It is important to understand how mobile is different than other marketing so that you can take advantage of the full power of the medium. As with any tool, it is best to use mobile for its intended purpose and to use it correctly As an example, you can get a screw into a piece of wood with a hammer, but it is certainly not the most efficient way to do it. If you can see mobile for what it is-the seventh mass media-you will be able to create much more dynamic and successful mobile marketing campaigns.
Understanding Mobile as the Seventh Mass Media
Probably the biggest mistake that businesses and marketing professionals make in marketing with mobile is that they don’t see mobile any differently than any of the other media they are already using to market. Many see it as a small TV or a dumb/slow computer and plan their marketing along those lines. But it is crucial for a business that wants to market smart with mobile to see it as an entirely new media: the seventh mass media. To understand that concept, we need to backtrack a bit and understand the first six mass media and how each subsequent newcomer changed the forerunners.
Again, this is examined fully in Ahonen’s book, but it is such a crucial foundation to a successful mobile marketing campaign that I’m including an overview here, with permission from Ahonen.
We’ve come a long way from the first mass media: print. In the mid-1400s when Johannes Gutenberg improved the printing press and mass printing became available, it revolutionized the world. Instead of only a handful of literate people who could participate in the world’s knowledge, literacy became commonplace. Large groups of people read the same thing, and information was shared on a wide scale for the first time. The common man found tremendous power since print allowed political influence by the masses, put religious texts directly in the hands of people that reduced the power of the church, and provided a way for literature to be shared easily.
It was not until the late 1800s (400 years later) that recording became the second mass media. This allowed music and books to be shared more universally, but it did not wipe out print as the first mass media, which some people believed that it might. This is important because every time a new media comes along, people think that it will wipe out previously existing ones; it never does. There were several generations who lived with print as their only mass media.
