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Submitted by Mike Grenville on Mon, 08 Oct 2007 17:52 |
With the mistakes already made, AdaptiveMobile says there is only a short period of time for all groups to get SMS advertising right.
There is a fine line to tread between advertising and spam. Unless both operators and advertisers/marketers take the medium, the audiences and the parameters of the technology into account, SMS advertising will certainly be viewed as spam.
For several years operators have tried to develop new revenue streams by positioning SMS as a mechanism for delivering targeted advertising to mobile subscribers. In pursuit of that quest a lot of mobile advertising revenue ideas have been tested.
Risks of SMS As Direct Mail
Gareth Maclachlan, Chief Operating Officer at AdaptiveMobile says that "there has been a marked decline in the value of SMS as a mobile advertising channel for advertisers. Essentially, SMS as a mobile advertising medium today is like direct mail – but without available demographic profiling of the residents."
"From 2002 onwards, the first SMS campaigns were paying up to 5 euros per message as some of the user demographics were known and there were high response rates" said Maclachlan. "This collapsed to around the wholesale price of the message. There were a number of reasons" explained Maclachlan. "For example brands didn't have a relationship with the receiver and had no way of vaildating if it existed. Also when sending an SMS they rarely got any information on how quickly or even if the message was delivered so they were blind unless the receiver responded to the call to action" he said.
Become A Medium For The Message
This is a high risk approach for operators says Maclachlan; "The operator is treated as a bitpipe and it dosn't add any value to them except the number of messages. To become a medium the operator needs to do a number of things. The first is to detect the users preferences. Mobile is the intersect between what we would like to do and what we can do. For example brands don't want to advertise alcohol to under 18s or fastfood to under 16s."
Maclachlan says that operators need to start understanding permission marketing. By identifying types of users the operator can move from selling messages at wholsale rates to becoming a channel. "The value to the brand of even just knowing where users are based, and the type of handset they are using hugly increases the value of the message."
Better Ads Than Google
In an attempt to become more marketing savvy, operators are hiring staff whose backgrounds are in FMCG brands. "One of the challenges the operator has in taking staff from brands is that they can think they need socio-demographics. Most operators don't have the information on customers - for example a corporate client just says the company, not the user. Likewise with pre-pay the phone could be bought by parent."
"Operators need to move to segmenting people who do the same thing" said Maclachlan. "If handled correctly this is a much better route than Google is trying to do ads."
One thing that can destroy mobile advertising revenue, which some operators are doing, is in working with portals they are agreeing to deals to release the MSISDN. By doing that the value is passed away from the operator to the portal company. If they are not careful by the time they figure it out it will be too late to get the value back" said Maclachlan.
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