ZestADZ Mobile Advertising

There are now host of companies that are trying to monetize the mobile site, SMS service or the mobile applications developed by independent developers. This is similar to the Internet model where a web site ower can include content specific advertisement get paid based on the click. Now for mobile a similar model has been developed by companies like AdMob, ZestADZ etc. Hovr has gone one step ahead and can allow the game developers to monetize games that they have developed i.e., end user gets the games free of charge but it contains the advertisements.

So here is the summary of the model provided by ZestADZ (http://www.zestadz.com/index)
- Built on the permission marketing concent (http://www.permission.com) which means Ads are served to subscribers along with premium services as they get that for a subsidized price or free in return advertising
- It offers the ad inventory that are location sensitive and contextually relevant. Supports non-intrusive, interactive mobile advertising which makes its possible to offer content/services free of cost
- Revenue model
  – with advertisers: CPC (click per cost) or pay per click (PPC) for text impressions and CPM (click per thousand impression) for banners
  – Pays out the publishers within a agreed period of time after billing which is typically 30 days. It is mentioned that 25% of the ad revenue is shared with publishers
- Typical traffic that ZestADZ bosts – 1 million expression per month for SMS (how? where the site originates or is it originated from its partner applications/services?) and WAP traffic 0.5 million impression per month
- supports advertising in Hindi (using Tensor Technologies MeghDoot Hindi SMS solution with Mobile Transliteration Technology)

The channels that the ZestADZ offers for the campaign management is SMS, WAP and J2ME applications and games. That means the focus is more on the data space of the operator. It is interesting that they expect the advertisers to pay the money in advance…

For the SMS, it charges per SMS sent and inserts context specific advertisement e.g., if there is a key word lunch in the message then some eat out place is appended to the SMS. And for WAP site, advertisement is inserted as text or as banner.

Following is the logical architecture of this system. But in this architecture it is not sure whether the data analytics system would have the access to external systems like the device information or the usage pattern of the subscriber. So may be only by tracking the WAP usage pattern the system must be tracking the subscriber behavior. But can it maintain per subscribers i.e., assuming 40% of the 170 million Indian subscriber information is maintained?

For the publishers or the service developers, ZestADZ offers API to embed the advertisement e.g., for SMS API call to their server and for J2ME applications & games MIDP1.0 APIs.

Campaign Management and Mobile Advertisement

Is mobile advertisement solution same as campaign or marketing management solution? What is relationship of these with the bulk messaging solution? In my opinion mobile advertisement is a gamut of solution which addresses using of the mobile voice and data space through different channels like SMS, MMS, WAP, IVR, USSD, RBT etc.Now campaign management platform helps to bridge the business intelligence gathered from data mining (which is non-realtime) or the real time events generated from different VAS/network elements with advertising content and the channel. While doing so it can offer features like a service creation & execution environment for the logic that bridges these entities and also dynamically controls the traffic on the channel that is selected. It may also come with tools that help to create rules out of the input received from external entities and also tools for creating/editing/adopting the advertising content specific for the mobile screen. MIS reports that the system would generate is another important component and this report helps to track the effectiveness of the advertisement/campaign.The advertising content can be any of the mobile content asset. This could be ring back tone, ring tone, wall paper, games etc. Adopting the content for a specific handset would be a challenge. Because if one is doing a MMS based campaign, then it is important to understand whether the receiver handset supports this capability. So whether the campaign management system should have such a capability or a system external to this should support the capability is debateable and it would mostly depend on the existing mobile operator network setup.Other aspect of the mobile advertisement is about having an up-to-date subscriber profile. There are different inputs for creating this profile. One is obviously the usage records of a subscriber. Other popular method right now is to have a client at the handset side that tracks the user behavior and with the help of the campaign server, it subtly instigates the subscriber to consume some of the digital assests or the service. So for the campaign management handset client is an event input medium as well it is an effective channel for the campaign/advertisement.

The advertising system can be either be present within the mobile operator network or it may be hosted by a 3rd party. In case it is hosted by network operator, then this system can either handle the advertising/campaign of the products/services offered by operator as well as it can be opened for the external parties to advertise their merchandise. Now this external party that advertises should be an advertisement aggregator and should have capability to manage different advertisers. But if the campaign management system is hosted external to an mobile operator, then it will have to connection to different operator’s channels (e.g., through bulk SMS gateways) and should buy the space from these operators. However having an effective system to measure the effectiveness of the advertisement/campaign and also sharing of the revenue with operator will have to be clearly defined.

How about the component that can generate the layout for the mobile web site (through WAP) for the advertisement i.e., either the text banner or click links. The portal that can generate based on the portlet technology (or Ajax?) to automatically generate the layout of the mobile site that the user is viewing.

