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To: elmatador who wrote (13160)	6/29/2001 5:07:26 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Respond to of 34857

No money in China? No first-grade beer? Unsophisticated Chinks?? When was the last time you dropped by in Shanghai? (Besides, Shanghai alone has more inhabitants than the whole of the Czech Republic...) Read My Mobile Sending text messages by phone is the cool new medium to reach hip young consumers in China By Kathy Wilhelm/SHANGHAI Issue cover-dated May 31, 2001 WHEN HEINEKEN wanted to promote a series of dance parties for its target consumers in China--hip, upwardly mobile, aged 20-30--it contacted them by mobile phone. First it sent short text messages about the parties to the mobile phones of consumers who had expressed interest in hearing about Heineken events. Then it built up its database of consumer phone numbers by inviting those who attended the mid-May parties in Guangzhou and Shenzhen to register for a lucky draw by sending a text message from their phone. Out of 4,000 ticket-buyers, 42% joined the lucky draw. "Premium beer drinkers in China today all have hand phones," says Jacqueline Speek, marketing manager for Heineken China. "We're trying to use this medium to reach them in a more effective and innovative way." Groove Street, the Shanghai-based marketing company that developed the promotion for Heineken, says it was China's first direct-marketing campaign to use SMS or short-message service, a technology that delivers text to mobile phones. It won't be the last. Groove Street already plans to use SMS to publicize the Heineken Open tennis tournament that will be held in Shanghai in September. "The response to this [dance] promotion was very high," says Willie Brent, Groove Street's vice-president. "People think it's cool to message with their phones." Just a year ago, mobile-phone operators in China and around the world were ecstatic over the revenue-generating potential of WAP, or wireless application protocol, a new technology that promised to bring the Internet to mobile phones. WAP's slowness and unreliability made it an instant flop with consumers. But something interesting emerged out of the debacle. Programmers who had developed WAP applications, like news alerts and games, adapted them for the older, less glamorous but more reliable SMS, previously used mainly by students as a low-budget way to send messages of up to 160 letters or 70 Chinese characters. Most mobile phones already supported SMS, so no new hardware was needed. Without any of the hype that had accompanied WAP's debut, SMS traffic exploded and a new entertainment and marketing medium was born. Globally, 15 billion SMS messages were sent in December, a five-fold increase over the previous December, says the GMS Association, a London-based wireless-industry group. China's ominant mobile operator, China Mobile, says its SMS traffic rose from 57 million messages in the first quarter of 2000 to 192 million in the fourth quarter. [snip] feer.com