We tip our hat at truly unique and innovative mobile marketing campaigns from around the world.
Smart TXTBKS: SMS Textbooks for the Philippines
Of late I have been doing a lot of thinking around SMS and its applicability in mobile marketing. Its an old warhorse, and one whose value tends to be underappreciated because it simply doesn’t come across as being “sexy” enough.
Well, I was wrong.
Smart, a telco in the Philippines, in partnership with a local agency DM9, came up with an innovative way to make feature phones act as eBooks – all leveraging SMS and unused SIM cards. The idea was to provide students with electronic textbooks that would save them the hassle of carrying heavy paper textbooks back and forth from school. To do so, they worked with book publishers to carve up (metaphorically) school textbooks into groups of 160 character SMS’s, which were then loaded onto the unused SIM cards. Voila! A modern day eBook reader using old-school technologies.
Students could simply pop the SIM card of choice onto their phones – and have access to the electronic equivalent of that textbook.
Watch the video to see how it was done:
Why we love it
What a great way to reuse an existing technology. And whats absolutely amazing about it is that it can serve as a completely new way to distribute any content – not just textbooks. The same mechanism can be used for low-cost magazines, manuals and any other content that may need to be accessed by lower income people in developing countries around the world.
