Mobile Marketing is one of the many Mobile VAS services that carry huge potential. Here are excerpts from the session on Mobile Marketing during the Mobile VAS conference.

Moderator: Vijay Shukla, Co-Founder and Country Head, India, Valuefirst

While there have been many changes that have occurred since the inception of mobile industry in India there has been something constant as well especially with regards to the mobile marketing and that is the hype and buzz surrounding it, every year this sphere is predicted to grow bigger. But when we talk of numbers or the brand value things don’t fall in place. So I would like to discuss the following points briefly

1. What are the opportunities?
2. What are the key challenges?
3. What are the gaps?
4. The success stories.

If we were to break up the mobile marketing eco system there are around eight categories of players.

1. The subscriber
2. The content companies
3. The government or associations lie IAMAI
4. Ad agencies, media marketing companies
5. Mobile network operators
6. Application and service providers, typically technology companies
7. Handset manufacturers
8. The Marketer

I would like to enunciate a few trends regarding the evolvement of the above listed players.

1. When we talk about the subscriber, his/her requirement of a mobile has moved on from a mere voice call device to a lifestyle statement. More than 75% of mobile usage is in stationary positions. It is really a personalized device that is with one 24X7
2. In terms of content, the early days of ring tones, wallpapers have evolved to more interactive, internet based applications
3. For the regulatory and governing bodies the areas of mobile marketing and VAS were insignificant till a few years back but now the change is perception is evident.
4. As far as Ad agencies, media marketing companies are concerned they are still looking for case studies and convincing arguments regarding the return on investments, as they were six years back.
5. The mobile operators are the ones who have evolved phenomenally, from 2G we are already on the threshold of 3G and looking forward to Long Term Evolution (LTE), which is expected to arrive at the Indian shores in around 2016.
6. For Application and service providers too there has been a huge change from the earlier simple SMS, mobile terminated, originated to marketing and usage of bluetooth. There are many companies who are trying innovations with mobile and gaming together to achieve mobile marketing.
7. The handsets as mentioned earlier also have evolved from basic voice devices to complete computing devices with extra features like cameras and bluetooth technology.
8. The marketer is the guy who is actually providing the money for mobile marketing. The marketer has been experimenting; he wants to go beyond SMSes. Mobile marketing does not figure in marketing budgets as yet.

Suresh Narasimha, Chief Executive Officer, Telibrahma

Mobile marketing has been an afterthought for most of us in the industry, we all started out with the ambition that enterprises will invest heavily in enterprise mobility applications that didn’t happen so we went to VAS expecting consumers to pay for it and when we didn’t see the expected trends there either we thought let the brands pay for the mobile marketing activities. I would like to speak about the challenges that we as technologists or operators are facing vis-a vis the brands may have in adopting mobile marketing. We at Telibrahma work with a lot of brands and we assist them in integrating their BTL activities to the mobile marketing at the bluetooth level and we are also doing a lot of location based targeting and advertising. If we look at the multiple channels where the money has been invested by the brands most of the money is spent on print and television that is more towards awareness and information, this trend has to slowly move towards mobile because that is the only way brands can engage with the consumers and get insights into consumer behaviour. So out of all the channels of advertising it is the mobile and digital channels that will provide interaction, measurement. The branding today is all about people, community, interactivity and dialogue. Over the next few years the traditional methods of allocating budgets towards various medias may become obsolete considering the message flow across various channels. They may not have the budget divided across the media but they will have it divided across the activities. But the question remains will any consumer want to receive ads on the mobile phone? And the answer as we know it today is definitely no!

1. Our first challenge is how to make the consumer accept advertising on the mobile.
2. From the brand perspective the challenge is whether there is a need to experiment.
3. What is the kind of return on investment we can offer the brand is another challenge
4. What is the measurement that will ensure that the overall ecosystem will be balanced
5. What kind of balance will bring optimization of the budget in respect with the brand.
6. Non-availability of skilled people with the agencies and the technologists that can understand the each other’s viewpoint.

