Love is fickle. Short-lived celebrity marriages and the advent of speed dating are just some examples of modern romantic habits. But believe it or not, couples today are even dumping each other by text message. This was the story that Hotwire developed for Swiss mobile software company Sicap, a company helping to drive the adoption of text and picture messaging services for GSM operators. The story about lovers dumping each other by text message was syndicated around the world.
Sicap had two strategic objectives. The first was to launch Sicap’s Multi-Media Messaging Service, MMS Bulk to mobile operators, a product designed to help increase picture messaging traffic. Its secondary objective was to establish Sicap’s credibility among operators by demonstrating that Sicap understands the mobile market and its major business issues.
As a result, the agency developed a strategy that would maximise media exposure for the launch by exploring the mobile phone usage patterns of operators’ customers.
Hotwire knew that familiarity with picture messaging among consumers was limited and that consequently adoption rates were a major business concern for operators. Therefore the agency commissioned research that would both reveal the truth behind picture messaging adoption rates and create a human interest story to raise awareness of the service among consumers. The research would then go on to explore consumers’ use of text messaging, a more established and popular messaging service. Both pieces of research would be used to build awareness of Sicap.
In April 2004, NOP conducted research among mobile phone users aged 15 years and over to find out about their usage of text messaging and their views and experiences of picture messaging.
The survey revealed that 83% of British mobile phone users have yet to send their first picture message and that 17% have no idea how to send one. These findings were sent to the trade press. It also revealed that 44% of adults have flirted by text, 30% have argued by text, and nine per cent have broken up a relationship by text. These findings were sent to the consumer and national press on May Day bank holiday – a slow news day – to maximise media interest.
The fact that the ‘affair’ between David Beckham and Rebecca Loos and their use of text messaging to communicate with each other was a current hot news topic at the time was exploited to the full. To give the research real-life flavour, case studies of people who had been dumped and who had been stalked by text – a fact revealed by the survey – were also sourced and sold in to the media.
The picture messaging research findings were used to strengthen Sicap’s relationships with the trade media and were released at the Global Messaging show, a major trade exhibition in London, on 11 May. The story was picked up in key trades such as Mobile Europe and got wider exposure in news media such as BBC Online.
The dumping by text story was syndicated across the world, including in the US, Canada, South Africa and India, while locally Sicap’s story appeared in The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian and the Daily Mirror in the UK, generating more than 100 pieces of coverage.
Sicap head of marketing Per-Johan Lundin said: “The campaign that Hotwire implemented was creative, innovative and widely exceeded my expectations. I was extremely pleased with the number of press articles that Hotwire achieved across different media, from the nationals, newswires and mobile trade titles, which in turn greatly raised awareness of Sicap as a company. We used PR as the primary medium to launch this new product. The campaign was very successful in alerting our target operator customers to its launch and establishing us as a credible player in the picture messaging space.”
Telecommunications 
