Tag: mobile advertising Page 5 of 6

Blyk scraps it! No, it doesn't!

On 17/05/2009

Blyk, the ad-funded MVNO for 16-24 year-olds has been in the news lately a lot. The trigger was a piece by NMA according to which Blyk had announced it would scrap its consumer offering and concentrate on selling its technology/concept/both to other operators. This was quickly refuted by Blyk. The “final” position appears to being a little unclear.

Now, quite a while ago, I issued concerns about the viability of their business model as a stand-alone ad-funded MVNO (see here), and I stand by it (even if they have varied their model a little recently: from 217 free messages and 43 minutes of free calls per month to a £15 discount voucher). If they now claim that this was “only” a proof of concept, I must say that this smacks more than a bit of hopeful PR although this may just be semantics:

The pitfalls of an MVNO-only model aside, their approach is rather intriguing: if you can segment the market as they do and thus create consumer (or people) clusters that are much more homogenous than most media will be able to assemble (18-49-year-olds anyone?), you have a fairly powerful opportunity to interact with your people more directly, more intensely and – most importantly – more relevant messages than you otherwise could. And this has value, and lots of it!

Combine this now with the headaches of your ordinary operator, of which the biggest one probably (still) is churn. I am lacking current accurate numbers but, historically, an operator’s churn rate (the percentage of users it would lose in 12 months) was up to 1/3. And this is painful, very painful! So get a tool that allows to reduce that churn significantly and you’re off to the races. Combine this with a (functioning because highly targeted) advertising model and you can even increase your margins on this model. Sounds good? Certainly does to me!

And so it is not a big surprise that other operators are said to have shown a lot of interest in the model. Vodafone, for one, have had their own advertising-related announcement in the last week, and the use of Blyk’s model and expertise could be quite compelling to them (as some voices already suggest). From Blyk’s point of view, such a model is also easier and more quickly scalable than a stand-alone expansion and it should therefore greatly aid Blyk to build the critical mass it needs to stay (or become) relevant to advertisers.

It might still fly, you know…

Image credit: http://asetcenter.net/images/article/mobile_adv.jpg

Mobile Advertising works!

By Volker

On 29/04/2008

We seem to be having another successful showcase of mobile advertising: this time, mobile ad firm Greystripe and research firm Dynamic Logic have produced a report that confirms that mobile ads are uber-effective: they report about a case study for a mobile advertising campaign for The Golden Compass (which was broadcast during load times for certain mobile games). The campaign brought about a 19.3% increase in awareness of the film’s title a 9.5% increase in interest in seeing the film among all respondents. The ad apparently also outperformed a typical online advertising campaign by 52% in terms of brand awareness.

The case study also states that results showed that WAP sites were effective in influencing
a highly-engaged audience, particularly when advertising new movies:

Among overall respondents, 35% say they use their mobile phones for “finding theater and movie times,” and 29% “watch movie trailers.”
Frequent movie-goers — those who have seen at least two movies in the theatre in the past two months — use the mobile Internet more often than non-frequent moviegoers (79% for frequent movie-goers vs. 58% for non-movie goers).

It would have been interesting to know if the game was actually the mobile game for the Golden Compass (published by Glu, which was surprisingly absent from any mention) or if it was just more or less random games selected. There was also only little to read about the details of the survey, etc, etc. As Greystripe has somewhat of a vested interest in this, one might be querying…

The naked numbers from above are in themselves impressive. However, I am calling for more information here as this is per se not substantial enough to merit a whole big new world… I am inquiring for more details… Fingers crossed.

Blyk now at 100k subs

By Volker

On 24/04/2008

Now, I will not claim that they ramped up their efforts as a result of my comments a few days ago, but Blyk announced today that they breezed past the 100,000 subscriber mark. So, well done them!

It does not however alleviate my concerns about the general business model, I have to say. They are not revealing ARPU or anything like that. The overall constraints of the ad-funded approach do, I think, remain. I stand to be corrected but would need to see a more robust business parameters to be convinced…

PS: Thanks to BitRabbit for the heads-up!

Nokia pockets Enpocket

By Volker

On 17/09/2007

In Deals

Nokia has agreed to buy ad-platform provider Enpocket for an undisclosed sum. The deal is expected to close later this year. This, coupled with Nokia’s recent announcements concerning Ovi, shows the Finnish giant’s push into other parts of the mobile content value chain.

Nokia’s CTO Tero Ojanperä highlighted just that: “Nokia has already announced its intention to be a leading company in consumer Internet services and we believe that mobile advertising will be an important element in monetizing those services for our customers and partners. […] This acquisition is a […] move to bring the reach and depth of Nokia to organize the market across the world, and make it easier for an ecosystem to develop.”

Nothing much to add, I guess. It’ll be interesting if they will manage to leverage Nokia’s might to extend the reach of Enpocket or if the latter will simply be absorbed by the sheer size of the former…

Mobile Coupons gaining traction?