Milind Pathak, Co-CEO & Country Manager, Buongiorno (Hong Kong) Ltd

We all see that society in general is changing the consumption trends of the media in which they are accessing content. If I look back on my childhood, to begin with there was only radio and slowly while I was growing up television dominated our perception and now I realize I hardly watch television or listen to the radio. Most of my time is spent on the Internet of the mobile. So the digital media is penetrating heavily in the society. So the impact of this is that the people through these mediums have started becoming the media, the power that was earlier in the hands of the content creator, broadcaster or producer is today with the consumer. Associative to this trend, if I have to give an example of an evolved market then the single largest market for mobile marketing is Japan that has an annual revenue of $700 million from mobile marketing, so they have $70 billion marketing spend and they just use 1% for mobile marketing. How do they do it? Japan has almost 90% mobile and Internet penetration, it has high 3G penetration, 4 out of 5 mobile users are on 3G technology, it has a very standardized ecosystem that is built heavily on handsets, network, software platforms etc. It has a very strong commerce application so what I am viewing I can terminate or initiate a purchase action. For instance I see a McDonald ad and I click on it and do mobile purchase commerce, the system identifies my location through LBS and my purchase is delivered to me in a committed time frame. So as a brand I am engaged on that consumer’s handset because the ecosystem is able to support in its entirety a great consumer experience. On a background and backdrop of what kind of ecosystem we need to build and how consumption trends of consumers like you and me who are using digital as a medium, what the brand should ideally do. Fundamentally we need to create engagement, which is not an SMS or a banner that one can click, or ring tones, which are points of interaction but will not necessarily drive engagement. Engagement would mean that one is able to link ones consumption to the image of that brand. For example if we take the example of Coca Cola’s “Jashn Mana le” campaign, is it able to generate engagement with its happy moments campaign and link it up to an interaction that is this media, because as I mentioned earlier consumer is the media today. So in this new medium is the consumer being given a chance to engage with the brand and not just interact and be communicated to? This is something that needs to be focused on. Secondly we need to strongly blend the virtual with the real. Another thing the brands need to do is to look beyond short-term engagements and look at long-term commitments. This gives brands a very strong opportunity for micro marketing, which means that if the ecosystem is right and the demographics well defined and my consumption patterns on this medium are well known. Therefore when one looks at mobile marketing holistically these three things are very important,

• One that ecosystem and the social side of the media is totally changing,
• There is a need to build an ecosystem that will allow brands to communicate with consumers more often and in an engaged manner,
• The brands need to make this experience enjoyable and targeted

Prasad Narasimhan, Chief Marketing Officer, Virgin Mobile

The opportunities and challenges are pretty much the same in the way I look at it as a marketer. For me the question of how to reach my customers and engage with them on a continual basis, the significant advantage that mobile marketing does give over traditional media like the television and print that in spite of being far reaching does not give engagement, the ability to personalize or customise my message, online marketing gives me the chance to customise and personalise but does not give me the reach. So a mobile phone which is already with 25% population and slated to reach 50% population and stays with them 24X7, therefore it covers the huge issue of scale and the whole nature of the equipment brings the customisation and personalisation issue right in. There are really four big opportunities out there.

1. Being effective in what one does. For instance if we talk about TV, we have this phrase “you spray and pray”, which is what we do as marketers. If one looks at the media’s collectively our ad spend is 13-14% which is humongous and with this kind of spending we will have ads coming out of our ears literally. So the ability to be effective with the mobile medium is very high Effectiveness is about being personalised, non-intrusive, permission based and ability to talk to people in different languages, which is very important in India.
2. It is both scalable as well as target able. Maybe one can’t span the whole country but one has the ability to target very specific consumers.
3. Interactivity. I think as 3G comes in interactivity will start to play a much bigger role.
4. Measurability. I can calculate the customer response on a per click basis over a period of time.

The challenges as I said are almost the same.

1. The first is what I call a typical CMO’s challenge where we are constantly being asked about the return on investment (ROI), the accountability. While some of us have put in an X amount of money in digital or mobile marketing, none of us can say for sure that this has worked or that it is scalable and can be taken to the next level. So one needs to try something, create a prototype and then take it to the next level.
2. All of us whether it is the advertisers, content developers, the operators etc. need to learn to work together more cohesively.

