Although the mobile marketing industry is still in its infancy, we're hearing more and more tales of successful campaigns. Each story like the one below that lands in our inbox, is one more affirmation of the coming explosion in the mobile marketing space.

Mobile Insider reports that MVNO Boost Mobile partnered with mobile community provider AirG to produce a successful campaign for West Coast Customs, a popular California car customizer. The response was overwhelming--over 1.5 million entries:

Those 1.5 million entries came in almost entirely via the phone in a 90-day span. Keep in mind that Boost Mobile is an MVNO form Sprint Nextel aimed at the youth market. It only has 3.8 million customers.
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Part of the secret sauce for this campaign was careful media planning and targeting on the front end. “We don’t think this would have worked on another network,” says Ghahramani. “The offer doesn’t resonate with the demographic or the user. But with Boost Hookt you got urban youth who care about pimping out their cars.”

The 'secret sauce,' of course, is based upon one of the most desirable principles of mobile marketing--that you can target and directly reach exactly the type of consumer who will respond to your campaign.

When you plan properly, the results speak for themselves:

In fact, the winner of the pimped-out car at the center of this contest was a young Jersey man who was a gas station attendant and one of ten kids in his family. A $40,000 tricked-out car was exactly the lure he would have wanted. The contest, the delivery vehicle, and the offer apparently hit their target dead-on.

Here's Mobile Insider's take on the power of targeting:

Getting 1.5 million entries off of a niche audience on a small carrier in 90 days is a good indication of how powerful the medium can be when marketers really hit their relevancy target. On mobile, media planning could be king. Aligning just the right offer with just the right target via just the right content may become the mobile marketer’s delicate dark art. Which is to say that mobile requires all the same disciplines that make all forms of digital marketing work… only more so.

Check the source to read more details about the campaign: http://blogs.mediapost.com/mobile_insider/?p=59