U Mobile rides on the World Cup bandwagon

The World Cup fever has begun and we can see loads of brands trying to leverage on the one of the biggest events this year. Our local telcos are in it in a big way too with Maxis leading the way becoming the official mobile broadcaster for the ultimate football event.

U Mobile – a telco that’s still looking to find a strong footing in the local market – has just started a promotion campaign around the World Cup theme. Like DiGi’s Bola! Bola! Bola! campaign there’s really not much value in it for the customers.

The U Mobile U Football Mania campaign is just offering some very generic subscription based content on football trivia and news along with SMS alerts on the latest scores and results from World Cup matches. There’s also some free mobile downloads if you’re interested. Although, we had a look at it and it doesn’t look interesting to us.

We don’t get why telcos see SMS alerts and the like as a feasible business proposition when more and more people are getting their updates for free from social media networks like Twitter.

Very simillar to DiGi, U Mobile is also running a contest that offers free travel to anywhere around the world. The difference here is that it’s not for football fixtures. Still, its something we don’t see adding much value to the subscriber. Apart from Maxis – who will be the first telco in the world to broadcast World Cup matches live to mobile phones – it’s funny how telcos are paying big money to associate themselves to the World Cup but at the end of the day really not giving anything of value to the consumer. We think that’s just a waste of money.

What we would like to see is, for example, a competition where we get to choose a country and if that country makes to the World Cup playoffs we’ll be rewarded with free talk time or a free phone or something – for example. That would be more interesting and fun, not to mention cheaper than paying for trips around the world.

Oh well, that’s just us.

In any case, if you’re interested to find out about the U Football Mania, click here.