By Lai Kok Fung, BuzzCity CEO
I stood on the banks of the River Ganges – one of the holiest sites for the Hindu religion – watching people throw cremated ashes of loved ones into the river’s holy waters. Religious pilgrims voyage to the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh to bathe in the river, drink its water and visit one or more of the 1500 temples located here in the town of Varanasi. It’s one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world and devotees believe that someone who dies by the river will be freed from the endless cycles of reincarnation.
After a few busy days in Mumbai where we hosted the Mobile Monday, I traveled to Varanasi for some reflections. I’ve always wanted to see the Ganges for myself. It is the city of the Lord Shiva, and the Lord Buddha is said to have preached his first sermon at a nearby town. Over the centuries, the city has produced prominent Indian philosophers, poets and musicians like the sitar player Ravi Shankar, who had such a huge influence on the Beatles. And for anyone who has benefited from an Ayurvedic massage – yes you can thank the people of Varanasi for that as well.
By Hisham Isa, Vice President (Marketing)
I just got back from Mobile Monday Mumbai, where an enthusiastic audience of industry players, ad agencies, bankers and even a dentist were keen to explore the uptake of mobile ads. There are some 150 million mobile phone subscribers in India today and the number of cellphone users there is expected to triple within the next four years. Ignore this market base at your own peril!
The big topic of discussion at Mobile Monday was about how the value chain starts with content (yes, content is still king), integrates across media, requires effective campaign management and in the end must resonate with a company’s customers. (Thanks to Gopala Krishnan of mobile2win, Swaminathan of iContract and our own Lai Kok Fung for some excellent presentations.)
I’d like to share with you now three incredibly creative and successful mobile ad campaigns and then take a look at what’s required for a business to effectively use this new medium. All three examples below are being recognized at this week’s Venice Festival of Media (and I owe the festival’s website an acknowledgement for some of the background details cited below).
INDIA - CADBURY – “PAPPU HAS PASSED”
At any one time, nearly 20 million students take public exams in India. The results – anxiously awaited and vital for a pupil’s future – can now be accessed earlier than ever before, thanks to a mobile campaign implemented by Cadbury India, in collaboration with Reliance Infocom and Madison Media.
Instead of waiting for results to be posted on a college notice board or published in a newspaper, exam takers can now log onto a WAP platform, select the name of their exam and enter an identification number to find out their results.
If they’ve passed, they receive a message saying “Jab Pappu pass ho jaya,” which roughly translates to “Pappu has passed!” The mobile message links to a very successful TV ad campaign – which practically every student has seen – featuring a sympathetic 40 year old man named Pappu who finally passes his exams. Incidentally, Pappu also likes to give away Cadbury chocolates to his younger classmates.
More than 30 state exam boards have taken part in the campaign and Reliance says it has received 50 million hits.
KOREA – ADIDAS – COLOR CODES
In the run up to the World Cup, Agency W wanted to increase traffic to the +10 mobile site. (If you followed the Cup, you were bound to have seen one of the +10 TVCs.)
The ad agency built on a Japanese concept – mobile barcodes. When photographed by a phone, these black and white images direct users to a mobile site. In Korea, Agency W decided to up the ante. They created colourful circles placed in a seemingly random arrangement on a black background. These color codes were featured in outdoor ads, in print, on hangers in stores and even as part of the Adidas clothing label itself.
Seventeen thousand items of Color Code clothing were distributed throughout South Korea. The campaign increased traffic to the mobile site by 10 percent or 25,000 users.
UK – TEEN ROAD SAFETY (PSA)
British authorities created a unique public service announcement aimed at teenagers by recruiting members of the target audience – teens – to film a 30” ad on their mobile phones. The spot shows a group of friends hanging out by the side of the road, when one teen walks into traffic without looking first. He’s hit by a vehicle. The ad was distributed online, via mobiles, in cinemas and youth clubs. Within five days, nearly 30 percent of the targeted audience had seen the clip. And ninety percent of viewers said they would be more careful.
