SA's Livemobile wins MMA Award

“We are privileged and honoured to be the first African company to win an award since its inception five years ago. We see this not only as our accolade but one which we share with the whole mobile marketing industry in Africa as this award serves as an endorsement to the fact that the rest of the world recognizes the leadership position that this continent is taking in this sector”, said Patrick Kuwana, co-founder of Livemobile.

“The world population sits at 6.8 billion at the moment and 4.1 billion of those people have mobile phones. Mobile marketing is not hype anymore; it is now a mainstream channel to access the market out there in a personally engaging and measurable way. We are providing marketing and advertising agencies with the perfect platform to offer to leading brands and advertisers who want direct and measurable access to the millions of football followers in South Africa, across the rest of the African continent and globally.

Powerful opportunity

“Most of the traditional advertising inventory in South Africa during the world cup period is either all sold out or selling at astronomical rates. However, Livemobile offers the powerful opportunity to access the football fan in the most direct way within the context of football on the one channel that stays in the hand or pocket of the target market 24 hours a day. We are delighted that the foremost global mobile marketing authority and industry leaders have recognized, endorsed and rewarded our strategy,” concluded Kuwana.

The award winning campaign was based on providing football fans with a multi-channel real time mobile football experience during the Confederation Cup in June 2009, without infringing on any governing body media rights. Livemobile offered fans real time running commentary, statistics and news from each game during the tournament from its portal www.lmfootball.mobi. Fans also received SMS based match kick-off reminders and other key SMS alerts to keep them engaged in the football excitement for the duration of the tournament.

Each interaction experience between the fans and Livemobile presented advertisers with the opportunity to take their brands or marketing campaigns to the audience. From a business stand point, critical marketing intelligence and profiling information was gathered from the fans to drive further targeted marketing to the user base and increase call to action activity and hence customer acquisition.

Livemobile worked very closely with its strategic partner Mo-B (Mobitainment), one of South Africa's leading mobile strategy consultancies in the design, execution and commercialization of the campaign. Multimedia Solutions, a global award winning mobile solutions company designed, built, integrated and hosted the site.