If the medium is the message, the message to advertisers and marketers is mobility.

Advertisers and marketers have always understood that if you want to communicate a message to your customers, you can’t expect them to come to you; you have to go to them. Often times, that has meant targeting your ads to people at home or on their way to and from work. However, the proliferation of laptop computers, mobile phones, and PDAs have opened up new advertising frontiers, and Kansas City marketing firms are leading the way in discovering and exploiting their full potential.

It’s a good thing someone is leading the way; it’s easy to get lost. It’s hard for advertisers to keep up with all the new opportunities available to them. Your ad agency tells you traditional media aren’t as effective as they once were, but what does that mean? In the context of

21st century advertising and marketing, even the traditional meaning of the word “traditional” has shifted. Traditional used to mean billboards, broadcast, and print media. Now traditional also includes Web sites. If you build a site they may not come. Simply creating and posting a site, no matter how good or current the content, may not be much better than printing brochures and trying to hand them out on a street corner.

“For advertisers, having a good looking Web site used to mean you were on the leading edge. Not anymore. It’s no longer good enough to create a Web site and try to drive traffic to your site,” says Jeff Yowell, founder and CEO of Datacore, a Kansas City-based marketing firm. “There has to be inherent value for the consumer in going to a site, beyond the possibility that they might be able to buy something there. They have to want to go there regularly. You have to create an interactive relationship with the consumer. And online is where that relationship exists. There has to be more to it than buying and selling.”

Mike Lundgren agrees with Yowell. Lundgren is Director of Creative and Applied Technologies at VML, the Kansas City-based advertising agency specializing in high-tech marketing solutions. “It used to be, as online marketers, our objective was to drive consumers back to our client’s dot-com. The end goal was herding the consumer back to that online destination.”

Now, he says, that destination is often someplace online where consumers are already hanging out, someplace that is contextually relevant to them. He cites Yahoo and Google pages, and that little phenomenon known as “MySpace.”

Advertising agencies are increasing-

ly utilizing the interactive social net-working site MySpace—the fifth-most popular English-language Web site on

the Internet—for what Lundgren calls “portable content.” He uses VML’s client Intuit as an example.

“The old school tactic would have been for Intuit to post a tax tips video on a dot-com,” he says. “New school is to make it just as easy for a tax professional or a blogger who’s writing about tax issues to put Intuit’s tax tips video on their blog or Web page, or even for an individual

to put it on their MySpace page.”

Traditionally-minded advertisers un-derestimate the reach and impact of MySpace at their own peril. The site

has 176 million users. Lundgren reports that it sees 400,000 new members a day.

Whether it’s MySpace or someone else’s space, Datacore’s Jeff Yowell says the foundation upon which all successful interactive marketing and advertising campaigns are built is data that quantify consumer characteristics and behaviors. “Unless you know who your customers and prospects are and what their preferences are you can’t optimize your marketing efforts. There will be lots of waste in your campaign and that’s expensive.”

Datacore specializes in creating marketing databases and data gathering infrastructure for its clients. Typically, these are clients who engage in direct marketing and are seeking to reduce their marketing costs without reducing the impact of their marketing efforts.

“The first thing we have to do in working with these clients is to get them to view customer data through a marketing lens,” Yowell says. “These days your marketing is only as good as your data. We try to capture as much data as we can so when it’s time to launch a campaign we can answer with a certain degree of confidence the questions ‘Who? What? When? and How?’ Here’s an example; Let’s say the client is Cabela’s or Bass Pro Shops. The ‘who’ might be duck hunters. The ‘what’ might be an in-store sale on hunting gear, apparel, decoys, ammunition, etc. The ‘when’ would be two weeks before the beginning of duck hunting season. And the ‘how’ is an e-mailed coupon or downloadable coupon on the store’s Web site and/or, for example, the Ducks Unlimited Web site.”

To gather those kinds of data, Yowell’s firm installs programs that track the “click” behavior of visitors to their clients’ Web sites. This data is then merged with demographic data, such as age, zip code, household income, occupation, family status, etc. and this comprehensive profile is used to create the database used as the basis for direct marketing campaigns.

Data this detailed can only be gathered with a certain level of customer cooperation, such as registration on client Web sites, responding to Web- or e-mail-based surveys, etc. But, the act of registering or responding to a survey is, in and of itself, one of the most critical pieces of data. It pre-qualifies an individual as being interested in the client’s company and products.   

At Intouch Solutions, the Overland Park-based marketing firm founded by Faruk Capan, data captured online drives virtually all of their work on behalf of their clients in the pharmaceutical industry. CEO Capan and Pat McNerney, the firm’s executive vice president, say they carefully monitor and measure each consumer online interaction with a client’s Web site.