Also creating such a system is nothing but creating a affiliate network where the merchents (or the companies that are advertising) place their ad that can be shown on the affiliating telecom service provider voice and data space. This affiliate network should be capable of providing the measurement of the advertisement to the merchants as well as the payment to the affiliates.

Different revenue models need to be worked out (glossary available at http://www.streakworld.com/affiliate-webmaster-glossary-CPC-CPM-mumbai-india/index.htm)i.e., whether it is based on internet model or mobile model (along with some monthly minimum payout)- CTR (click through ratio)
- CPC (click per cost) or PPC (pay per click)
- CPM (click per thousand impression)
- CPA (click per action) or PPA (pay per action)
- PPI (pay per impression) or PPV (pay per view)
- PPL (pay per lead)
- PPS (pay per sales)
- OPS (opt-in-per SMS)
- OPC (opt in per IVR call out)

Overall Mobile ad platform should support direct advertisements or sponsored content and rich media such as ring tones as the mobile media. The solution should involve both push and pull technology, advanced reporting and campaign management. Key is reaching the target audience. So mobile ad platform optionally contains campaign management system but the channels supported could be data (mobile sites, SMS, MMS, USSD) or voice (IVR, RBT etc)

Building Service Factory

How will it be if new telco product/service can automatically populate the data in the OSS/BSS applications (like customer relationship management, billing, order management and provisioning etc)? Because without this, now 60% of the cost of a new teleco product/service can be traced directly to the time and effort involved in plugging that product into the network operator’s OSS/BSS. So a central repository of the product data is essential.

Why now all of a sudden there is a focus on creating such a central repository to manage the service? This is due to the nature of the next generation service environment, where telcos will have to manage large number of services (as there is no killer service and hence operator will have to maintain long tail of services). So a factory kind of setup with the flexibility to create products from set of components is the need of the hour. Product data management system (PDM) suppose to help operator to build the automated service factory. Following table from Lightreading shows categories of PDM and their proponents.

 It is interesting to see why there are different approaches. One is from the OSS/BSS perspective i.e., vendors like Amdoc with their understanding of the BSS space, can easily identify and expose the information that they require from the new services. So for them it is a mere exposure of the product data that they expect from the service components.

Now for companies like Accenture, IBM, they should come out with a framework that can patch up the teleco products/services with the OSS/BSS. Because in many a instances operators can not just bring in new systems that supports the PDM way of managing the service. May be in case of IBM, it is bringing SOA into picture to gain more market traction. However it would be interesting to see how the PLM (product life cycle management) suites from Ceon and Tribold help in doing the portfolio management?

Service Delivery Platform

http://www.lightreading.com/servsoftware/document.asp?doc_id=141937

History repeats – was it just a cliche? Not according to the article ‘Beyond SDP: building service factory’. in 19th century industrial age the factory mode of manufacturing helped the industries to standardize manufacturing environment to quickly produce and reduce the waste. Now even in the telco environment the service providers are looking at creating standardized, interchangeable and interoperable elements in an environment where such elements can be used to create unique products. These service elements contain data/interfaces for create, provision, maintain and bill. This is nothing but the product data. Product data management system (PDSM) provides a 360 degree view of the product data from management perspective. But are there standards to create such a view? There should be some patterns (is it SOA?) which drive such product element design and help in decide the boundary for such products.

In the existing service delivery environment of the telcos, hundreds of services/products contain product data in a desperate manner. Dispersed nature of the product data is stalling time to market, stalling their ability to deploy complex products and prevent the reuse of products. So centralizing PDM is seen as the key to cost efficiencies, process automation and next genration service creation.

Now I need to find more details on what are the standards or the best practices that are available for the PDM and also its relationship with SOA. Need to find is there anything specific SOA patterns available for telecom? Also whether eTOM SID (shared information data) is nothing but the PDM? But with eTOM focusing on the operations, may be it will not define how the products inside the telecom service provider domain should look like.

Other thing to figure out is; relationship between SDP, BSS/OSS consolidation (or convergent billing) and how they impact each other. One thing that is obvious is – if the components or the products have to be created, provisioned, managed and billed, the OSS will have to take care of the first 3 parts and billing should be taken care by the BSS. Now if there is a conflict in the way these products function, then there has to be some orchestration mechanism built in the SDP that can resolve these conflicts before interacting with OSS/BSS.

However the article carries a table of the preintegrated SDP which is according to TMForum’s SDF (this needs to be checked). But looking at this table it appears that the SDP is the service creation and execution point, these services could be voice services, data services or content based services. But how about the add on functions like the management interface for managing the data in these services, subscriber data management, content storage/management, self service by the end user etc. Are they also considered to be services that can be generated from these service creation environments?

