September 22nd, 2008
By Bena Roberts - BKI Media
Service providers are talking up careful targeting and personalisation while brands are still preoccupied by scale and reach. Should there be a difference between targeting and personalisation of operators’ services – voice, data and content – from third party promotions? BKI Media doesn’t think so, despite the apparent chasm between the two opposing views.
Service providers talk of targeting, personalisation, context, relevance. The world’s big brands want volume, reach, scale, mass market. Are the two approaches exclusive to telecoms and media respectively? If so, why do such different rules apply? And what about the whole notion of convergence; the meeting and interaction of telecoms and media? Can telcos possibly know more about promoting their services than the big brands who’ve been running ad campaigns for decades?
Cynics would say that of course telcos have to talk up targeting and personalised services because they simply haven’t got the scale to satisfy big brand advertisers.
This is true. Europe’s biggest advertising market is the UK, which is worth around GBP 19bn (EUR 28.23bn) annually. The total revenue from the five British mobile operators is also GBP 19bn. UK Internet advertising amounts to some GBP 2bn (EUR 2.97bn), or about 10% of the advertising spend. There are roughly 60m people in the UK of which big brand advertisers want to hit a segment of perhaps 2m, spread across five networks, which means five different channels, in effect. In addition, there are issues around obtaining consumers’ permission and the number of phones within the target group that can handle video ads.
Consequently, in the medium term, it would be ambitious to predict that mobile would attract the equivalent of half the online spend, bringing into question the oft cited figure that the global mobile advertising market will be worth GBP11bn (EUR 16.35bn) by 2011.
And yet research has found that in the seven weeks prior to someone buying a car, a mobile advert can be hugely influential, for instance triggered by a search. Peugeot ran a mobile campaign to support its biggest ever car launch, the Peugeot 207. Of all the people who engaged with the mobile ad, half undertook a test drive, 12.5% ordered a brochure, 20% visited the WAP site and viewed an average of 20 pages, and overall, it was considered around 30% more successful than an online campaign. It seems that serving a car ad to someone outside that seven weeks is a waste of time.
This is akin, to Orange’s trial in the UK last summer whose aim was to drive the usage of MMS and sales of premium goodies. Initially, Orange sent thousands of users a text message asking if they would like to take part in the trial by downloading some software. About 20,000 people said yes. Orange used half of these people as a control group, which didn’t receive advertising. The half that received ads resulted in the most successful mobile promotion Orange had ever done, although it won’t release figures.
The downloaded photography application triggered an on-screen speech bubble every fifth time someone took a picture, asking the user if they would like to send an MMS. It turns out thousands of people did want to (but didn’t know how to) and followed the walk through stages, which resulted in a big upturn in MMS traffic.
Orange also promoted Music Theme Packs, based on ringback tones. The trigger for offering the service was when a participant got a call from someone three times in a week, they were offered a ringback tone that they would hear when that person called them. The first one was free (there is scope for an advertiser to pick up the cost in a similar promotion), but again the take-up was substantial.
Of course event triggered promotions are not only applicable to mobile, but also when someone chooses a video on demand or starts making a lot of phone calls to a particular overseas destination. These are perfect opportunities to offer a ringtone of the film’s big theme or bargain flight prices/holiday packages to Paris or Perth. But that’s not all, film companies and/or the service provider could display an if you-loved-that-you’ll like this kind of recommendation for a film in the operator’s catalogue or highlight comments made by people who have stayed in the hotel recommended.
Both service providers and advertisers have a host of other options too. Not only buy one get one free promotions, but happy hours for cut price calls or viewing, based on that person’s usage. Everyone loves a bargain and likes to be thought of as special, a perfect opportunity for operators and brands to work together to promote bundles of services and everyone gets a prize – ranging from a can of a soft drink to a year’s free films.
Indeed, Virgin Mobile USA has been demonstrating how brands and operators can work closely together very successfully indeed. Its Sugar Mama incentive scheme has been enormously popular. The premise is very simple: if customers agree to watch adverts (and provide feedback) they receive free call minutes (up to 75 minutes per month) and text messages in return. None of the company’s customers are on contract, so they can churn at any time. Sugar Mama was devised, in part, to make sure they don’t.
The biggest message from the extensive research carried out before launch was we don’t mind ads, just don’t send us stuff we’re not interested in. So far Virgin Mobile USA has given away 8 million minutes since the launch in summer 2006 and many older people are participating too. In a market where many high profile MVNOs have failed (ESPN and now Amp’d), Virgin is clearly doing something very right.
It’s very telling that Virgin doesn’t talk about selling impressions however, but engagements. The argument is that it measures everything that it can possibly measure and analyse, so it is able to refine and refresh its tactics all the time to get the best possible results for its advertisers, its customers and itself.
Clearly, although brands and telcos don’t seem to have figured it out yet, they have far, far more common ground than they realise, whether you call it advertising or self-promotion.
Comments
