I’m not a marketing person, but while watching this video on YouTube about a girl toting her addiction to Starbucks really made me think about an interesting marketing medium.

Why not utilize a coupon system over SMS in addition to product placement or promotion to sell products on Internet distributed videos? There are some very bright and creative people out there creating free content for video. Why not entice them to advertise a product and make some money at the same time?

Here’s how it works, using this Starbucks Addict video as an example. Ann (the video’s author) publishes some incredibly witty and clever video that somehow draws thousands or hundreds of thousands of people to watch it. Part of the video advertises Starbucks and there is a coupon offer associated with the video for 10% (or whatever) off.

So far, pretty simple; now to mix in SMS. I saw an article about using your phone as your wallet recently and I put these two ideas together.

Extending the example: to entice both parties to deliver, a single-use coupon code is created that uniquely identifies the offer. A hash is generated that identifies the author of the video, transaction number and expiration date. Of course, the author needs to get a registration key from Starbucks that authorizes the coupon. If the viewer decides they want the coupon, it can be SMS’ed to their phone and stored there. When time comes to use it, the viewer enters the Starbucks and text messages the coupon code to the store which automatically registers the coupon code and credits the video author’s account and also issues the discount for the item. The credit could be a flat fee or a percentange of the item. Everybody wins. The author gets credit for their creative talents, the viewer gets a discount and the product company gets some free advertising. And as a freebie, this method also allows for establishing some excellent metrics by tracking the coupon codes.

This can all be done with existing technology and it would be quite simple to do.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 1st, 2006 at 10:17 am and is filed under Mobile, OSI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.