Vodafone UK  and Visa Europe  have successfully completed a mobile advertising campaign trial testing customer reaction and acceptance of advertising on a second Welcome message received by customers travelling outside of their home market .
As part of the trial, for two weeks during May 2008, a total of 150,000 messages were sent to Vodafone UK customers travelling abroad to eight selected countries. Delivered 30 minutes after customers arrived at their roaming destination, the message reminded all recipients to dial the UK +44 country code when calling home, and at the same time promoted the possibility of winning tickets to the Beijing 2008 Olympic and Paralympic Games with Visa if they used their credit card while abroad.
Vodafone and Visa wanted to investigate the impact that mobile advertising within this environment has on brand awareness, recall, customer interaction and engagement.

The research revealed that:

86% of respondents remembered receiving the second welcome message, with 74% opening and reading this message

1 in 7 (14%) of respondents recalled the promotion spontaneously, and a further 7% upon prompting

Recall of the promotion was approximately twice as strong among those who had returned less than a week prior to being interviewed (36% vs 17%).

Of those who recalled the promotion spontaneously, almost 20% remembered seeing it in a text message. Within this same group, 3 in 10 correctly attributed the promotion to Visa.

Of those who recalled the promotion when prompted (7%), a third recalled seeing it in a text message.

50% of respondents said that they would be open to receiving promotional messages in welcome messages if they were relevant and targeted.

Vodafone and Visa say they are examining ways to make the content in the Welcome Message more targeted and relevant for future promotions.
Working with Visa Europe made absolute sense when trialling such an innovative and inherently travel-based advertising opportunity, says Richard Saggers, Head of Mobile Advertising for Vodafone Group. The trial was a success. Our research showed that the Visa-Vodafone welcome message promotion was well recalled by customers and compared well against the more traditional direct forms of one to one communication.