Mobile Gaming Conference, New Delhi: These are the interesting insights on marketing of mobile value added services and games from Kaustuv Ghosh, Country Manager, India, Mobile 365.
His main grouse is that no one is interested in consumer marketing (pls note: not trade marketing) mobile value added services including games. So his underlying idea is that the VAS including games needed to be built as consumer brands, and not just as trade brands.
“Content owners should step out of operators’ shadow, and develop brands on their own. We also need to know the consumer better. The VAS brand should be separate.” He even suggested advertising on cola bottles, airline seats, or cereal packs.
You need to distinguish the mobile brand (as in Airtel or Hutch) and the mobile content brands.
Kaustuv, a former NDTV exec, says, TV forms a potent medium to develop these as consumer brands. Currently, the short codes revenues for TV offer huge opportunity cost. They earn actually less than 10 times of the revenue through short codes which they could have earned otherwise. So his message is to make use of TV for marketing VAS and games. And it’s done at the cost of TV, mind you. So he talked about having strategic brand collaboration with the broadcaster.
VAS revenues currently stay at Rs 400 crore ($90 million), but the actual potential is ten times of that. So how do you bridge that? That’s an issue to be discussed.
Another point he noted was that one also needs to look at the rural markets / black and white handsets when developing VAS and games. That’s a growth segment, and it needs to be reinvented.
Another interesting point he raised was why traditional media houses are not there in mobile gaming / gaming business? They prefer to be in broadband, internet businesses etc.
The answer to me is mobile gaming is still nascent and too small a market in revenues.
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