Selling Your Product (Or Cause) With Video Ringtones

Pepsi is running an interesting promotion – if the code under your bottle cap is a winner, you can download a video ringtone to your cell phone. But what’s really neat about the promotion is that major music stars – Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige, and the All American Rejects (ok, I don’t know this one) – all signed up to not only have their videos used in the promotion but to actually create entirely new music videos just to be used as video ringtones. You can see them all on YouTube. But can original mobile content like this make money?

There’s no doubt that ringtones have become a major industry, and one that musicians dominate. Last year the Recording Industry of America sold $421.6 million worth of mobile content. Ringtones have their own Billboard chart, and doing well on it can lead to commercial successful for musicians. Just last week rapper Rick Ross’ single went platinum before he even released his album.

But can other industries cash in on ringtones? Some activists have used ringtones extraordinarily well to get out their message. The best example and by far the most famous political ringtone yet is the Hello Garci ringtone from the Philippines available at TXTPower, which protests President Gloria Arroyo’s rigging of the most recent election. It’s two years later and people all over the country still use the ringtone.

But on a large scale, activist ringtones really haven’t made it big yet. Video ringtones could help change that, if video makes the ringtone more desirable and therefore more valuable. This is exactly what Pepsi is testing out and I think some campaigns could use a similar business model. For example the One Campaign could give everyone who signs up for a newsletter or takes an action for the cause a never before seen U2 video in ringtone format. Or PETA could give out a video ringtone of Pamela Anderson talking about animal rights – that’s one that I bet a lot of people would consider the video a “value added.” And I bet a lot of people would love (and even take action) to get their hands on a video ringtone of Vice President Dick Cheney adamantly saying that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, or any one of George W. Bush’s infamous missteps.

Of course there are some pretty big problems to overcome with video ringtones. Many phones still don’t support them, and many of the owners of the ones that do don’t know how to use them. Creating mobile video content can also be expensive. But these problems are increasingly becoming more manageable. If a campaign can come up with a video ringtone that provides content that is really in demand and can do it affordably, it could get some great publicity for their cause.