Clever Stuff

You don’t always thing of mobile operators as the most innovative beasts, or at least I don’t. They’re more supertanker than speedboat, more juggernaut than sports car. But fortunately, they don’t always have to be, because there are some smart companies out there doing a very good job of making them look very clever indeed.
Yesterday at the Mobile Marketing Forum, I heard a presentation from Buongiorno and Vodafone Egypt about a mobile advertising programme Buongiorno is running for Vodafone in Egypt. 96% of the country’s mobile phone users are pay-as-you-go, and among the poorer sections of the population, it’s common for users to run out of credit and go several days without topping it up, which of course means they can't make any calls or send any texts. The solution? The credit-less user can send a free, ad-funded SMS from their mobile to the mobile of the friend they want to get hold of, asking them to call them. They can get hold of their friend, the friend gets the ad, the advertiser gets the eyeballs. Neat.
Just now, I’m fresh out of a demo of Comverse’s mobile advertising platform. Comverse sells the platform into operators. Companies who want to run a mobile campaign then access the platform over the web and build the campaign, selecting the customer segments they want to target by age, gender, handset type, types of mobile sites visited, location, and various other parameters.
Next, they select the tools they want to use to target the customers, from a palette that includes mobile web browsing, messaging and voice. Each of these breaks down into numerous sub-categories. Voice, for instance, includes ringback tones, multimedia ringback tones, voicemail and visual voicemail. Web browsing encompasses banner ads and, a really neat one this, interstitials, which appear in between sites when the user is surfing from one off-portal site to another, generating revenue for the operator from off-portal activity. When the campaign has been built, the advertiser can fix a budget and see how many impressions it will deliver, based on historical browsing data from the operator.
Comverse Director of Product Marketing for the Mobile Internet Solutions Division, Meidad Sharon, explained to me that while the company’s main focus is on the operator community, the company is starting to try to position itself to the ad agencies. And so it should. Because if the Comverse platform doesn’t quite make running a mobile campaign child’s play, it certainly simplifies the process enormously, which is exactly what’s needed to kick-start the mobile marketing business.
Talking to some of the delegates after yesterday’s Mobile Marketing Forum, the one thing we agreed on was that the operators are definitely starting to get mobile advertising and marketing, as evidenced by the ad-funded music and video download services from 3 UK and others. And with the operator taking around a 60-70% revenue share from the Comverse ad solution, so they should. Advertising, in one form or another, is going to play a big part in the future of mobile, as the operators are slowly starting to realise. And as the Comverse solution shows, there’s more to it than banners.

David Murphy
Editor