ESPN - Mobile is their media "Glue"

ESPN digital media executives stressed that mobile is a key component of the sports network's overall multichannel portfolio of products and services and will only grow in importance going forward.

Given that ESPN operates in every channel one can think of -- television, print, online, radio and mobile -- the executives praised SMS in particular for connecting all of the various media and making them interactive. ESPN claims that it has the most-trafficked sports mobile Web site, the most-downloaded sports application for iPhone and the No. 1 sports SMS alerts service, as well as a growing amount of mobile video coverage.

"Mobile is the glue for everything we do," said Oke Okaro, vice president of ESPN Mobile, Bristol, CT. "It's an activation channel, a way to bring people into the fold, let them test the mobile waters and then bring people into more comprehensive platforms such as the mobile Web, applications and live video on the mobile phones... It's important to drive awareness and adoption of our mobile products and services, and integration with our TV programming is a great way to accomplish that," he said. "The X Games had robust mobile messaging campaigns that enabled people attending the events to text information to screens and vote on outcome of events themselves, which saw really good engagement.

"There are two mobile use cases: people looking to complete a specific task such as check a score, and people looking to kill time -- entertainment," he said. "We try to satisfy both." Smartphones drive 70 percent of our mobile Web traffic, with BlackBerry alone representing 40 percent, so it makes sense to bring this all-encompassing experience to BlackBerry devices," Mr. Okaro said. "It features contextual integration of sports data with video and alerts that bring you into the app so you can then consume the latest content.

"We want to use all different channels -- TV, print, online and radio -- and mobile is the glue that sticks everything together and drives engagement," he said. From Mobile Marketer at http://bit.ly/E9fud

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