Gaurav Mishra, COO and Co-Founder, Guruji.com

I bring the perspective from purely a search point of view. We are web search Company and have in the last few months diversified into mobile search we have launched our web site recently and we have had a great response. Where is the money for mobile marketing going to come from? Is it going to come from the budgets allocated for TV, print and online or is the marketer going to allocate a new budget for this? The progress is going to take place only when something unique happens as in the case of web it was Google. Until Google came into the picture users were subjected to useless banners of ads, but with Google the user gets the ads that he is searching for, so push and pull factor has come into play. And this gave boost not only to search engine but to marketing as well. So mobile advertising is today standing on the threshold of the pre-search marketing era of the web, where it is not targeted, one receives SMSes that are totally irrelevant and not asked for. Therefore one has to move to the pull medium where one can get an advertisement for something that one is searching for only then consumers will become receptive to ads on mobiles. As the targeting improves more marketers and advertisers will come into play, it will reach out to SMBs that do not have big budgets. For instance a small restaurant in a particular area can choose to be advertised only when searched for or when a user is in that locality, that way he keeps his budget small and see and immediate ROI. For all this to happen we have to be patient with consumer and make sure we deliver the relevant ad to him. That’s where search will play an important role and our company is spending a lot of time and effort in developing the right model in terms of delivering targeted advertising. When we talk about mobile marketing we have three key information with us:

1. The mobile users location
2. Personal preference
3. Search Intent. In the case of mobile the keywords being used are short and succinct, are abbreviated and often misspelled because of keyword constraints and this creates a lot of problems from a pure technology point of view because one has to do mapping of these words to the right intent.

Debasis Chatterji, Director Operations, Netxcell Ltd

I want to discuss the nuances of mobile marketing with a special focus on rural India. I call a mobile as virtual handheld equipment where one can capture all the emotions, and it has a multi-platform, small size, inexpensive, location detectable but at the same time ubiquitous and personal. One has to create value for internal branding as well as external branding. One can create value for the other stakeholders, inside the organisation or the ecosystem and not just the end player and that one can do with for instance “HVE- Hosted Voice Exchange” like a company owner can greet all his employees simultaneously on Diwali through this technology. Basically if we were to analyse in depth, customer behaviour, there are of three types. Firstly there are consumers who are involved in high value purchase. With these users one needs to communicate at the cognitive stage. All the apparel companies are using SMSes as a promotional tool. So it is very important to target our promotional objective and act accordingly. All the other avenues of media alike TV, newspaper, radio have become two-way with instantaneous advertising, the mediums that took time earlier have also become instant thanks to SMS and IVRS. Apart from this there are host of new developments around the corner like mobile ad platform, LBS. Pros: we can deliver contextual and relevant messages We can target geographically Quick response opportunity for the subscriber. Once the ecosystem develops we can measure ROI There is additional revenue for the VAS player Additional revenue for the operator with increased traffic on voice and data Eventually the various VAS products can be ad supported. Cons: It is very nascent in India Subscriber deceptiveness Privacy issues Advertisers are wary of spending money on mobile advertising as yet. Agencies are still in the learning stages With this background we look at rural India. According to a recent data we are at present targeting only 3% of Indian villages that are on the periphery of cities and the rest 97% have a population of less than 5000 per village and there only requirement is good communication. The SMSes that are considered spam by city dwellers would be a treat for these villagers especially in the local language. According to a NCER data the villagers are spending at par with city dwellers and their consumption pattern is changing in the sense that they are spending more on non-food items. According to another survey done between Jan-June 2008, the consumption of FMCG goods both in terms of value and volume, rural India has overtaken urban India. The problems in the rural sector are umpteen.

• Lack of connectivity.
• Lack of electricity
• Variable earning patterns
• Complex distribution systems

In spite of all the problems something like the Hosted Voice Exchange where a message can be sent in quick time to a large number of population would really help mobile marketing to take off.