I don't think we're going to find a comparison that we agree on ;) The last episode of BB has been unusually hyped for months in the press: a 75% or so response rate must be unusually high!

I'm certainly not arguing that operators have MMS right (in terms of working out-of-the-box, pricing, etc.)... but 8000 submissions in the course of a 1-off TV programme didn't strike me as bad.

Not sure that it's possible to get them, but I'd love to see figures for how many people *tried* to send in MMS ;). And were then any calls to action on the same programme fr SMS feedback, I wonder?

[John]

Hang on, how many people with MMS enabled phones watched that TV programme? There's your problem, right there, it was the wrong target audience. Per viewer, Johnny's BBC 3 programme which also had MMS inbound, had a higher response rate.

I've got hard stats in front of me (well, in the office actually) that show response rates for a recent MMS advertising campaign, and they are an advertisers dream.

[John]

Can't say what the campign was, they sent out over 20,000 MMS, recall was almost 80%, the message was forwarded by 45%, and of the key target audience 33% bought the product. I'm not a marketing expert, but I think that's pretty good - doesn't DM have a response rate of 1-2% ?

[nick ris]

hi guys,

just searching google for some info on my MMS campaigns (of which this was one!)..

At the time of the campaign i'd estimate that there were probably no more than 3.5 million handsets in the UK that were MMS capabable and more importantly MMS enabled. This obviously only makes up about 7.5 odd % of the mobile penetration and makes the response stat a little better :)