Media brands should forget about creating apps and focus on MMS instead, says strategist

According to a tech author and 3G strategist, Tomi Ahonen, MMS is an important platform that is being ignored right now and should be taken more seriously. Too many people are focusing on creating apps dedicated to smartphones and ignoring phones that are more than capable of displaying multimedia. His reasoning? “There are about 100 million iPhones on the platform. Now multiply it against all mobile phones. That’s 2% of your audience. If you develop an iPhone app and you are a media brand, you are deliberately ignoring 98% of your available audience. That’s a pretty rotten strategy in my mind.” Most of the world still isn’t using smartphones (smartphones only account for about 17% of the world’s handsets) and by using SMS and MMS to reach out to audiences would be a better idea at this point in time. Ahonen also mentions that MMS has 2.4 billion active users today – that’s more than the amount of users Facebook will ever reach.

Although everything sounds great in theory – there are some other factors to consider. Apps offer a level of interactivity that SMS/MMS messages can’t ever hope to achieve. If someone has an app on their phone, it means they’ve voluntarily installed it on their phones; most users will just ignore texts from people they don’t know and delete them without a second thought, especially when it’s an advertisement of some sort. And aren’t the smartphone users the ones that brands want to target since they are usually the ones with money? What are your thoughts on Ahonen’s strategy? Do you think reaching out through MMS would work or is it just a waste of time?

 

George Wong
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: ads, advertising, mms, sms, text