MyThum joins with customer loyalty giant Givex to offer coupons to phones

Mobile marketing company MyThum Interactive says a deal it’s inked with Givex Corp. could jumpstart the use of customer loyalty numbers in SMS and other campaigns. On April 5, the Toronto-based company announced the agreement which will see the two organizations jointly offer the Mx-Coupon program - a way to deliver redeemable coupons to mobile phones through text messaging. Givex is one of North America’s largest shops managing loyalty programs for major brands including Chapters/Indigo, IKEA, Cara Foods, and others. Mx-Coupon still falls short of the longstanding promise of using actual barcodes on mobile phone screens to conduct m-commerce, but MyThum director of marketing and business development Michael Brown tells Canadian NEW MEDIA the program brings the state-of-the art a big step closer. The program will work by delivering customer loyalty numbers directly to the mobile phone that can then be punched in by clerks at the point-of-sale. Because current bar codes are often unwieldy, containing around 30 digits, MyThum and Givex will also work to provide more mobile phone friendly codes. Those might include a subscriber’s actual cell phone number to ensure numbers aren’t stolen or shared. Loyalty cards are practically ubiquitous today as stores develop sophisticated ways to track and keep customers, and Brown says they are a natural fit to move into the mobile arena. "What (a loyalty card) really is a way for you to carry around a number, and in this case it’s a bar code. When you go to buy something at a point of sale, you just present your number. The card itself is not necessarily carrying any value…In our ongoing relationship with (Givex), it became really interesting when we started to say, well, that’s one way for people to carry a number around, but the mobile phone is another way, and there’s all sorts of reasons why that might be a better way. One would be, how many cards can you carry in your wallet? Your phone’s always with you. Where it’ll eventually become even more interesting is when we’re able to put bar codes onto the phone itself, which is something we could technically do today, but then it’s a matter of whether there are enough devices in the market that kind of make this feasible and a necessary thing to do at this point. In the interim, though, when you go and you swipe your bar code at point of sale, sometimes it doesn’t work and they manually punch in a number. To make a long story short, we’re putting it into a text message…And then, as part of a mobile campaign, we can kind of build this in as a whole new layer of value for the consumer." Brown says there are currently no campaigns planned that will use the Mx-Coupon program, but he’s hoping to hammer together some deals by the end of the year. The potential for a mass-market campaign is enormous, he says. "The opportunity is already there, so let’s go grab it. It was really important for us to work with Givex. There’s no better company to work with in Canada because they’ve got so many of the existing point of sale systems with these retailers…Givex has a lot of partners in the U.S. as well. So, it’s an exciting time and the response to that press release has been I think a really good indication (that) even though we could have done this a year ago, it probably was worth waiting because it’s taken a while for people to get their heads around the mobile space. Now that they’re getting it, they’re starting to see the value in doing this type of thing." The announcement would seem to be validation of some of the earlier promise of mobile marketing, which has been slow to make in-roads in Canada. At an August 2003 conference called the Mobile Marketing Boot Camp, held shortly after Canada’s four wireless carriers announced inter-carrier SMS cooperation, there was an enthusiastic reception to several early successful case studies of SMS marketing campaigns (CNM, Aug. 28/03). At the time, it was expected that less reliance on the WAP platform would give marketing campaigns a boost, but Canada continues to lag behind countries in Asia and Europe in using short codes. One company, SUMmedia.com Inc., was an early pioneer in the coupon space. Based in Vancouver, the company worked in 2000 with Telus Wireless to beta-test a wireless coupon product with tens of thousands of ecoupons available through a WAP portal. Later that year, the company formed a partnership with SignalSoft Corp. to deliver the coupons, but by May 2001 it was out of business (see the July 10/00 of Report on Wireless, for details).. Some high-profile campaigns, notably for Canadian Idol, have been responsible for new expectations around the technology, however. In the meantime, the volume of SMS messaging here is experiencing explosive growth. Brown says the agreement with Givex will help capitalize on that growth, and that the company has several other tricks in its bag. Best known, perhaps, for its work with CHUM Interactive and Ericsson to enable the broadcaster’s mobile multimedia store, Brown says MyThum is now poised to go a step further and give brands such as Givex’s clients direct access to consumers, bypassing the carrier’s WAP gateways. MyThum announced last month that the new commuter paper Dose, for example, would give readers the ability to buy ringtones, games and images directly from the print edition and from the paper’s web site by using simple text messages. (Canadian NEW MEDIA recently accompanied a trade mission of new media producers to Australia and Singapore, where those producers were struck by the heavy integration of SMS into multiple media. For more on the opportunities Canadian content producers see in those markets, and an evaluation of the relative strength of SMS in Canada in comparison, please see the April 6 issue of affiliate publication Report on Wireless.)

MyThum joins with customer loyalty giant Givex to offer coupons to phones

Broadcast | April 15, 2005

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