Mobilized Marketing: How to Drive Sales, Engagement, and Loyalty Through Mobile Devices

Chapter 7

Listening to the Consumer

Across the country, at one of the most influential radio stations in the country, Clear Channel’s Director of Marketing Eileen Woodbury knew that her KIIS-FM audience in Los Angeles was texting.

“Around 2005, I was getting hit on by hundreds—I know I’m exaggerating—of mobile companies,” she says. “All the talk was how everything is going to be on your phone. At the time, our company had a local deal in place with a text marketing platform provider but we weren’t actively engaged with it.

“I recall my marketing manager reached out to me one day and said, ‘I don’t know exactly how this works, but please meet with them and see if it’s useful to us.’ I met with the company and I was a little bit unsure of what they were offering and what it could do to drive results for the station. But so many companies were hitting me up, I thought I better take it seriously and figure it out. I ended up setting meetings with 10 or more companies to learn what it was all about and how it could apply to radio. Not many mobile companies were experts specifically in radio at that time. They didn’t come with a, ‘This is how you can use it in radio, this is how you can increase ratings,’ instruction book. It was really an overall brand marketing strategy that they were pitching.”

Woodbury was one of the first to see the potential of mobile messaging.

“As the application and strategy became clearer we were really excited to launch a texting initiative,” she says. “We ...