Don't Stop at WAP

David Murphy meets Meidad Sharon, Director, Product Marketing and Business Development, Content Solutions at Comverse, a company with some interesting ideas on how network operators can make money from mobile advertising

 DM: So Meidad, I believe Comverse has a pretty unusual approach to mobile advertising, can you tell us about it?

MS: When youre talking about mobile media, the operator has two assets. The first is the ability to touch the user through multiple touchpoints. When people think about mobile advertising, they think of the mobile web, banners, search etc but operator has much more inventory than that to sell.

DM: Such as?

MS: Theres a host of things. Off-portal inventory. Messaging channels A2P (Application-to-person) and P2P Person-to-Person). And voice channels, so a bit like a ringback tone, but instead of hearing a ringback tone selected by the person receiving the call, the caller hears an ad because they have opted in to the programme.

DM: And whats the second asset?

MS: Its the fact that mobile media is the only 1-on-1 media, compared to TV or billboards or print advertising. Even the web, because on the web, I might think I know who the user is from the IP address, but that could be me in the morning, my wife in the afternoon and one of the kids in the evening. Also, the operator has a lot of detail on the users, historical data about where they have surfed in the past; what they are doing now. Are they on a news site or a sports site? And also socio-demographic data like age, gender etc. So they can run targeted campaigns.

DM: Can you give us some examples?

MS: Sure. For a P2P message, I might send an SMS to a friend to invite him to meet for a coffee and get a text ad at the bottom of the message for Starbucks. Or I might send an MMS photo to my wife with an ad for Nike on it. Then theres voice calling. The customer can opt in to an ad program so that when he makes an outgoing call, while hes waiting for the call to be answered, he hears a targeted ad.

DM: These are all interesting ideas, have you deployed any of them yet?

MS: We have operators using the ad-funded SMS solution. The voice call/ringback tone idea, we have a lot of interest,  mainly from Eastern Europe and APAC, and we are making good progress on various fronts with the sales process there.

DM: So if you take something like the voice calling idea, how much would the customer be paid or how would he be rewarded for listening to the ads. I imagine most people would find it fairly annoying but if they have opted in to it, thats their choice, but I wonder what the operator would have to give them to make it worth their while. 

MS: The market is developing so I cannot give you a precise figure. There is one operator in Europe where the users opt into the ad plan and receive a one-time bonus payment of $10 (5), and in return, they get ads in various different channels, including ringback tone and other channels. But the business model will vary form operator to operator. 

DM: Are there any more ideas?

MS: Yes. Another one we think might be of interest to operators is avatars, where someone sends an SMS to a friend to invite them to go skating maybe and they get an animated avatar skating as part of the message.
Another one very interesting is the ability for the operator to use the off-portal space for advertising. Putting banners on their portals is simple, but we offer them the ability to show an interstitial ad when a user is surfing in off-portal. So say someone clicks form Googles mobile site to Yahoos, while they are waiting for the Yahoo! page to appear, we would serve them an ad.

DM: So this is between pages, as opposed to an ad network lik eAdMob serving banners on individual sites?

MS: Correct. AdMob has agreements with specific WAP sites, which is fine, but the operator is not part of the value chain here. So when a Vodafone user goes to Vodafone live! But then moves off-portal, they might see ads served by AdMob, but Vodafone get nothing from this. But since Vodafone has invested in the network, they would like to leverage this off-portal traffic, which is already big and growing rapidly. This is a way for operators to remain in the value chain and get a new revenue stream from off-portal traffic. Operators are moving to the flat-rate model, and there is really not much difference between flat-rate and being some kind of dumb pipe. This gives the operators a way to stay in the value chain and be more like a smart pipe.

DM: I would imagine operators have been biting your hands off for this. Whats the reaction been like?

MS: We have had a great response to this idea and we are in an advanced part of the sales process for it.

DM: Anything else?

MS: Well the other point worth making, where we feel we have a big advantage over the competition, is that if you look at all the ad proxies, the messaging gateway, video gateway, ringback tones, this is all the in-network part. Now because we are a market leader in Value Added Services (VAS) like voicemail, SMS, ringback tones etc., we have a lot of knowledge in this space, so we know how to build ad proxies to put ads in those channels. To be able to put ads in P2P messages, off-portal, ringback tones, and to do all those channels together, is a unique ability and because of our VAS leadership, we are in a great position to supply this solution to operators.
Then the other part of it is the central platform, made up of the ad server where we create and manage campaigns and create reports, and then the targeting engine connected to all the spaces in the operator in order to get the relevant data to target ads in the most relevant manner. The ability to do this is vital. You hear mobile ad operators sometimes talking about their solution and when you see the demo, the parameters they can target on add up to the handset type and time of day, because this is all the information they get. You need to integrate with the operators to get more data. By doing this, our targeting engine identifies the sub-segments of a segment that will respond best to a campaign. That enables us to increase the clickthrough rate from the mobile industry average of 3-5% to up to 15% by optimising the campaign results in real-time. 
The final point is that we are white-label, but we are an established firm, with over 4,500 employees, over 500 service provider customers, and 1 billion end-user subscribers in 130 countries. So you have companies like Google and Yahoo! who are big and credible, but a threat to the operators, are smaller ones who are not a threat, but who are not established or credible. Were white-label, but were credible too, not a small start-up.