How cool is that? If you look at the new Sprite plastic bottles, you’ll see they’ve printed their SMS short code 777483 right on the bottle. What great exposure for a major national brand to put their SMS short code so front and center on their product.
Even more cool is that it’s interactive, as you have to pop the Sprite cap to find the “cap code”, which you then are supposed to text to the short code 777483.
I wasn’t sure which “cap code” to text, so I tried both. Hey, maybe I got two chances to win! You can see the two responses I received below.
WTF! What did I do wrong? This was a huge disappointment not only for me as a Sprite drinker, but also as a mobile marketer… Such a big stage to show other brands the power of SMS and it didn’t even work!
This is even more disappointing because only just a few days ago did Tom Daly from Coke (they own Sprite) say that “SMS for Coke is job #1. It’s by far the world’s most ubiquities technology, it is a passion for our core consumers who are teens, it creates a unique opportunity to create relevant messaging, exclusive content to consumers, through a technology that they already embrace.” You can watch the full video interview with Tom Daly here.
Tom, if you’re reading this, what’s the deal?
To be completely fair, I haven’t slept in weeks, as we’ve been preparing nonstop for the launch of our new enterprise SMS software platform, so maybe there’s something I’m doing wrong, but for the life of me… I can’t figure it out. If you can see why this isn’t working for me, let me know in the comments below. Thanks!
————————————————
Update: I finally figured it out, there weren’t two codes on the cap, it was just one really long code as you can see below.
This kind of shit drives me absolutely nuts, and was one of the main reasons why I decided to throw our hat into the enterprise SMS marketing space with the launch of TatangoPlus. Plain and simple, most enterprise SMS providers are lazy as hell, not going that extra mile for their clients to ensure a perfect campaign. How fucking hard would it have been for this SMS provider to provide some simple logic that if a consumer texted in a 7 digit code (which I did), the response would say something like “Whoops… that looks like only the first part of the code, please respond with the full 14 character code.”
This is exactly why we launched TatangoPlus. The enterprise SMS providers that are currently out there have lost the hustle, they’ve become fat and lazy, and don’t give a shit anymore about their customers, even customers the size of Coke. If they did give a shit, there wouldn’t be entire websites devoted to SMS marketing fails, and little stuff like this wouldn’t happen.
Tom, I’ve been the CEO of an SMS marketing company for 5+ years, and if I can’t figure out why an SMS campaign isn’t working, how many consumers do you think have experienced the same thing? Maybe it’s time for a new SMS provider…
