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?

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The following are the main behavior indicators we take into account when building a synchronized set of offers to different segments. To see how we impacted each please see the before and after graphs in How Do We Impact Prepaid Behavior?

> The time period that goes by between top ups – the shorter the period is means the subscriber is more active.

> The time that goes by from reaching a zero balance until the next top up is even more important, because each day that goes by without talking, means the subscriber could be churning. This resonating silence is referred to as a ‘dormant subscriber’.

> The third factor is the date of the last call, or days from the last call. This is extremely important because since there is no contract, there is no proactive activity involved in case the subscriber wants to churn like calling the operator to terminate service. That is the main reason why so many prepaid subscribers become dormant, and why this phenomenon is often referred to as ‘passive churn’.

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As we can see in the below graph showing last call date distribution (Phenomenon 1) a subscriber that didn’t talk for 30 days is considered dormant. As a result of our targeted marketing program we managed to reduce the time frame from the last call made (a shift from the right to the left on the graph), where subscribers actually remained active over time. This is based on a three month period that began in January 2008, and three months later we checked how many were still active. So for example, subscribers from day 30 to day 60 in the graph made their last call in March, and subscribers from 61 to 90 made their last call in February. What we managed to do is bring about a shift where more subscribers remained active over time or to put it another way – kept talking!

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This post is about the best way to overcome these obstacles and go about impacting subscriber behavior in one of the most lucrative revenue sectors for mobile operators - the prepaid sector that is comprised of over 1 bln subscribers worldwide. The following insight is based on our activity with one of the largest prepaid operators in the world.

Our first challenge with this operator was to increase usage within a “mid–ARPU” prepaid segment. Experience has taught us that the best way to impact behavior in this segment is to integrate real time and immediate response tactics into all marketing activities. Here is a real life sample of how we went about increasing top up recharges and voice usage for subscribers with an average top up amount of lower than €10.

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The key challenge for all marketers in this sector, if they are to thrive in this environment, is to employ a multi-step approach that maximizes relevance for each customer through the dynamic adaptation of personalized marketing offers.

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A survey conducted at the Mobile Marketing Association’s Mobile Marketing Forum this week in New York quizzed advertising agencies, content providers, aggregators, carriers and others about the space to understand from an insider’s view of what is going on in the industry.

Here are results that are relevant for wireless operators:

– 31 percent of wireless operators reported that they are looking for more information from the mobile ecosystem on the strategies used for executing mobile marketing campaigns.

– 23 percent of wireless operators said they felt that content customization and personalization are the key to increasing mobile marketing.

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Of course this mass infiltration of the mobile user’s private space is intrusive and unwelcome, mostly because the systems in place today are not sophisticated enough to be able to create a truly personalized approach based on multiple user and usage criteria.

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T-Mobile has been a pioneer of in-game mobile advertising since 2005 and is creative in using gaming as a way of publicising its own new tariffs and promotions.

The first example was during the run-up to and aftermath of the soccer World Cup in 2006. T-Mobile launched The Beautiful Game (a reference to football legend Pelé’s autobiography). T-Mobile’s game showed fans undressing and streaking across the football pitch – another 1970’s craze. The simplicity of the game was remarkable, the in-house advertising creative was original and it attracted a lot of interest in the media. Yet during the world’s biggest football event in the host nation, the uptake and use of the game remained low.

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Digital content and data services are the expected business growth drivers of Telecom operators. But this type of content is very different from the traditional communication services. These products are much more diversified, highly related to customers’ lifestyle, can have multiple cross-media relationships (e.g. song, ring-tone, real-tone, performer picture, latest gossip, latest video clip, other songs from the same album, link to concerts schedule, etc.), have a relatively easily identified target audience, and most have a relatively short lifetime (e.g. related to a specific event, hit parade, location, etc.).

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The theory refutes the long-held wisdom of the 80/20 rule whose premise is that 80% of sales would be made on the 20% of the inventory. The arrival of the Internet as a mass medium has proven this wrong. Amazon says 50% of its total sales come from a wide range of items that only sell once a month, while eBay’s staggering success came from auctioning obscure items.

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