As fate would have it, while walking through Time Square on the way to the Mobile Marketing Forum here in NYC (more on that later), I stumbled upon an interesting bit of mobile marketing being attempting by UK based automobile company Land Rover. As I ventured downtown on Broadway toward the Marriott Marquee my N70 beeped as if I was receiving a text message. When I took out my phone to see who could possibly be texting me at 8-oclock in the morning you could imagine my surprise when I saw the message “Land Rover is trying to connect to you via Bluetooth. Accept?.”Remembering the stories I have heard about Symbian phone virus’ being spread via bluetooth from a company I met at the Mobile Monday Would Summit called F-Secure I clicked no. The message came again. I clicked no again. This continued. Finally, I figured “well, I have all my data backed up and am carrying 4 extra cell phones with me so lets just see what it is.” If its a virus, i figured, then we can put F-Secure to the test. (To all those who care, if I really wanted to stop receiving the bluetooth requests all I had to do was walk away or turn off my bluetooth as “visible”)

I clicked yes. In a few moments the bluetooth message was delivered to my inbox (that is how it works on Symbian phones). I opened it up and to my surprise the RealPlayer application started up and the commercial that showcases the Land Rover LR3’s GPS navigating a cargo plane from France to Corsica began to play. It was very much like the one you can see here only at the end it instructed me to visit the website in which I just directed you.

Some of you may remember the billboard across the street from CTIA Las Vegas in which the company BlueCasting demonstrated this type of proximity marketing system, enticing you with a giant poster of a half naked woman (total Las Vegas style). So I immediately looked around for any Land Rover ad’s or billboards from which this message could have come from but, alas, could not find any (it was Time Square so I may have missed it). I wanted to know more about this and figured that someone at the Mobile Marking Association Forum I was about to attend would know something about it but when I talked about it it was news to people. I looked online for it but could find nothing.

So I am sharing the info with you. Breaking the story I guess. There it is, my first real life mobile proximity market experience. But that is all I have to share, the experience. Anyone know more?

Technorati Tags: blue casting, bluecasting, f-secure, land rover, mma, mmf, mobile marketing forum, mobilemonday, n70, NYC, symbian

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 7th, 2006 at 8:10 pm and is filed under Advertising, Mobile Marketing, Bluetooth, Mobile Stumble. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.