Brawling over Ringtones

(First posted at EchoDitto on May 11, 2006) 

I've been spending some significant time making ringtones for clients over the last two weeks. We've seen this ringtone wave coming for a while now given that 23% of American mobile phone owners (30 million Americans) downloaded a ring tone between August 2004 and 2005. Internationally, mobile phones will soon outpace computers as the dominant way to access the internet, so customizing a ringtone will soon be common.

Don't just take my word for it. Seth Godin, famous author and top blogger of strategic marketing, thinks ringtones are going to explode:

Take a look at virtually every giant online success (except for Amazon) and none of them were obvious in 1992. I think we're going to discover a whole new universe of cell phone services that people want to pay for, things that we won't be able to live without. Like... ringtones.

Since then, we've seen ringtones used for political and advocacy campaigns in Israel, and the U.S. Our friend Eric Gundersen at Development Seed made a ringtone of Pres. Bush's infamous "Heck of a job, Brownie" comment regarding the former FEMA administrator's performance during the hurrican Katrina disaster. What if 20 phones with that ringtone went off during a congressional hearing of the post-Katrina response?

Even recently in Iraq, a lawmaker's ring tone, sounding a Shiite religious chant, incited a scuffle and led to a shutdown of the legislature. There is enormous potential for the disruptive effects of ringtones to revolutionize advocacy campaiging.

For many people around the world, there are only three things they carry everywhere they go: wallet, keys, mobile phone. As mobile phones become true personal, mobile pocket computers, we'll see tremendous advances in mobile phones role in advocacy. Not only can you download ringtone from the internet, but friends and family can send them to each other via SMS and MMS.

What could a ringtone campaign look like in the real world?

• "Mobile Stand" - Rather than simply organizing a rally, march or sit-in, organizers can also plan for the supporters around the world, no matter their location, to have their mobile phones ring a prepared ring tone at a set time. The ringtone could be a symbolic song or statement from a pivotal leader calling for change.
• "Ring-raisers": Sell ringtones to fundraise for specific nonprofit campaigns. Create a ringtone for each campaign and restrict the revenue for each ringtone to the affiliated campaign. For example, revenue from a ringtone of recorded whale call would only help the current Stop the Whaling campaign.
• "Ring-Alerts": Download a ringtone that will ring only at a set time. For example, an exclusive message from a candidate to wake you up on election day. Or a message from a candidate to remind you to join volunteers to knock on doors and drop literature at homes in your district. How about a message from a celebrity to remind you to see a movie on opening day?

This sample of possibilities only touches the surface we can see. There are enormous opportunities for ringtones to become the best advocacy or direct marketing tactic nonprofits, political campaigns and businesses have ever seen.

Here is a scary thought for those of you who think you can pick up this wave next year or later: organizations might never be able to buy mobile phone numbers -- like you can buy email addresses or landline phone numbers. (Big ups to John Aravosis at AMERICAblog for drawing attention to how easy it is to buy cell phone records.) Hence, the sooner you start to collect mobile phone numbers, the better. Otherwise, you are just playing catch up.