I don’t know about you, but I am struck by both the creativity of these campaigns as well as their impact. How can you join the list and like Pappu make the grade? What’s needed to implement a successful mobile marketing campaign? I think there are four pre-requisites:
1. Define Marketing Goals
Just like traditional campaigns, it will be easier to determine what mobile tactics work best—as well as what measurement criteria can be used to evaluate success – once you have clearly defined your goals. Are you trying to
* Increase brand awareness;
* Generate a customer opt-in database
* Drive visits to WAP sites
* Increase downloads or sales
2. Select the Right Marketing Partner – you have three choices:
(a) Interactive Agencies
If you want a full-service provider or don’t want the hassle of developing your own WAP site, this is the way to go. Most traditional ad agencies now have digital divisions. Other providers like Buongiorno and mobile2win can also host and develop your sites too.
(b) SMS Aggregators
These companies will help you obtain the short codes needed for SMS ad campaigns. Providers in Singapore include iPOP and mblogs. mobile2win can also help here.
(c) Mobile Advertising Networks
This is where companies like BuzzCity and services like myGamma come into play, by aggregating traffic from multiple sources and making campaign management easier.
You may choose to go with just one of these marketing providers or all of the above, depending on your needs.
3. Strategize. Determine the Right Marketing Tactics
As Cadbury, Adidas and the British authorities have demonstrated, we’re not just talking banners or SMS campaigns anymore. Options include functions to click and call (these are great for call centres / delivery services like Pizza Hut and McDonald’s), contests, coupons and landing page information. Be creative.
Each of these will deliver a different value and experience to your target consumer. Work with your mobile marketing partner to determine what’s best for you to achieve your specific goals and objectives. When choosing tactics, keep the following in mind:
* Will you need a WAP site?
* Define the promotions flow
* Provide Customer Support
* Campaign Reporting & Analysis
4. Look Beyond Operator Portals
There are only a limited number of telecom operator portals in each market – and users don’t stay on just one portal - so you need to look off-portal to extend the reach of a campaign. myGamma delivers a million ad impressions a day in India alone. It’s difficult to make a precise comparison as operators don’t release their figures, but we estimate our network reaches 30 percent of each operator’s traffic.
OK, so that’s my list. What do you think?
(Note: photo of Indian model holding a mobile phone is from Tribune India.)
By Andrew Lim, Vice President (Business Development)
Mobile advertising is becoming an increasingly important revenue stream for service providers – companies whose business plans have traditionally relied on content downloads. And as Hisham pointed out in his column last week, mobile ads are a great tool for extending a company’s reach far beyond traditional media markets, particularly in developing countries where such a large part of the population lives outside major urban centres.
So you’d think that China – where mobile penetration is linking huge numbers of people to the internet like never before – would be the perfect market for mobile ads.
Well, it would be, if not for actions taken recently by the country’s largest telecom operators.
Late last year, China Mobile blocked access to all free WAP services other than their own and created extra “road blocks” to discourage users from surfing outside the company’s own flagship portal, Monternet. Sophisticated users can reset the proxy on their phones to surf WAP sites outside the telco garden, but they now have to pay a high fee to surf these outside sites. And each time a user is detected to be outside CM Monternet, she is directed to a holding page and “reminded” of the risk of surfing outside sites as well as of the higher tariffs that will be incurred.
To further determine what a user can see and from whom, China Mobile has announced that several services -- including mobile instant messaging and music -- will come directly under the periphery of China Mobile.
Take the case of instant messaging. The most popular IM platform in China, by far, was a service called QQ, run by Hong Kong-listed Tencent. China Mobile “invited” QQ to collaborate with Fetion, China Mobile’s own IM service. QQ was paid a sum of money and given six months to transfer its entire database to Fetion. By mid-2007, the process should be complete.
China Mobile’s intention is clear. It no longer wants to be just a telecom operator. It is now a service-provider as well. We thought about trying to collaborate, but there are already thousands of local companies trying to get China Mobile’s attention. Only those at the top of the buddy list can get in the door.
China Mobile and its list of “white sites” are eyeing ad revenues. But we think their actions actually threaten the development of wireless advertising. Restricting consumer choice will dampen the number of users and thus the size of the advertising audience.
China’s Minstry of Information Industry meanwhile issued a statement condemning monopolies, but regulators have taken no action against China Mobile’s anti-competitive actions.
Meanwhile, China Unicom, China’s 2nd biggest mobile operator, has recently announced plans to impose new rules and restrictions on her list of Service Providers. This is likely to lead to a further tightening of her “walled garden” as well.
