Hi, is this Kevin Garnett’s cellphone?

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More people will respond to your ad if they’re not quite sure if it’s an ad. Especially if they think they’re responding to a personal message from NBA superstar Kevin Garnett.

Marketer Gene Keenan, who has the dubious distinction of being a former chef for the Grateful Dead, told a sad story at an advertising conference today about a campaign his company, Isobar, ran for Adidas. The campaign, which ran during the NBA All Star Game in January, encouraged kids to sign up for a program that would make it sound like ‘KG’ (that’s Kevin Garnett, the Boston Celtics power forward, for you non-hoops heads) had left the outgoing message on their voice mails. Those who signed up also received a call with a recorded message from Garnett.

But tens of thousands of kids called the phone number that appeared on their caller IDs, trying to reach Garnett, Keenan said. They left messages about their lives, their basketball teams and how much they liked Adidas. Others just called with messages such as ‘Great game last night, KG.’ The only problem? When you leave someone a voice mail, you expect them to return your call, even if it is Kevin Garnett. Eventually, Adidas started getting angry messages from kids wondering why ‘KG’ wasn’t calling back.

They’ll tweak the plan for the next campaign, Keenan said.

There’s good reason that marketers...

... are starting to spend more energy (and money) to advertise on mobile phones. There are more than 3 billion handsets in the world. At Mobile Ad, a conference presented by mobile-ad agency Ad Infuse this morning at the Beverly Wilshire, the race was on to convince marketers to spend more.

About 16.2% of subscribers in the US receive ads via text-messaging (aka SMS), and 12.4% of those people respond to them, according to Dag Olav Norem, director of product management at research firm M:Metrics. Those numbers made the marketers in the audience salivate even more than they did when they learned George Clooney was supposedly hanging out next door.

I bet Clooney can get KG to return his calls.

-- Alana Semuels