What can marketers learn from a Norwegian interactive agency's work for a fast food chain? A Q&A with the Adam Holtrop, creative director of Vidamo Group, on the mobile campaign for Pizza & Kina Expressen.

While Norway lacks the population, its market faces the same forces of competition that bigger markets such as the United States, Britain, Canada or India do: pressure from lower-priced products on premium brands. This is the issue for Pizza & Kina Expressen, Oslo, Norway. Mobile Marketer's Mickey Alam Khan interviews Oslo-based Mr. Holtrop on the details of the pizza chain's strategy and tactics and Norway's attitude to mobile marketing. Excerpts:

What's the service Pizza & Kina Expressen is trying to push with mobile?
A VIP club where consumers sign up to get offers. Consumers are subscribed to general offers and told they can customize what offers they'd like to receive on the VIP page of the Web site.

The chain can then broadcast offers by SMS to specific groups based on food preferences, location, special events, holidays, et cetera.

What's the mobile strategy?
To build an extremely targeted database, then promote items which are overstocked in a particular outlet.

Of course the database is also used to promote event-based offers -- national holidays, for example -- as well as to promote their normal campaign offers during the year.

So what have you done for them?
We produced an SMS call to action which was promoted on their poster advertising in public transport.
Consumers sent VIP to 2223, they were returned an SMS with info and asked to opt-in to the campaign by replying to the SMS with the keywords VIP YES.

Consumers who responded were put into a general database and in return SMS we told them they could customize their offers at a Web URL.

We then built a Web interface attached to the customer's regular Web site where consumers could customize offers. This was labeled as the VIP area.

They were then added to a general database and told they could customize their offers at a Web site URL.

We then provided the customer with a SMS broadcast platform where specific groups could be selected and messaged.

So the campaign was geared towards signing people up to a VIP club.

Once signed up consumers could get online and configure what special offers they would like to receive.

They could select no offers, or they could select detailed specifics, like vegetarian pizza only, weekend evenings. They could opt into offers aimed at special events in the Norwegian calendar. And the system automatically sends offers on their birthday.

The business plan was, of course, to give people a greater sense of control over messages from the advertiser. To try make them feel they could get something they actually wanted.

But on the client's side we supplied a messaging platform where they could select databases and broadcast specific SMS offerings directly.

So if the chain had an excessive stock of pepperoni pizza in one of the branches, they could select a group of customers who live nearby, who want meaty pizza, and send an offer only to them.

They use the system mainly for this reason now, since they've had big problems with excessive stock in specific outlets.

What sort of results did you see?
Norway is a small country, and a few thousand responses are considered valuable, especially if these are mobile-based.

Of the thousands that responded to the initial call to action, around 30 percent opted in to the club.
Of this 30 percent, around 70 percent went to the Web site to configure their offers.

This showed us that if you offer consumers control, they are eager to take it. And consequently become more likely to accept marketing messages.

Was this Pizza & Kina Expressen's first time with mobile?
The client had not produced any mobile marketing before this event.

How does mobile fit in with their marketing? Any other channels involved?
The mobile campaign was tagged onto a series of special offers promoted on posters on public transport.

What kind of promotions or messaging did they do or are they doing to push mobile?
We supplied a platform where the customer could compose and schedule messaging to the databases.
Certain messages were configured to push automatically -- birthday offers, events and holidays.

Anyone else in Norway doing something similar?
No. There is very little mobile marketing for fast food chains in Norway currently. This customer was particularly brave.

Is your campaign for your client still live?
It was supposed to end last month but is now being considered to live longer.

So what challenge are you helping them address?
Overstocked outlets -- they can quickly promote offers based on an overstock of a particular item in a specific outlet.

What's your agency's specialty? Any other examples of mobile work for clients?
Vidamo is a wireless interactive agency with offices in Oslo, Norway; Copenhagen, Denmark; and Madrid, Spain. We've just opened a new office in South Africa.

We're a company formed of people from the advertising, media and technical industries. We believe this blend of disciplines is the solution to deciphering mobile strategy in a world moving faster than many of our clients can relate to.

Our focus is on the marketing, entertainment and enterprise sectors. Sectors which we feel are often blended into each other.

Vidamo enterprise handles high volumes of SMS traffic for local airlines -- passenger information -- and banks. We then look for opportunities to cross-sell new products within service messages and lead consumers into marketing dialogue.

Our marketing campaigns for PepsiCo put short codes on bottles of Pepsi Max leading to a rich mobile site where consumers could join databases, motivated by competitions and free offers.

Pepsi could then message these specific databases during music festivals in the summer and drive consumers to their brand events.

For Tuborg we recently created content and a JAVA game soon to be available from Tuborg.com. The campaign was geared towards building their Green Club membership database and will be used to inform consumers of Tuborg events and concerts in future.

Our work with Warner produces mobile fan blogs, where artists can blog their backstage lives and fans can keep up to date with the images and video loaded to a mobile site.

Our mobile community called Mopeeps has users from 160 countries in the world, with video blogs being sent in from as far as Sierra Leone.

Other Vidamo activities involve partnerships with media windows, such as TV and radio stations where our experience in revenue-generating mobile activities creates an income from low-yield media space.

What's the fast food marketplace like in Norway? Who are the key players? What does the average Norwegian like?
Many fast food chains compete for a small market share in Norway. With a country of around 5 million people advertisers are extremely careful with their marketing budgets.

Pepe's Pizza has the most marketing muscle and lead most of their promotions with tie-ins to film releases, sometimes offering a free DVD with a pizza.

Very few fast food chains produce any mobile marketing.

Norwegians eat a lot of pizza, and surprisingly frozen pizza has gained such popularity that Pepe's Pizza produced a gourmet frozen pizza range to gain shelf space in supermarkets.

The rise of local, cheap, street-corner, fast-food outlets has put further pressure on the often premium-priced market leaders.

This has caused our client Pizza & Kina Expressen to try and build relationships through mobile marketing and attempt to create loyalty through price offers.

How can other European countries learn from the Norway experience?
In a market as small as Norway it becomes increasingly important to offer consumers exactly what they want.

A small handful of consumers overloaded with marketing messages become more and more difficult to engage.

Mobile marketing in this environment is focused on turning a few consumer responses into loyal business.

To do this you need to hand control of promotion to consumers as soon as possible, provide a sense of a tailored product and attempt to deliver exactly what each specific consumer needs.

What about the U.S. -- are some of the lessons applicable to this market?
Attempt at all costs to turn sweepstakes campaigns into ongoing relationships. But then I presume this is high on any marketer's agenda.

How advanced is mobile marketing in Norway? What is it typically used for? Is the average Norwegian open to marketing messages and from which channels?
Norwegians have been exposed to mobile marketing for many years and are now very careful with their involvement.

Many SMS activities have been tried, tested and left behind. But useful or rewarding services hold their ground.

SMS database marketing still exists, with users of mobile sites often automatically subscribed to databases and sent messages. This does not go down well and plenty of bad press surrounds such activities.

Jamba and aggressive content sales on TV hurt the mobile marketing industry some time ago by aggressively subscribing consumers to expensive subscription plans. This made many Norwegians afraid to engage SMS short codes at the fear of being charged for unwanted services.

Consequently mobile marketing is now deeply connected to rewarding, informative and service-based offerings.