It’s worth making one final note here. Telecom providers like Verizon in the US and Vodafone in Europe also restrict consumer choice. The story in the media about these companies is that they are opening up. Verizon is offering YouTube videos. Vodafone is starting a mySpace service. But offering access to a select list of popular providers is not the same as equal access for all – the model which has been the cornerstone of internet growth.
There are so many services that users would like to be able to access from their mobile phones and the list of new content and services is only going to grow. However, if access to these services is dependent on operators being able to secure an arrangement with each service provider, it's not going to work. Keeping up with the pace of innovation is a hard enough task. Telecom operators should focus on building systems that deliver services and content that users want, regardless of who creates them – not blocking them.
By Hisham Isa, Vice President (Marketing)
Content downloads – the bulk of many a mobile industry business plan – are stagnating. In some cases, they’re even declining. The take home percentage for a mobile service provider isn’t very exciting either. Take the case of a ringtone sale in The Philippines. Retail price is PHP 30 (US$ 0.6). Market rate for revenue share is 30 percent. So that’s just PHP 9 (US$ 0.18) per transaction before royalties and marketing costs. In some countries, the percentage drops to just over 20 percent.
So what’s a mobile service provider to do?
Well, at BuzzCity, we have three revenue streams: membership fees, merchant commissions and advertising. The area where I see the most growth and opportunity is the third item on the list. And I’m not alone in this view:
"The full value of mobile marketing lies in the ability . . . to create more relevant customer experiences among more receptive target audiences," writes IDC vice president Scott Ellison in a report released last week entitled “The Potential Actually Exceeds the Hype”.
IDC predicts that the mobile advertising market will grow more than 25-fold from US$160 million last year to more than US$4 billion in 2011.
“Mobile marketing can reach billions of mobile users in the developing world on an individual basis for the very first time,” the report continues “and thereby create new markets and customer relationships for brands.”
At BuzzCity, though, we’re already running over a hundred ad campaigns. Eighty percent of our advertisers are repeat customers. Ads appear both on myGamma and on 1500 partner sites. Here are some examples:
* Mobile agency Mobiclicks is running ten campaigns for clients targeting users across South Africa.
* Malaysia-based mobile I.T. expert mTouche are running a regional campaign across southeast Asia. They chose to advertise on a mobile platform because of the rising cost of traditional print ads.
* US-based Cellufun is advertising across our network.
BuzzCity’s story is not typical of the industry at the moment – advertising already accounts for 15 percent of our total revenue and should rise to 40% in 2007 – but we believe we are at the forefront of the mobile marketing wave.
The next wave of content is likely to be specialised information (bus schedules, cricket scores, weather reports) with huge public appeal, and this is likely to attract the most ads.
You’ll notice that the first adapters are companies also working in the mobile space. Brick and mortar firms have been slow to adapt, mainly I think because media agencies are still overlooking the mobile sector. This will soon change though. Here’s why:
1. Mobile phones are the best platform for reaching people outside major urban centres, particularly in developing countries. This is a big driver in places like India. Mobile phone networks extend beyond the big cities into areas with poor TV reception and limited newspaper or magazine distribution. Mobile networkers also have a very different demographic than internet users (see Kok Fung’s article).
2. It’s cost-effective. We auction our ad space – similar to Google. The higher a company bids, the more likely its ad will be shown. The average cost per click is 2 US cents for a campaign on myGamma, so a one-month mobile media buy for a regional southeast Asian campaign costs US$10-15k. Compare this with (a) internet ads or (b) print campaigns. Google ads cost at least 5-6 cents a click (popular keywords cost more!) A print campaign in a single country, Malaysia, is US$42k. That will buy you regional exposure for 3 months on a mobile platform.
3. Mobile marketing offers a unique one-on-one experience. With traditional media, the net cast is really wide. Plus TV viewers can take a break during commercials to go to the kitchen or toilet. Mobile networkers, on the other hand, keep their eyes on the screen. It’s easier to target content to them based on their preferences and usage patterns.
The biggest obstacle that service providers like BuzzCity face in this area though comes from telecom operators. In the PRC, for example, China Mobile is making it increasingly difficult (and expensive) for mobile phone users to surf outside of a pre-approved network. But more about this in the next blog entry from our China expert, Andrew Lim.Hisham Isa
For more about mobile adverstising, join us at Mobile Content World Asia 2007, where Kok Fung will be speaking about global trends.