“We need to know how long a consumer or prospect stays at a site,” says Capan. “How far do they click into the site? Which pages on the site do they view for the longest time?

Do they register at the site? And do they express a preference for e-mail interaction or some other form of contact?”

McNerney explains that because the pharmaceutical industry is so highly regulated they have to be very conservative and cautious in the kinds of online tactics they employ. Use of MySpace, for example, would in most cases be out of the question. However, creation of an educational site that provides consumers with opportunities to learn about their medical condition and to exchange stories and experiences with other consumers may be appropriate.

“We believe that informed and ed-ucated consumers make good purchase decisions,” McNerney says. “But again, the Web site that provides the education and information has to have real value. It can’t just be a sales pitch.” 

Web marketing content that educates is good, but it’s even better if it’s mobile, says August Grasis III, founder and chief executive officer of Handmark, the Kansas City-based creator and packager of Web content for mobile phones and handheld devices. Grasis says that marketers who find ways to reach and provide value to their customers while they’re on the move are most likely to succeed in today’s marketplace.

Handmark’s flagship product is PocketExpress which delivers a wide range of Web content to subscribers’ handheld phones, Treos, Blackberries, etc. PocketExpress content includes news from Associated Press; weather reports, including live regional Doppler radar; sports scores and news; real-time stock prices and financial news; entertainment news; maps; games; business and reference tools; and even Dear Abby.

The premise of Handmark’s business model is that advertisers must not only provide value for customers who visit their Web sites when browsing, but they must provide value to customers wherever they go, by delivering valuable Web content to their handheld mobile devices.

“The typical Internet experience on a cell phone is frustrating and highly unsatisfying,” says Grasis. “The images don’t fit the screen. It takes too many clicks to get where you want to go. And the content available is too often neither useful nor entertaining. When you search the Web

on your desktop computer you browse. Generally, because you’re sitting in a comfortable stationary place, you can take the time to visit a number of sites to find precisely what you’re looking for. Mobile phones, however, are not a good medium for browsing. The thing itself is too small. You’re usually not in an environment that’s conducive for leisurely browsing; it’s may be too crowded, you may be in transit, it’s too noisy, too many distractions, or you just don’t have the time. The success of marketing and advertising campaigns that use mobile phones as their means of reaching consumers will be linked to the ease of use.” 

Grasis says that will require new thinking, as well as the creation of content specifically designed for use on a handheld device. Advertisers will need to spend the time and money to understand the limits and opportunities of communicating with consumers via their mobile phone.

He cites the hypothetical example of a couple leaving a movie theater while on a weekend trip in St. Louis. They decide they want Italian food for dinner so they use their mobile phone’s Web capability to search for an Italian restaurant near the theater.

“These folks don’t have the time to browse for several minutes on a tiny screen, paging through dozens of Google or Yahoo returns to find a possible place to eat,” he says. “But if their device is loaded with a program that knows their location and can provide an instant list of nearby Italian restaurants, and maybe a smart advertiser uses that program to provide a digital coupon for a discounted dinner for two, well, then you have something.”

Grasis agrees with Datacore’s Jeff Yowell that data form the basis of all successful Web-based marketing efforts, especially those targeted at mobile users. 

“For example, if we know which of our customers use our product to track Formula One racing. We can then use that data to provide advertisers access to that speci-

fic consumer segment. Those advertisers might include dealers of high performance cars, retailers of high-end apparel, sunglasses, stereo equipment, travel packages, etc. Obviously, the more we know about our customers, the more precise our advertisers can be in targeting their messages.”

Not all subscribers to Handmark’s PocketExpress receive advertising messages targeted at their consumer preferences or interests, however. Grasis says that cable TV is an appropriate model for his business and others who market products and services via mobile devices. With cable TV some content is free to the user because it’s supported by advertising, he explains, and some content is available only by paid subscription, but is still subsidized by ads. Then there is premium content available through subscription only, but is free of ads. “That’s the same model that Internet businesses have adopted. And now we’re seeing it emerge as the dominant model for companies marketing content and services to users of mobile devices.”

Of course, the main use of a mobile phone is, at least for now, to talk with. Which brings us full-circle—back to the most basic form of advertising: WOM—word of mouth.

“Word of mouth has always mattered online,” says VML’s Lundgren. “Brands have always lived or died on word of mouth.” Lundgren says the percentage of consumers who believe what they read online about a brand over their own experience is 13 percent higher. “It starts with the validation, the pass-along and the wisdom of the crowds,” he says. It all comes back to what people say to one another.