H&M tapped mobile marketing company Phonevalley and ZenithOptimedia to promote the collection on mobile. The mobile campaign targeted women 25-34 years old.

“Beyond the qualification of the target on mobile, mobile is highly efficient to generate sales for retailers: women browse on the mobile Internet on popular fashion sites, click on H&M’s banners in a ‘time killing’ situation, plunge in H&M’s mobile collection and discover the exact model they were desperately looking for,” said Alexandre Mars, CEO of Phonevalley and head of mobile at Publicis Groupe, New York. 

“But mobile also provides on the go features unknown to other media,” he said. “Geo-localization enables [retailers] to offer very personalized marketing tactics: when a women matching the brand’s target wandered near an H&M store, she received a text message offering her a discount coupon for the new collection to redeem in the store.”

A whopping 3.9 million women 25-34 have a mobile phone in France, and more than 20 percent regularly browse the mobile Internet, according to M:Metrics. Therefore, mobile seemed the obvious choice for this campaign.

The H&M mobile campaign consisted of banner ads on high visibility mobile sites and applications in line with its target.

Interstitial ads ran on Grazia, Elle, Elle à Table, Elle Astro, Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger, SFR TV, Yahoo, as well as on the Aufeminin.com iPhone application.

Additionally, the campaign included editorial integration in the Fashion section of Grazia’s mobile site.

From March 23- April 11, H&M sent SMS and MMS to women living in Paris and its suburbs.

The messages offered discount coupons for The Garden Collection articles.

This was not H&M’s first foray into mobile.

H&M launched a mobile marketing campaign on its home turf to promote its latest collection in January.

The campaign included SMS coupons, mobile banner ads placed on major carrier portals and media sites including Tele2, Telenor and TV4, and a mobile site with click-through slideshows and animated GIF images of the retailer’s latest garments.

For that campaign, H&M tapped mobile marketing agency Mobiento and its sister company Adiento, an ad network, which use mobile ad network MADS’ technology platform (see story).

“I am delighted that a major international brand like H&M has grasped mobile’s tremendous potential for its collection launch,” Mr. Mars said. “Mobile is perfectly suitable to generate
traffic for inspired and refreshing collections like H&M’s The Garden Collection.”