OnMobile CEO Arvind Rao’s presentation at the CII Marketing Summit on “New Consumers, New Language: Communication with the Gen Next of Indian Consumers” got quite a few people to sit up and take notice of the advertising opportunities in the Indian mobile space. OnMobile provides a platform for marketing via mobiles, and manages the entire communication delivery process.
Rao began by telling us that there are 60 million consumers in India who use VAS; India will have close to 300 million mobile users by 2010 and OnMobile is looking at the mobile advertising space with interest. There are plans for rolling out mobile advertising services by the end of the year. OnMobile currently sends 200-300 million SMS’ to users, every month.
What’s driving this space? The youth – 50-60% of revenue from VAS comes from music, estimated at Rs. 2000 to Rs. 3000 crores of revenue. This is expected to grow at 50-60% a year. A move from SMS to Voice and WAP will have higher yields.
OnMobile, in collaboration with operators in India knows what the Indian consumer is up to – who’s downloading Bengali ringtones, travelling from one state to another and visiting high profile restaurants; OnMobile has specialised collaborative filtering algorithms that they’re using the track the Indian consumer. They’re data mining to create specific profiles (though not for all consumers, yet), and tracking 50-60 million calls a day. I spoke later to Balachandran Unni, Head – mCommerce, OnMobile, who added that OnMobile has tie-ups with all operators, which allows them to track consumers even if they switch operators.
The mobile space has great potential for specific, targeted advertising and OnMobile is in touch with advertising agencies for mobile advertising. The advantage is that mobiles are intensely personal with a 100% attention span and every effective call-to-action using both SMS and IVR (interactive voice response). It’s real potential lies in being a tool for viral marketing: when a user hears a call-back tone, it’s a recommendation from the person whom he has called. In fact, OnMobile had suggested to Coca Cola for their employees to put their ad jingle as a call-back tone.
Rao presented a few case studies, among which was a targeted marketing campaign OnMobile had done for Citibank in conjunction with Mediaturf. For a particular product, Citibank had to meet targets of 50,000 signups, and OnMobile generated 120,000 potentially high-yield leads based on their tracking system. Another was where LG wanted to sell phones with polyphonic ringtones. OnMobile created an opportunity where users who wanted to download monophonic ringtones were allowed to hear the polyphonic version, and offered a 25% discount on an LG mobile. OnMobile also is doing reverse auctions with Mahindra and Mahindra and mobile ticketing with PVR cinemas. The real advantage is that mobile marketing can be very targeted – even focused on a single village in, say, West Bengal or Andhra Pradesh. I asked Rao later about the opportunity for the mobile replacing the credit card, as an extension of mCommerce, and he said that the problem there is that the operator is not willing to take the credit risk.
Responding later to a question on the intrusive nature of the data mining, Rao said that it’s just an initial discomfort because the mobile has, so far, been a personal medium. If you can give value to the both the seller and his customer, then it no longer remains a problem. Earlier in the presentation, he’d proposed the idea of sponsored calls wherein for each call, you get to hear a targeted ringback tone that takes up a few seconds of your time, and the call becomes free. He also said that they might look at an option similar newsletter signups on the Internet, where the consumer can opt out, but also lose out on sales promotion in the process.
I asked Balachandran Unni later about how much advertising can spread across various media: whether it will be able to sustain Print, Radio, TV, Internet and the Mobile businesses. Unni felt that the real opportunity is in sales promotion via the mobile, and it isn’t just above the line advertising that will sustain the businesses.
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