By Volker

On 11/09/2007

Mobile coupons have long been a story lots of people have tried to get their heads around (the oldest blog entry I found dates back to 2003). There is a large number of players working on and with this and there have been the occasional successes: Austrian firm 3United (acquired by VeriSign) sold mobile tickets for a Britney Spears concert in Vienna as early as 2005 and 10% of all tickets sold were sold via mobile (they upsold additional content to 85% of those users!; see here). Scottish company Mobiqa is rolling out a mobile ticketing solution for MLB through tickets.com (see their showcases here). There are countless more applications in the area (apologies for not mentioning everyone…)

Cellfire now reports “about” a million people who have signed up for their service in the US. The WSJ ran an article about this (read it here; note: this might go to behind their subscription wall soon…). Redemption rates are reported to be good: they say they’ve been seeing them at 15%, which is a whopping 3x that recorded for old-fashioned paper vouchers.

Besides the usual critical mass and all I suppose it comes down to mainly two points then: more information about the line one must not cross in respect of bombarding consumers with advertising and retail brands picking up on the mobile screen as an advertising and indeed customer retention tool in earnest (so far, most of what we are seeing are trials or fashion-driven PR affairs). Given that there are more mobile phones in the world than toothbrushes, this should be a no-brainer! And with customization and segmentation of the customer base increasing by user, a very targeted approach should be possible. This is something Cellfire clearly realizes: they do not share phone numbers… Well done, them.

Cellcom's ad-funded game trial: the Results

By Volker

On 18/07/2007

In Games

It is probably because they read here my criticism of their somewhat cryptic information policy back in April (well they probably didn’t) but – one way or another – Cellcom, the Israeli carrier that entered into a comprehensive ad-funded mobile game trial has provided insight in the results. Kudos!

So what do we learn? Here’s some of the highlights:
* 44% click-through rate
* 19% acquisition rate
* 10x higher game downloads per user (compared to downloads prior to the trial)
* 24% of the participants had not downloaded a game in the preceding 6 months, and 54% had not done so in the preceding 3 months.
* Take-up appears to have been particularly high amongst the youngest (9-20 years). No surprise here. The sentence reporting that is a bit mumbled, so not sure if they want to tell us that 65% of the users in this segment downloaded at least one game during the trial…

A little aside I noticed was that they call advertisers – somewhat carefully – sponsors: does that mean they didn’t get any return for their money? Anyway, they advertisers/sponsors included quite a few of the biggies, e.g. Nokia, McDonalds, Diadora, Samsung, Adidas and Walt Disney. All the agency powerhouses tinkered with it, too, with McCann, Saatchi & Saatchi and BBDO all involved.

I have praised above Cellcom’s information policy but two crucial data points are (somewhat unsurprisingly) left out, namely CPM and pay-out to the game publishers. For a 1-month trial, everyone will be in for the ride, and be only to show that they are in the midst of the flavour of the month, mobile advertising. However, only if advertisers are that (and not sponsors), i.e. if CPM will be at levels comparable to other media (or better), will it work. The above click-through numbers suggest that this might well be the case, and the added value of extreme targeting (the mobile screen is a user’s most personal one: it is not shared with others to the extent the TV or computer is) will improve that further.

The question will then remain if big mobile game publishers who regularly spend hundreds of thousands dollars on a game will provide for in-game ads in these games and if licensors for such games will allow advertising that will then factually be endorsed by their brands. Finally, operators must make sure that the consumer is not charged for the data transferred to feed the ads. This can make for an incredibly complex business model, and perhaps one that will not make it worthwhile for one or more of the parties in it to participate. Much easier of course if there is no third-party licensor involved. The result could then likely be a two-fold structure: high-powered branded premium games for a price and unbranded, ad-funded games for free.

Buongiorno buys Flytxt… and it goes on…

By Volker

On 15/05/2007

Consolidation of the mobile marketing sector seems to happen faster than people can blog: Italian mobile content distributor Buongiorno has acquired UK and US operations of Flytxt for c. $ 5.4m. With Buongiorno’s platform and D2C focus and Flytxt’s background (they provide a tool that allows marketing types to run their own campaigns), this is a somewhat different twist to the approach Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and others have been taking. A D2C player should really be better positioned to bridge the gap between advertiser and consumer as they are much closer to the latter.

Here’s what they say: “Mobiles allow marketers to reach individuals in new ways, which are not possible with other media and open up dramatic new opportunities for marketers to interact with consumers. Flytxt’s work with Orange on its ‘Orange Wednesdays’ campaign is testament to how powerful the use of mobile can be as a marketing and advertising tool”. By way of background: Orange Wednesdays are a BOGOF cinema service that has mobile ticketing components (i.e. you can sign up/participate via mobile), and if we get this right, the mobile component is based on Flytxt’s propositions…

No numbers on usage and/or take-up though, and that is a pity… Other than that, this combination could be intriguing. Bring it on, folks!