This is a story that fell through the cracks last December when I was moving to Hong Kong and then the earthquake in Taiwan disrupted our internet access for two weeks.
A great story from MTV, everybody's fave music video broadcaster. We've talked about many MTV innovations in the book and on this blogsite. MTV was one of the companies that invented the TV-mobile phone integration, and introduced user-participation to TV, what is now worth 1.2 billion dollars in 2005 and used by everybody from American Idol/Pop Idol and Big Brother to 24 hour gaming channels on cable TV. Oh, and TV voting is worth something like 2 billion dollars in 2006.
So what is the latest from the music video youth broadcaster? Ha ha, I love this. Financial Times reported on 18 December that MTV has set up a unit called Mobile Media Group. Judy McGrath, the CEO of MTV Networks explained that this was set up because "Connecting with our consumers on every platform they love is at the heart of our digital strategy." And surely there is nothing else the teenagers love more than their mobile phones, from South Korea to South Africa; from Canada to Colombia and from the United States to the United Emirates.
And here is their first innovation in this space. MTV launched Mobile Junk 2.0 (first network operator/carrier is Sprint in America). Mobile Junk 2.0 is an access and sharing system, which connects to the social networking sites online (like YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, etc) and allows user-generated content to be transmitted to the mobile phone. Fine. That was to be expected. These services themselves are all now launching mobile variants or access systems.
Except this Mobile Junk 2.0, like so much of what MTV does in its digital portfolio is engagement marketing at its heart. The MTV customers can then vote using their phones, on which content is the best. And those that the Mobile Junk 2.0 users vote as best - yes, yes, yes - these get to be broadcast on the MTV networks like MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central (depending obviously on the content type) !!!
Don't you just love it? Engage your customers. Of COURSE TV broadcasters can do it. But the natural engine that powers this interactivity is the mobile phone (not the PC). And since mobile traffic is billed, the network (MTV) can get a share of the billed revenues. WONDERFUL. This is yet again, MTV showing us the way to the engagement marketing future using digital communities. Yes, communities do dominate brands.
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