Coupon Capers

I had a little bit of trouble getting my head round the GripOffs story (scroll down) that we ran yesterday. It seemed to be a mobile couponing thing for US consumers. Or that’s what I assumed at least. You go to the GripOffs mobile site, (which incidentally has the same URL as the website – dotMobi would not be too pleased), see what offers are available, and then, so I thought, choose the coupons you want to have sent to your phone.
This was how we initially wrote the story up. But in fact, it’s a little more clever than that. First, it’s a global thing. Advertisers can select the regions they want any coupons to be displayed in, enabling them to target a sales promotion campaign at a specific territory.
Secondly, as a paperless system, it’s very eco-friendly, which GripOffs Founder Jim Dugan tells us is proving very popular with potential advertisers.
Thirdly, and this is where it is a little bit different, we were wrong when we wrote initially that you select the coupons you want to have sent to your phone. Having checked out what offers are available before you head for the shops, what you do, in fact, is go back to the mobile site once you get to the shop or restaurant making the offer, select the appropriate mobile coupon, and hand your phone to the cashier. So there’s no need to send the coupon to the handset, and no need for the phone to have anything other than mobile web-browsing capabilities.
Presumably there still needs to be some sort of POS infrastructure at the retail end in order to redeem the offer and enable the advertiser running the promotion to measure its success, but even so, as mobile couponing schemes go, this one looks to have potential
Potential is for the moment, however, the key word in all this. Because if you visit the GripOffs mobile site, you’ll see that whatever category you click on, the number of offers is zero. The company behind the scheme, PipPops, has so far not signed up any advertisers, but says it is getting a lot of interest, and expects to sign up the first advertisers within the next few weeks. A cynic would say they’re bound to say that, of course, and I suspect it will find this is a slow burn rather than an overnight success, but I for one will be checking back over the next few weeks and months to see what interest, if any, the scheme is attracting.

David Murphy
Editor