NEW YORK ? Brands need to leverage one global strategy for mobile and then adapt and deploy it locally, according to a SanDisk Corp. executive at the Digital Marketing Days Conference & Expo.

Launching global mobile programs is challenging due to wide variance in mobile and privacy rules internationally. However, with 4 billion mobile phones worldwide, the mobile channel offers the widest reach of any channel and gives brands the opportunity to form more personal one-to-one relationships with consumers.

?With mobile, as with any marketing program, you have to determine what you want to get out of this program, formulate your goals and an overall strategy with an eye to what role mobile can play to boost ROI,? said Beth Caltagirone, senior manager of worldwide retail marketing at SanDisk, Milpitas, CA. ?Will you use solely SMS or integrate mobile as part of a larger campaign?how will it contribute to making your program successful?

?A global mobile strategy lets us standardize marketing programs and put procedures in place,? she said. ?We?re working with a lot of different regional marketing teams around the world, and we enable them to run local promotions and it is so easy to get a different look and feel, as well as different messaging, for each region.

?We have been targeting the 18-to-30-something age group, and the response when I targeted that demographic using mobile was huge.?

SanDisk is an American multinational corporation that designs and manufactures flash memory card products, including a series of USB removable drives.

Multichannel global campaigns featuring mobile
Ms. Caltagirone said that she was originally brought on by SanDisk to develop a Web component for a global campaign called "Wake Up Your Phone," which resulted in the development of the site http://www.WakeUpYourPhone.com.

?SanDisk wanted the Web component to provide a dynamic, engaging experience for 18-34-year-old range, not a corporate-feeling Web site,? Ms. Caltagirone said. ?We wanted to provide education to boost awareness about our products by offering cool downloads of music videos, ringtones and wallpapers.

?We provided a completely free experience on the site that let consumers go through a download experience,? she said.

?Research was telling us that people were buying our memory cards but did not necessarily know how to use them, so the campaign centered on helping consumers to discover the mobile slot on their phone.?

SanDisk ran an event-based ?Show me your slot? campaign to help consumers realize ?I have a slot and I need to fill it with a SanDisk memory card.?

The SanDisk marketing team engaged attendees by asking them ?Do you know where your slot is?? and offering them free downloads of mobile content.

The brand has also connected with artists such as the Crystal Method and leveraged their fan bases for cross-promotion.

?We added a mobile component because ideally we want people to download directly from their mobile phone, and a mobile Web site provides that ability,? Ms. Caltagirone said. ?For the Wake Up Your Phone initiative, the mobile site was a teaser to entice people to go to the PC version to get the full experience.

?We can activate the campaign at events and put content that is specific to an event or a promotion and tell people to go to site for more downloads,? she said.

SanDisk has used SMS embedded with links to drive consumers between the wired and mobile versions of its sites.

SanDisk also launched wired and mobile versions of SanDiskCards.com, which is designed to offer product information online and in-store to influence consumers? buying decisions.

?SanDiskCards.com was focused on the in store experience, helping to make recommendations for what to buy,? Ms. Caltagirone said. ?If consumers put in the make and model of their phone, the site will tell you which memory card is the best for your phone, to help you make that decision.

?It also tells you whether it will hold music, video or photos?whether it will service your needs based on what you want to use it for,? she said.

?We are not trying to do direct sales or drive ecommerce with the site?we want to be engaging, talk to this audience and provide education about our products.?

A global approach means that a brand must meet regional locations? needs via local sweepstakes, promotions, data collection and email blasts.

Each region needs its own global landing page tools, a CMS to manage its own Web and mobile programs.

Brands can tap extend the message programs with localized keywords to drive consumers to the point of sale.

The use of Market Activation Kits helps brands communicate the optimal way to launch the programs internationally.

When it comes to launching a mobile Web site, it is important to make sure that consumers get a good experience no matter what device they use to access it.

?It took a few years of researching and talking with mobile specialists to find out that there are companies such as 5th finger out there with a built-up database to know what phone someone has and offering up an optimized site so the user has a good experience,? Ms. Caltagirone said.

Mobile tricks and tips
5th Finger powers San Disks mobile initiatives.

Steen Andersson, vice president and cofounder of 5th Finger, San Francisco, offered up a list of best practices for launching global mobile marketing initiatives.

The following are six key mobile tricks and tips:

1. Understand the different role mobile can play and your measures of success?customer acquisition, customer retention, building brand equity and providing utility/convenience

2. Know your audience and engage them on their terms, on their device

3. Understand the different global mobile carrier requirements and when to use short codes

4. Identify what is and is not personally identifiable information (PII) data and ensure your vendors are on the hook and in compliance with local and international regulations

5. Centralize development and hosting to optimize economies of scale

6. Design for the on-the-go consumer

Mr. Andersson said that Internet access is evolving rapidly.

IDC, Gartner and Morgan Stanley Research predict an impending inflection point. By 2012, there will be more smartphones than desktop and notebook PCs.

In addition, there will be more smartphone shipments than feature phone shipments by 2011, according to Ehud Gelblum and Morgan Stanley Research.

There are key usage moments for reaching consumers.

Mobile usage breaks down in the following way: 95 percent downtime, 80 percent at home, at work and while shopping, and 65 percent while commuting to work.

Mr. Andersson offered the following points regarding global text delivery:

? Text delivery is different than email

? Choosing the right aggregator is important (SanDisk tapped Sybase)

? One-way ?Bulk? messaging is cost-effective and has wide reach

? Two-way messaging via short codes enables interaction with consumers who opt in

? Double byte and China is a distinct market because of the unique alphabet

? There are legal and copy challenges, but the U.S. regulations tend to be the most strict, so use those as a boilerplate

Both Ms. Caltagirone and Mr. Andersson offered up privacy tips for mobile marketers:

? Protect your company and understand the privacy policy

? Determine if the data is PII or not

? Know the data touch points

? Loop in your company?s legal and IT security departments

? Verify your vendors satisfy your privacy requirements

Once those concerns are satisfied, brands can use mobile to enhance all of their existing marketing initiatives.

?Mobile offers a good way to extract more value from what is already being done by a brand,? Mr. Andersson said. ?The mobile channel augments traditional email and print communications, and provides a new way to communicate with consumers.

?Mobile is so personal, and if you use it the right way, it can create a level of dialog and increasing intimacy of that relationship with consumers, which is exciting,? he said.

One best practice is offering consumers an incentive that is exclusive to mobile, something they cannot get via email or on the Web such as code for a special discount offer or mobile content.

?Think about using mobile to elevate a brand, because it provides cache, and it is a channel that makes sense for the consumer,? Mr. Andersson said. ?Understand as much as you can about the target customer.

?Provide a mobile extension optimized for what kind of phone they have so you can scale and tier different engagement models for feature phones, smartphones and touchscreen smartphones,? he said.

Final take
Here is a video of Ms. Caltagirone, Mr. Andersson and 5th Finger's Dave Lawson in Mobile Marketer's offices: