We've released the advertising index for the 2nd Quarter.
Indonesia remains in first position with 3.78 billion impressions. India continued its growth trend, exceeding one billion banners, securing its position at number two in the rankings. The United Kingdom rose four places on the last quarter to 5th, reflecting increased advertiser interest in off portal advertising. Saudi Arabia also saw significant growth on the last quarter (63%), jumping ten spots to number nine.
This latest report also shows growth in Europe, with three countries appearing in the Top 20 for the first time. These include the United Kingdom (17%), France (26%) and Italy (23%).
The following table shows the top 10 countries by the number of paid advertising banners delivered in each (compared to Q1 2009 results) :-
1. Indonesia: 3.78 billion (-14%)
2. India: 1.07 billion (+28%)
3. United States: 487 million (-8%)
4. South Africa: 461 million (+8%)
5. United Kingdom: 133 million (+17%)
6. The Philippines: 124 million (-1%)
7. Egypt: 108 million (-34%)
8. China: 95 million (-27%)
9. Saudi Arabia: 92 million (+63%)
10. Kenya: 92 million (+15%)
Click here to view the full report
In the last week, our ad serving capabilities has also been extended to include carrier targeting capabilities in the Philippines and Saudi Arabia. This increases targetting capabilities to 28 major markets globally.
July 16, 2009
MOBILE ADVERTISING INDEX (Q2-09)
July 09, 2009
The BuzzCity Roadshow 2009 : Cape Town
The BuzzCity Roadshow heads for Cape Town this August, where we'll share the latest in mobile internet advertising case studies and host a panel discussion with industry-leading creative agencies and digital specialists.
Date: 14 August 2009 (Friday)
Time: 1.00pm to 5.00pm
Venue: The One & Only Hotel Ballroom, V&A Waterfront, Cape Town
This is a great opportunity to hear straight talk from some of the most passionate, insightful and experienced marketing professionals around. We welcome your participation and we'd like to hear what you expect from Mobile Internet Advertising.
For more information and to book seats, please email partners[at]buzzcity.com.
June 29, 2009
MOBILE APPLICATIONS THAT WORK FOR YOU
By Clifford Chew, Vice President (Engineering)
Developers of mobile applications face two big problems:
1. Unless you move to a planet with a much slower rotation than our own, there's simply not enough time in the day to develop an application that works on all mobile platforms.
2. Setting up an ice-cream stall outside my daughter's school is likely to be more profitable than selling applications in a mobile app store.
In this week's blog entry, I'd like to take a closer look at these two issues and share with you BuzzCity's approach to tackling them. Let's start with platforms . . . .
MOBILE PLATFORMS
Apple, Blackberry, Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Palm . . . since the days of mobile gaming, mobile developers have struggled with different OS versions, screen dimensions and feature sets. Developers who wish to achieve cross-platform presence have to contend with severe device fragmentation and variations even within the same operating system. Symbian, for example, is found on over 200 handset models, but the feature set and display characteristics are different on just about everyone.
Apple has introduced some sanity -- at least for the developers of the 50,000 plus applications sold in the Apple App Store – by tightly controlling and unifying its hardware and software. Apple has overtaken Microsoft as the No. 3 smartphone OS vendor, according to a Q1 '09 Gartner report. But Symbian and Blackberry OS still have a combined market share of 69.2% versus Apple's 10.8%.
Focus only on iPhones and you're ignoring 90% of the market.
Yet the preferred business model of many developers appears to be selling their applications in mobile app stores – and Apple's App Store, in particular.
CAN I MAKE MONEY DOING THIS?
This is the question that mobile app developers should be asking themselves. Some coders hit it big, rising to the top of the Mobile App sales charts. But these stories, while widely repeated, are unfortunately few and far between.
Developer Rick Strom recently documented his experience selling applications for iPhones. He's placed some twenty applications in the Apple App Store and two are on the best-selling list: “Zen Jar” (ranked #34 and selling at 99 US cents) and “Spirit Board”(#95, also at 99 cents). Both applications also have free versions that are ranked in the top 100.
“With two apps on the paid charts, one would assume I’m rolling in dough,” writes Strom. “The reality is much more startling.”
The paid versions are downloaded 2.5% as frequently as the free ones. Strom explains that he sells about 30-35 units of the social networking application “Zen Jar” every day. At 99 US cents per sale, he nets about US$20 per day after Apple takes its cut. “Spirit Board” is making just US$4 per day with less than ten daily downloads.
As Strom rightly points out, if he's making less than US$25 per day with two paid applications ranked in the top 100, how much revenue do you think the other 50,000 applications are generating?
Some developers meanwhile attempt to milk a single application by making small feature changes and then re-releasing it as a new version or even a “new” application. But they still can't be making much. So given the dismal revenue figures and the challenge of programming for multiple mobile platforms, you can start to sense the degree of developer frustration.
PROGRAMMING FOR THE MOBILE INTERNET
Some developers overcome the diversification problem by developing features that work in a mobile browser without requiring an application download. Of course, now, you need to decide whether to target a WAP, XHTML or full HTML browser.
The majority of our users are using built-in mobile internet browsers on Symbian handsets. About 40% are on the Nokia Series 40 platform; over 30% use the Series 60 platform. A growing number of myGamma users are also upgrading to handsets that support at least XHTML, which offers a better browsing experience. Two of my favorite mobile browsers are the Opera Mini and Apple Safari, both of which are pushing the envelope on the mobile browsing experience.
Oh, and here's a tip: it looks like most web-based apps written for a Nokia-browser will also work nicely on an Apple iPhone (that’s why it is a called a web-browser.)
FROM CODING TO SALES
While not every developer will get rich quick, BuzzCity has a couple solutions to help coders targeting the mobile internet get a return on their hard work:
1. Use the BuzzCity Merchant platform. Create in-game purchases and use our international mobile Credit Card or SMS and WAP billing networks to collect payments in over 85 countries.
2. Leverage on the BuzzCity Publisher platform to monetise your pageviews by selling advertisements – either on the mobile app's homepage or inside the game itself. With 8.5 billion paid banners in the first quarter of 2009, we are the industry-leading global mobile ad network.
BUZZCITY'S APPROACH
With the recent launch of the myGamma Developer Platform, we've opened up the myGamma backend with a really easy-to-use write-once deploy-anywhere API that we hope will lead to the creation of even more entertainment options for our users. We certainly welcome developers to take it for a test drive.
Our technology makes light work of the previously-described mobile platform and browser issues by auto-configuring each application to work on every handset. We do this without requiring developers to write any additional code. Here's a picture of some of the mobile makes that myGamma users use every day (though far from an exhaustive list):
The only downside to our approach is that applications are only accessible to myGamma members. But that's no small thing -- myGamma currently has 3.5 million users in 86 countries and we average four million pageviews a day.
At the moment, all applications in myGamma are available free of charge. However developers can tier their applications to charge for premium features. For example, they can require gamers to pay Gamma Dollars to access higher levels of the game. They can also use the BuzzCity Merchant and Publisher platforms to sell virtual items and advertisements, as described above.
I think most mobile coders create new applications simply because they love doing it. But developers also need to make a living and I sincerely hope that the myGamma Developer Platform will make their lives easier and more profitable!
June 15, 2009
LOOK BEYOND THE NUMBERS
As a native South African – and someone who has spent the last 8 years working in marketing here – I've seen a dramatic transformation in how people communicate and access information. South Africa has one of the world's highest rates of mobile internet penetration and I believe that the lessons from my homeland can guide marketers worldwide.The cellphone has become ubiquitous in South Africa. From affluent urban shopping malls to poverty-stricken rural communities where they are often the sole means of communication, you'll find mobile phones in every nook and cranny of the country. A few statistics:
- South Africa has a population of 50 million people
- But of these 50 million, 10 million are under the age of nine.
- There are over 30 million active cellphone lines in the country. That's 75 percent of all South Africans, aged 10 or older.
- More than 10 million people – one-third of all active cellphone users – connect regularly to the mobile internet.
The first lesson to draw from this – I tell my clients – is that mobile advertising must not be seen as a simple extension of fixed-line PC internet campaigns. Mobile is not only a different medium – you're reaching a different audience.
The second lesson is that mobile marketing is not a mass-market tool. Don't be fooled by the numbers. There's a lot of inaccurate thinking about this in the advertising and marketing industries. I've spoken to advertisers, planners and strategists who believe mobile marketing is only useful if you want to reach a large, undifferentiated mass of people, for example to sell broad-based consumer products like Coca-Cola, toothpaste or washing powder.
Mobile does indeed have a staggering reach and SMS, for instance, allows you to send a message to any individual with a cellphone (assuming, of course, you have permission to communicate). But mobile marketing should not be thought of as a single, undifferentiated channel. Instead, the mobile internet enables brands to reach increasingly sophisticated, smaller and more focused segments. You can think of each segment as a medium in its own right – with its own set of users, its own demographics, and its own opportunities for carrying marketing messages. There are more channels than you might think. Just consider the following communities:
- music and video sharing
- mobile gaming
- social networks like myGamma
- mobile internet channels (sports, entertainment, news, etc.)
- and the staggering number of South Africans who use Java-based instant messaging applications likeMXit .
- simple brand exposure
- user engagement
- adding users to your database
- making a sale?
- Take mobile users from your ad directly to your mobi site. (Don't have a mobi site, no worries, use our landing page .)
- Track the results of your campaign quantitatively (clicks, impressions served) and qualitatively (who responds to your ads).
- Adjust your campaign in real time to optimise performance based on the latest campaign data.
Photo Credit: Bazil Raubach
June 04, 2009
PRIVACY AND THE MOBILE INTERNET
IMAGINE for a moment that you are travelling to a new place. You've just arrived and you know nothing about it. You subscribe to a mobile service that's like a travel guide. It provides information about historical facts, places to see, things to do, good restaurants, maps, safety tips and more – all tailored to meet your personal interests. Even better, take a photo of a nearby building, submit via your phone and the application knows exactly where you are, so it can target the information you desire even better.This is one of the not-so-far-off scenarios that we considered at a recent workshop in Spain sponsored by the European Union.
Think for a moment about the information you are providing this mobile travel guide company. First, there's your personal data and preferences. Many of us are already accustomed to sharing this information with service providers, such as the applications and games companies that inhabit Facebook and other social networking sites like myGamma. But in the example above, you're going a step farther. You're also sharing your exact location.
How can the mobile service provider use your data? Can they extrapolate information to send you targeted ads? Can they share the information with other companies or people? Should you even care that the information is no longer private?
The internet is loosely regulated; mobile carriers are tightly regulated. In many countries, you can't get a mobile number – not even a pre-paid card – without providing identification. So what happens at the intersection of mobile and the internet? Should applications be subject to public guidelines or laws?
Let's take a look at a couple more examples.
IMAGINE that you subscribe to a mobile health and fitness service. When you exercise you place your phone on your arm and it monitors your vital signs – heart beat, sugar level, etc. The device advises you how fast to run, based on your fitness goals and health signature. At the end of your workout, it offers nutritional advice (for example, “You just ran 10km. Time to drink 1 liter of water and eat an orange.”). During the workout, if the device detects a health problem – let's say that you unexpectedly faint from heat exhaustion – it automatically calls for an ambulance.
In this instance, you are sharing one of the most sensitive types of information – medical data – with the service provider. In many countries, medical information is absolutely confidential. Only you and your doctor know what's in your file and even your spouse can not access it without permission. But in this case, the mobile application provider might want to sell your information to manufacturers of health or sports goods, so that they can target their products to you. By subscribing to the service, you are giving the company permission to access your data. Should they be allowed to use it for resale or to target ads?
OR IMAGINE that you subscribe to a networking service, one which lets you know which of your friends or colleagues are nearby. Could be great in a crowded bar or possibly for meeting online friends in real life. But what if the service provider notices that you and another friend are always at the same location every Friday at 10pm. Are you members of a club? Or perhaps you're having an affair? And what about teenagers and children who may not realise what is and is not safe to share (or who to share with)?
Actually, young people, specifically those under 20, appear to care less about privacy than others.
"Online privacy? For young people, that's old-school," exclaims USA Today technology writer Janet Kornblum. Twenty percent of teenage internet users have exchanged naked pictures of themselves. The figure rises to 33% for young adults aged 20 - 26.
However as we get older, such transparency can come back to bite you. Just look at the examples of young adults who have been fired - or not hired – because of a personal online posting.
Back at the EU workshop in Spain, as we debated the privacy implications of these and other scenarios, a consensus emerged. Simply requiring mobile application users to accept a Terms & Conditions agreement before using a service doesn't cut it. Some regulation is needed to safeguard individual privacy. In fact, we believe a public body should be created to manage user data.
Take a look, for example, at how credit card information is managed online. When consumers make an online purchase, usually, they are not actually giving the merchant their credit card number. The information is provided to a bank - or service like PayPal - which verifies the card and then informs the merchant that the payment has been processed. The merchant does not actually see your credit card information.
Similarly, personal data needed to run online applications could be managed in this manner. Consumers would enter their particulars on a public portal. Service providers would then access the data required to run applications from this public databank, but they would neither store nor own the information. Nor would they know WHO it belongs to -- they would access the information via a user ID number, thus protecting a consumer's privacy.
Should this third-party information be a government (or inter-governmental) body or should it be a private company? In essence, who do you trust more – Google or the government? A lot of people today would answer the former. But like my colleagues at the Spanish EU forum, I believe my personal data will be most secure with a non-commercial body taking charge.
Post-script. A note about BuzzCity and privacy. BuzzCity does not share personal data with advertisers aside from global reports aggregating information about age, gender and geography.
May 27, 2009
CLICK-TO-SMS FROM THE LANDING PAGE
From time to time, here on the Gamma Life blog, we like to share ideas and tips about how to make the most of the BuzzCity ad network. In this entry, we'd like to tell you a bit more about Mobile Landing Pages.
When you create a campaign on our mobile network, you'll upload banners (graphic and/or text) and then set the hyperlink to go to a mobile site or a landing page that we provide.
Our customers are finding the landing page to be a useful tool in and of itself; some campaigns use it as a kind of microsite 
May 12, 2009
INDIA 2009
By Manish Mishra, Country Manager & Executive Producer (India)
Since January, there has been a definite shift – across the board -- in the way Indian companies advertise, a shift with positive implications for mobile and not-so-positive implications for traditional media. Branding campaigns are out. Sales Generation is in.
Overall, most industry watchers expect Indian ad spending to rise this year, albeit at a much slower pace than before. ZenithOptimedia and WPP global media specialist GroupM are both projecting about a six percent increase on the US$ 4.25 billion spent on Indian campaigns in 2008.
Yet all indications are that brands are shying away from traditional campaigns. Forget about publicising a product launch or wooing new customers. Advertisers are insisting on quantifiable – and almost immediate – returns.
Take, for example, a mobile campaign by SriLankan Airlines that ran in December '08 / January '09 and featured the following text banner: “You visit SriLanka. Kids go free!”. Click on the text and users were taken to a landing page to enter personal details so that a representative of the airline could contact them. SriLankan Airlines purchased 20,000 clicks. Initially, the ads attracted 700 – 800 clicks per day and then rose to 1000/day. The campaign experienced a click-through rate of 4.3 percent – more than double the typical Indian CTR. Why? Two reasons: One, the slogan is direct, catchy and offers a good deal. Two, the New Year period is a good time to target travellers.
From our client's perspective, I think the best thing about the “Kids go free” campaign must be the ROI. They spent US$950 on the three-week campaign. A ticket from Mumbai to Colombo costs about US$450 – 500. Sell just a few tickets and you've paid for the entire ad spend. We don't have details about the exact number of leads converted to sales, but the carrier is signing up for another campaign, so they must be happy.
By industry, the largest mobile advertisers are automotive companies and banks. Toyota and Renault have both run campaigns inviting consumers to come out for a test drive.
The only negative feedback I've heard about these ad runs is that the Cost per Lead ended up being a bit higher than expected. However I think there's a lesson here. CPL is also an offline function – it depends on the person who is closing the deal. What is the understanding of the person who first clicked the mobile ad? The sales agent needs to understand what's driving the consumer (no pun intended).
For major brands, traditional Media still constitutes the biggest part of the Indian advertising pie. However television and print stand to lose the most in the economic downturn. Internet and mobile ads should rise faster as companies focus on performance-driven ads. Mobile is also becoming a standard component of the advertising mix for many companies, not just something to experiment with.
May 11, 2009
FIVE MEDIA TRENDS
By Lai Kok Fung, BuzzCity CEO
Whether you work in the industry – or just enjoy good content – it's clear that the media landscape is undergoing a transformation. Newspapers are going out of business, music is sold piecemeal over the internet, and Twitter has become a household name. Mobile meanwhile continues to grow even while other sectors contract.
As BuzzCity celebrates its 10th anniversary, I find myself reflecting on these changes and I've noticed five industry trends that I would like to share with you today.
1. BANKERS ARE OUT, INNOVATION IS ALWAYS IN
For those of us who endured the internet crash, there is some sense of relief seeing bankers take the heat this time. While the credit crunch has hurt businesses across the board, there is a silver lining for companies with strong reserves. Over the past few years, credit was overly-abundant. VCs chasing high returns funded companies with poor business models, companies that offered services below-cost and sometimes for free. While consumers might like this in the short-term, these companies eventually go bust. It then takes awhile for consumers to get used to paying again. However, I believe this is the time for those of us that are still standing to innovate, to introduce new products, new services at prices that reflect reality. Then we can truly gauge the degree to which consumers embrace – or reject – what we have to offer.
2. MOBILE OVERTAKING PCs
More consumers access the internet from a mobile phone than from a computer in markets from India to South Africa.
3. THE LEAST DEVELOPED MOBILE MARKET MAKES THE MOST NOISE
Read the US media – or follow American bloggers, particularly those from Silicon Valley – and you could easily believe that the iPhone is the end-all and be-all of mobile.
But, please, take a look at reality. The US mobile industry is light years behind Japan and trailing the rest of us by several years. Smartphones (mainly Blackberries and iPhones) account for just five percent of worldwide shipments. Nearly one-third of all phones shipped are feature phones. Device Fragmentation is here to stay. No one company – as much as they may still dream about it -- will control mobile OS. And it won't be long before every mobile phone has a pre-installed internet browser.
You certainly wouldn't know this, though, by listening to the Americans. The I.T. world is saturated by US media and practically still worships Silicon Valley. With all the noise they make, it's easy to think that they know what they're talking about. But in this case, they don't.
By the way, Christine Gonzales has written two interesting pieces on Venture Beat recently. The first article is accompanied by an illustration of a Pied Piper (Steve Jobs?) followed by a throng of people (silicon valley developers?). The second provides Silicon Valley's rebuttal – a young child giving Nokia the finger because their platform is more difficult to work with. 
4. SOCIAL NETWORKING MAY NOT BE A STANDALONE BUSINESS
This might seem like an odd statement for the head of a mobile social network to make, but let's take a look at some recent headlines from our industry:
At BuzzCity, we view our social network myGamma as an integral part of the BuzzCity mobile advertising network. In addition to the obvious benefits of providing inventory for the ad network, myGamma allows us to consistently learn from our user base and gain insights from demographic data and anecdotal feedback. We've used these insights to launch new services, like click analytics and regional targeting, which differentiate BuzzCity from stand-alone ad networks.
5. WHO PAYS FOR CONTENT? WHO WATCHES ADS?
The pillars of media monetisation – premium content and paid advertising – are undergoing a seachange.
First, there's not a lot of content that people will pay for anymore. Even the porn industry is suffering – there are just too many free videos online now. The only content that consistently attracts paying subscribers appears to be sports. ESPN.com charges for access to live and on-demand web broadcasts. Cricket and football matchers are often broadcast for pay-per-view audiences.
Second, it's becoming tougher for brands to effectively reach consumers through traditional avenues. A media executive recently lamented to me that TV's golden age of advertising is over. TV content is created with commercials in mind: just when you are about to find out who garnered the most votes on Idol or who shot J.R., there's a commercial break. But television advertising is based on the premise of controlled delivery in a “safe” environment. With technological advances like online streaming, concurrent windows in a TV screen and an almost unlimited choice of channels, consumers have more control over their viewing and are less likely than before to passively watch ads.
How will the advertising industry react to this challenge? How do advertisers invent new formats that engage and entertain users? We are still searching for answers.
OUR RESPONSE
The growth of online advertising over the last ten years clearly demonstrates that ad spend follows consumer eyeballs. As consumers spend more and more time surfing the internet from cellphones, the mobile component of total ad spend will only increase. While it's hard to predict how fast this will happen (will it take 5 years or 10 for mobile to account for ten percent of total ad spend?), we believe this increase will be more than sufficient to support tremendous growth of a handful of major players in this space.
We have also always observed that a new “unwired” class of consumers is emerging. Companies that can help advertisers understand and reach this audience will do well over the next decade.
What do we need to do at BuzzCity?
We simply must execute our business model in a disciplined manner on the mobile ad network and provide excellent service to advertisers and publishers. Our clients meanwhile demand better reporting and a higher quality inventory. We must listen to them and meet these needs. At the same time, BuzzCity will continue its groundbreaking work on myGamma to stay in touch with the Unwired audience. By keeping our focus on both sides of the industry, I am confident BuzzCity will be well-positioned to thrive amidst a changing media world.
April 27, 2009
SHIOK, TAK SHIOK!
Shiok: A Singaporean English colloquial expression denoting extreme pleasure of the highest quality. Derived from either Malay or the Punjabi “shauk”.
Tak Shiok: The opposite of Shiok.
“What's Hot, What's Not? That's the million dollar question,” TheMobileGamer CEO Alvin Yap told participants at BuzzCity's Developer Garage and Marketing Roundtable. Identify the right trends – avoid the pitfalls – and you're on the road to success. Well, to paraphrase Yap, here's my Top Ten List from the event of what's “damn shiok!” – and what's not.1. Shiok: Innovative Ad Placement
We've seen this in movies and television for awhile. American Idol judges drink from Coca-Cola cups. Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw writes her columns on a Macintosh PowerBook G3 (updated to a MacBook Pro G4 in the movie version). Mobile social networks are getting in on the act now too. At MXit*, advertisers create characters to interact with surfers in community chat rooms. A Robin Hood like figure called “The Bandit”, for example, gives away free “moola,” MXit's virtual currency. Community members must first find The Bandit, then when they do, they're asked a few questions about themselves and the advertiser's product. Answer correctly and you get the virtual cash. The advertiser, meanwhile, gets marketing exposure plus new consumer data.
2. Shiok: Mobile Payment
Twenty-eight million people made online mobile payments in Asia in 2008, according to Alvin Yap. Japan and The Philippines are leading the way, but the biggest opportunity could be – unsurprisingly -- in fast growing economies like China and India, where traditional banking is not keeping up with population growth and mobile usage is high. Asians, in general, Yap contends, are more receptive to mobile commerce, less wary of malware and other risks, than Europeans.
Singapore's OCBC Bank, meanwhile, has released a mobile application that anyone can use, regardless of where they bank. Check foreign exchange rates, interest rates and more. OCBC's consumers can also transfer money – a straight-forward menu listing the bank account details of selected friends makes this quick and easy to do. OCBC exec Yvonne Cheong says the service is making headways in the city's heartlands. She described a group of aunties who regularly play mahjong and settle their accounts at the end of the game by making mobile transfers instead of paying cash.3. Tak Shiok: Mahjong Debts that are so big, you must pay them by m-banking.
4. Shiok: Flat Rate Pricing
Whenever carriers implement straight-forward, easy-to-understand and affordable data charges, mobile internet usage goes through the roof. This has been a common theme through many postings on the GammaLife blog. Microsoft's head of mobile services Chris Chandler, meanwhile, notes that in Indonesia he can get unlimited mobile access for about 50 US cents a day – much cheaper than going to an internet cafe.
5. Tak Shiok: Java (the programming language)
Every day when school lets out in South Africa, MXit's Cliff Warren says MXit experiences upwards of 500 logins per second. Unfortunately, they found that Java becomes unstable around 400 logins per second. The company migrated their platform to C++.
6. Shiok: Java (the island)
This anecdote also comes courtesy of Warren. An Indonesian user posted an entry on MXit's blog asking if MXit could translate their service into Bahasa Indonesia. MXit responded positively, introduced a local language version and, according to Warren, didn't do any other promotion. Within a year, he says, Indonesia became MXit's biggest overseas community, with more than one million users.
7. Tak Shiok: Fragmentation and Saturation
This one can be a big headache for mobile developers. A number of companies still have a “One Platform to Rule the World” mentality, but Yap says fragmentation is here to stay. Do you develop for Symbian, Google's Android, Java's J2ME, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, iPhone or all of the above? The prevalence of so many incompatible platforms makes application development more expensive and time-consuming.
Some developers prefer to focus on the iPhone, but that's created a saturation issue. Applications are often priced at 99 US cents or offered for free – which makes it difficult for a newcomer to stand out.
8. Shiok: A Wireless Mobile Joystick
It's like playing Wii, but on a smaller screen. Hold your phone in one hand, the remote joystick in another. Alan Chan of SBA Mobile Solutions showed me a helicopter fighting game. Move your hand -- up, down, left, right – to fly the 'copter and and press a button in front to shoot. The helicopter responded pretty quickly to my movements. The phone vibrates when you hit a target, though this feature suffered from a time-delay. It wouldn't surprise to see gamers – particularly public transport commuters – embrace this new toy.9. Tak Shiok: Advertisers who are scared to go first
No surprise that participants at a mobile seminar embrace mobile ads. Agency execs like Gosh Advertising's Kelvin Tan note that the economic downturn is leading brands to switch more of their budget away from TV and print towards less expensive campaigns online and on mobile. But Tan says that the shift is occuring more slowly in Singapore than in his company's European office because brands in the Asian city don't want to be a first-mover. They also dread being last in their market to innovate.
10. Shiok: IM via Mobile Internet
Has SMS peaked? I don't think so, but some Gen-Y surfers might, particularly in places where Mobile Instant Messaging is so much cheaper than SMS. In The Philippines, the average domestic SMS costs about one peso. An international SMS could be 15x that amount. The cost of a mobile IM? One centavo (= 1/100th of a peso). The cost of an international IM? Still one centavo. Plus you can see whether the person you're messaging is online before contacting them.
(*Full Disclosure Note: MXit and BuzzCity have a common investor, the South African - based MIH Group / Naspers.)
April 09, 2009
FINE-TUNING A CAMPAIGN
An advertiser on the BuzzCity Mobile Network recently launched a campaign to promote a free music service. “Free MP3 Downloads” read the banner, which attracted 150,000 views a day and a 1.89 percent click-through rate. At first glance, these are great numbers. But the campaign experienced only a 5 – 7 percent conversion rate. Out of 20 people clicking on the FREE MUSIC! banner, up to 19 were walking away without closing the deal.
What went wrong?
Well, let's take a look at what happened after you clicked the ad banner.
- First, users were asked to answer a long series of questions. That's turn-off #1.
- Second, after answering the questionnaire, users were told to download an application. Not music, but an application. That's turn-off #2.
- Third, users now had to log off the internet, then launch the application and finally they could click on a link to download music.
Yet there are also several positive lessons that we can take from this example. Afterall, the campaign attracted a lot of eyeballs. So what did the brand do right?
- They launched both graphic banners and text ads. It's a best practice to do both because some publishers only take graphics, while others only accept text. (Some sites publish both text and graphic banners.)
- They bid high. Advertisers bid on the price-per-click that they are willing to pay. The higher your bid, the more frequently your campaign banners will be shown. But they also didn't bid too high. BuzzCity publishes a table in our online system with recommended bids, based on current supply and demand. (Currently, in South Africa, a high bid is about 30 – 40 cents per click. But South Africa is expensive relative to other markets due to high advertiser demand. An good bid in Asia Pacific might be 10 cents per click.)
- They checked the campaign settings regularly and kept an eye on the Recommended Bid in the market where they were running the ads. At one point, the recommended price per click dropped quite a bit due to a fluctuating market situation (other advertisers must have changed their bids). So the brand in this case was able to lower their bid, save money and still get the same good exposure.
- The campaign message was attractive. (Unfortunately, as we saw above, the user experience did not match expectations.)
- exposure
- clickthrough
- conversions
Return to the auction page and raise your bid. Keep in mind that you can set your daily budget as well in order to keep expenses in check.
Second, examine your target audience. It could be too narrow. As Hisham described last month, there are a number of parameters that you can fine tune, such as content channels, time targets and phone type. If your target is too selective, you could be slashing the number of interested prospective viewers.
Now, let's suppose that you're getting good exposure, but not enough click-throughs. What to do?
First, take a look at your messaging. Is it attractive? This is not simply a subjective question. You can test multiple banners in the initial stages of a campaign and then weed out the low-performers.
Second, examine your target audience. (Sound familiar? : ) It could be too broad. If your ads appear everywhere (a broad audience), they might attract a lot of eyeballs, but not a high enough percentage of the right ones.
WAIT -- TWO MORE BEST PRACTICES
1. Double-check your campaign settings to make sure everything is set up correctly.
I know a client who meant to bid 11 cents per click, but accidentally bid $11. (Fortunately, their daily budget was low, so they didn't lose a lot of money.)
Sometimes advertisers also screw up when they are launching several campaigns simultaneously. They link up banners with the wrong re-direct urls.
To help you sort out mistakes like these, the online advertiser interface shows you a summary of all settings after each submission. This way, if there is an error, you can correct it within seconds.
2. Test, Test, Test. It's the best way to get a campaign right. And don't be scared to make mid-course corrections. By the way, BuzzCity's analytics – which can help guide you as you make adjustments -- just got a great review on the MsearchGroove portal (a site that tracks mobile advertising, search and social networks).
Remember, optimising a mobile campaign is all about getting the most number of clicks for the least amount of money.
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