Heard about the Meffy Awards?
In their own words:
As the industry’s official benchmark for measuring success and rewarding innovation, the Meffys honour the most influential players from around the world.
So, in other words, MEF aims to reward good mobile services.
Anyway, I’d like to elaborate on the Meffys Oparator award. Telenor in Norway, together with the commersial TV channel TV2, won this award for their mobile football (soccer) service among others.
This is from the nomination text:
Success with football service: In April 2006 Telenor launched a football service in cooperation with TV2 offering live high-quality streaming and video clips of all goals. In 2007,Telenor and TV2 improved the service and included own WAP sites for all the clubs in the Norwegian league.
Telenor and TV2 bought the rights to Norwegian football and immediately incorporated the mobile channel in the strategy. TV, desktop internet, radio and mobile (including messaging) are all complementing each other in order to supply a complete service. Each distribution channel is used in suitable contexts based on the characteristics of the channel. The mobile channel includes messaging (sms,mms and wap push) and rich mobile internet portals with video streams and in-depth information. New, since Telenor got the award is that the football clubs are more tightly involved in the service. All clubs have their own mobile portals, sends their own sms alerts and manages their own user databases.
This collaborative effort to distribute valuable information to passionate consumers has in my eyes been a great success so far. My company,Mobiletech, has assisted Telenor with the development of the service and I can only say that the Telenor football service is one of the most successful, in terms of users and revenue, in the Norwegian market. Not only because football supporters are “fanatic”, but because this case is a great example of including the mobile channel in the strategy process. The mobile channel is NOT just another channel, it IS a unique channel with unique characteristics that no other channel can compete with. When the content owners and “strategy makers” realise this, and mobile service creation is no longer witchcraft, good mobile services will be reality.
Another important thing in the strategy Telenor developed is marketing/information. No matter how perfect the mobile service is one thing is for sure: no user can guess that a service is available on the mobile. You have to tell him!Telenor and TV2 has carefully told the users about the mobile channel using internet, tv and radio. In addition the clubs have also told the people present on the stadium during a match about the mobile channel.
Read Telenors press release here. The MEF nominees can be found here and the winners here.
Leave a Reply