Sugar Mama Update

About a year ago, Virgin Mobile USA announced plans for a program called Sugar Mama that lets customers talk for free, as long as they agree to watch commercials and answer questions about what they've seen.

Well, today Virgin issued a release on how the service has performed. About 1,000 subscribers have signed up for the program each day since it launched about a year ago. That makes for roughly 330,000 of its 4.8 million subscribers, who are willing to exchange 45 seconds of advertising on their handset or on their PCs for an extra minute of talk time. Virgin has doled out 9 million minutes of mobile talk time since Sugar Mama launched.

Most importantly, the Sugar Mama users aren't ignoring the advertising either: they clicked on offers in the ads they viewed more than 5%of the time, which is 5 times higher than the average online click rate.

Advertisers in the service include Pepsi, Xbox, Jive Records, Levi Strauss, New Balance, Nintendo, Showtime Networks, Sony Pictures, Subway and the U.S. Navy.

"When we launched Sugar Mama, we knew we were adding something pretty unique to the way companies use mobile advertising to interact with consumers," said Howard Handler, chief marketing officer, Virgin Mobile USA. " With an average click-through rate of 5.5%, Sugar Mama offers our partners a way to directly engage our customer base. Certain outstanding Sugar Mama campaigns have achieved click-through rates which are significantly higher than our average. The most successful campaigns managed click-through rates of up to 21.1%. And our customers continue to tell us how much they appreciate the opportunity to see cool new ads and earn minutes."

"SUBWAY restaurants are all about freshness, and that includes the way we look at marketing to our customers," said Tony Pace, chief marketing officer of the Subway Franchisee Advertising Fund Trust. "We like the innovation behind Sugar Mama and it is a natural for reaching the digitally savvy consumer."

It sounds to me like the Sugar Mama program is a win-win for everybody. I'm surprised none of the other carriers in the US have rolled out similar programs.

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[Source: Mobile Phone Blog]