@Digital Summit: Mobile Marketing Challenges And Opportunities

The session at the IAMAI Digital Summit on mobile marketing began with Rajat Mukarji, VP Corporate Affairs for Idea Cellular asking about how one can talk to different disparate groups with the same message? There are two India’s existing in parallel – India A and India B. Differences are in the types of handsets used, the increasing complexity of handsets with their features, differences between content providers and service providers. MMS still hasn’t taken off due to interoperability reasons. There are issues of unsolicited calls and SMS’.
Arvind Rao, CEO of Onmobile said that the mobile channel has unique characteristics that allow them to profile users. He showed screencaps of some of their tracking softwares, and said that the response rate using the targeting software has increased from 5-7 percent to 25-30 percent. The operator no longer has to send out 25 million SMS’. Mobiles are notoriously viral, and consumers like to refer others, so they launched ‘copy a ringback tone’ and ‘gift a ringback tone’ features. Users tend to be impulsive, so these initiatives have worked. Voice, though, still has the highest effective reach, highest impact and has no device constraints. He game examples of marketing that they’ve done for TV channels and newspapers, which help reach out to consumers. The issue, however, was that operators don’t give audited results of content downloads.
Mohit Bhatnagar, Operating Partner of Sequoia Capital India said that companies need to develop KYC norms and profile their customers – sharing this information with marketers will help them segment the market. No one likes advertising, so contextualization is a must. No one has really figured out mobile marketing, so there’s still lots to be done.
Atanu Mandal, President of ACL Wireless spoke about short codes being used for IVR, Video etc, which will be used by advertisers for reaching consumers. He listed down the following challenges that face advertisers: spam, short codes and suffix support, reduction of prices for adverttisors, high cost of decentralized architecture for voice and video platform, and reconciliation, collection and payment settlement. These offer the following opportunities for changes in the ecosystem: opt in campaigns, broader and inclusive shortcode policy, rationalisation of prices and aggregator margins, deployment of centralized architecture for voice and video platform, and improved billing systems.
Responding to my question of what marketers demand of them, Arvind Rao said that FMCG companies and content owners look for maximum reach, while services companies want leads generated for high value items. Atanu Mandal later told me that marketers sometimes expect high response rates, but are aware that SMS is a push mechanism and hence they are held accountable mainly for the reach.

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