Urban car shop West Coast Customs, former star of MTV's "Pimp My 
Ride" reality series, pre-pay mobile phone network Boost Mobile and 
mobile marketing platform AirG recently partnered for a mobile 
marketing campaign that drove more than 1.5 million entries from 
mobile phones.
The "Get Hookt Up With a New Ride" campaign, which ran from Oct. 15, 
2006 through Jan. 15, 2007, targeted urban youths. It asked them to 
use their pay-per-use cell phones to enter a contest to win a new, 
fully customized Dodge Charger.
"It was a multichannel-type approach that was pushed through the 
mobile phone, national radio campaigns, Web sites and MySpace," said 
Frederick Ghahramani, director at AirG, Vancouver, Canada. "A brand 
as strong as West Coast Customs actually got a lot of interactivity 
from customers on their mobile phones."
The campaign was promoted through multiple online and offline 
channels including the mobile phone through Boost Hookt, a mobile 
community at http://www.boostmobile.com/,  retail mail-in, a radio campaign, 
an online sign-up promoted through MySpace viral referrals, and 
online sign-ups through the West Coast Customs and Boost Mobile Web 
sites.
Interested parties who own Boost Mobile phones could text in to sign 
up for the promotion. More than 98 percent of the 1.5 million entries 
were received through mobile phones via the Boost Hookt mobile 
community.
"The key to a mobile contest is to have the least amount of clicks, 
so that users can sign up easily," said Craig Thole, director of 
Value-Added Services at Boost Mobile, Irvine, CA.
The winner of the contest was James Fauntleroy of Burlington, New 
Jersey, one of 10 children. He works at a gas station and has never 
owned a car before.  He was flown to Los Angeles to meet the staff of 
West Coast Customs and presented with his car.
AirG recently conducted a series of surveys in its  community. It found that 65.6 percent of users surveyed said texting was their favorite cell phone activity. Seventy-five percent prefer chatting on the phone to watching television and 59 percent do not own a personal computer.
"The key trend that we are seeing in the mobile space is that when it 
comes to a marketing message with a strong call to action and 
interactivity, mobile phones let consumers react instantaneously no 
matter where they are by using their mobile phone as a remote 
control," Mr. Ghahramani said.