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

Chapter 9

Mobile as a Natural Progression

Across the country in Cleveland, Kris Foley and her team at Clear Channel station KISS also were having an epiphany about mobile. For the first time, she says, sales, programming, and management were unanimous in their desire to use a technology to get closer to listeners and to get advertisers to spend with the station.

For Foley, it wasn’t a matter of having risk-takers singing the same song—it was more of a natural progression for KISS.

“Personality may have had something to do with it but I think it was more we had a number of things that we needed to improve about the operation of the radio station and texting allowed us to accomplish all of them,” she says.

“For an example, we went from where the traditional advertiser purchased a 60-second commercial. With that commercial, the hallmark was you had to say the client’s website three times and the phone number three times. That’s not how people consume media now. It’s either, ‘Make the message relevant for me right away and I’ll tune in to it or I’m going to tune out from it.’ We also have a time-crunched society where people want to be informed as quickly and simply as they possibly can.”

Further, Foley saw mobile as a tool to drive additional advertising dollars and to help her fulfill a personal mission.

“People thought of us as innovative because of what Hipcricket brought us to use,” she says. “We took a model at the beginning to not try to put a high price tag on programs involving ...