Both Advertisers and Consumers Want Mobile Ads to Be More Relevant

An unwanted mobile ad might as well be poison to a company’s brand.

It’s intrusive and it’s undesirable to both the sender and recipient. But with the fragmentation and technical complexities of purchasing SMS campaigns, brands often have no choice but to blast irrelevant SMS ads, or they simply ignore the mobile platform altogether. Those companies avoid mobile advertising because to users, the current state of SMS advertising is no different than spam.

The mobile advertising marketplace is broken. What’s needed is a platform for advertisers that aggregates the ad inventory from all the mobile carriers. Alcatel-Lucent delivers such a solution with Optism.

The big difference is Optism only delivers permission-based advertisements. That means consumers must opt in before they receive any marketing messages. Ads scheduled through Optism are personalized and conversational, thereby achieving astonishing response rates — as high as 40 percent.

Optism uses Alcatel-Lucent’s existing relations with all major carriers to act as a “one-stop shop” for purchasing mobile ad campaigns. With all carriers aggregated, purchasing ad space is easy, plus reporting is consistent no matter which carrier(s) carry your campaign.

Typically, Optism campaigns begin with a question. The end user responds via SMS, which in turn delivers a relevant response. The goal of this conversational dialogue is to turn what was initially an advertisement into wanted information.

For more, watch the interview with Thomas Labarthe, VP Mobile Advertising at Alcatel-Lucent, below, and check out the Optism blog and interactive brochure.

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