Mobile Marketing Failures

Reflect back when you were eight years old or so. Mom or Dad is there consoling you because, somehow you fell, you scraped your knee but hey, you got up and kept moving forward. This analogous event might remind you of when you were young, but how about now. You are mature and need real challenges to make you slow down right?



Check out this interesting site specifically set up to highlight some notable and unfortunately, typical mistakes in mobile marketing at, www.mobilemarketingfail.com. Some postings record a few epic failures that are enough to make you laugh and for the other side, the marketers, cry. Nobody is holding their hand to make them feel any better though. Sometimes you just have to learn the hard way, like Dad said. True.

The most recent posting from 10/5/2011 discusses a failure while promoting the movie Super 8. You would really think the team working this promotional project would make sure that a 'mobile ready' trailer was fully tested across multiple platforms and tested on the most popular devices. Work ethic and integrity, right? That's logical to me. But it's not quite the case. It seemed to be the case of a mobile device trying to view a regular website.

Another example was from MIT in some related manner. A white paper was the landing page for a QR code. The white paper was a 28 page .pdf file. Now, I fully respect MIT and the intelligent students and faculty as my grandfather was a student and professor. But obviously we all are human, all benefiting from our individual and collective missteps. A little more planning and preparation would have delivered the material in a much more effective manner instead of making the mobile user scroll up-and-down and from side-to-side to see the enlarged font.

I think the moral to this story is that, you can never be too sure until you are sure. No I am not trying to promote some circular logic but please consider your quality processes as a project is wrapping up. When planning your mobile marketing efforts, do remain vigilant and ensure high-quality experiences are what you are remembered by, not epic mobile failures.