Software on Multicore Processors

Now it is the turn of the chip makers to propose Open System Interconnect (OSI) kind of layered architecture for programming on the chips. AMD seeing the need for the software programmer to think differently for parallel programming on the multi-core hardwares, is putting together an industry consortium for defining such a layered architecture on the multi core processors. Looks like this kind of hardware abstraction is slowly catching up with the industry. Some of the earlier initiatives are, Nortel’s versatile service engine (VSE) on the ATCA platform from Motorola, Android of Google for handset etc.

As per AMD, the new computer stack could include run-time environment above the operating system. This environment could have scheduling, synchronizing and utilities to manage the chip-level resources for the applications programmers. Below the operating system virtualization software could be extended to better track and correct programming errors. Oh! this is definitely a good way forward but as always the layer architecture introduces increased memory management issues (like which layer is responsible for creating/releasing the memory resources) and also to some extentent degrades the performance (because of many procedure calls).

Now here there are two concepts are brought together – one on creating virtualization (which I guess this is gaining traction because of on-demand business model popularity) and creating stack on this virtualization. Just wondering why go for new kind of stack, won’t the POSIX (portable operating system interface) APIs defined by IEEE for the Unix, be extended to support such a stack?  As per Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX), many popular operating systems already are fully/partially POSIX compliant. I think extending these API also to support other operating systems and multi core processors should be fairly straight forward.

http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206503988

Looks like Microsoft is beeing wooed by both Intel and AMD to make the software gaint to support the multi core processors in its software. Even though AMD is still talking on this, Intel has made definite attempt by funding a project in University of California at Berkeley to define a parallel programming model. This project is suppose to take a lead role in defineing the programming model what serve the multicore computer processors. Currently most of the software works on the serial programming model and all the programs access the hardware resources in round-robin fashion or based on priority of the operations that that program is handling. However there are some efforts in which if the server has more than one CPU, then it was possible to restrict some programs (like database process) to access only a subset of the total CPUs available in the server.

Even though there is so much of hype on the model for parallel programming, I am not sure whether these efforts are already underway in telecom equipment providers lab as they have been constantly working on improving the price-performance ratio. I remember Nortel had some kind of initiative on the multicore processors way back in 2001. At that time, Nortel re-modeled its software to take advantage of the multicore processor architecture. However may be due to IPR reason that model never came into the public domain and common software programmers couldn’t learn from such model.

However if a server has heterogeneous set of processors (say some from Intel, AMD and from Sun), then how can these processors provide a unified view to the software? University of California has already published a report on such an effort which can be accessed from http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-2006-183.html. Some of the key points that I noticed are:

- evolutionary approach to parallel hardware and software may work from 2 or 8 processor systems, but is likely to face diminishing returns as 16 and 32 processor systems are realized, just as returns fell with greater instruction-level parallelism.

- Design patterns or Dwarfs defined on how parallel programming to be handled (it is now important to start putting together all the patterns available in computer science be it at the hardware level, OS kernel level or on the applications level)

- Compilers to do more for the programmers. This may be to take care of the heterogeneous set of processors involved in the computation

- Performance to be measured through performance counter (number of million insturction per second per core?) as well as energy counters (MIPS per watt?). Now for a software programmer, how can he controll the energy counter? is it that he will have to achieve the functionality with less number of instructions but won’t this again go back to the traditional performance benchmarking?

- virtualization – i.e., deconstruct the traditional operating systems and orchestrate OS functionality using libraries

Personalization in Mobile Marketing

ChangingWorlds, which specialises in personalisation and content discovery techniques for mobile data,announced the launch of its solution for off-portal personalization, ‘ClixSmart Discover’. ClixSmart Discover enables mobile operators to intelligently personalise the ‘invisible’ 90% of off-portal content including content catalogues, content partner sites, networked content applications and freely available mobile Internet content. ClixSmart Discover forms part of the ClixSmart Mobile Internet Platform which includes sophisticated reporting as well as the profiling and personalization of mobile Internet content.

ClixSmart Discover uses an off-portal subscriber intelligence engine which actively monitors users’ offportal browsing habits in order to analyze emerging behaviour patterns. The company says that this enables mobile operators to build in-depth business intelligence on the likes and preferences of individual portal users browsing off-portal.

Now if this capability is integrated with the campaign management and mobile advertising platform, it will help to promote different services as well as to offer cross promotions.

Different Mobile Marketing Solutions

The Airwide Mobile Advertising Solution lets operators tap directly into messaging and browsing streams enabling unprecedented control for campaign execution. It also also enables proactive discovery and targeting of appropriate advertising content to recipients based on their preferences, history and profile information.

Another mobile advertising solution was unveiled by Comverse. The snappily-named Comverse Mobile Advertising solution includes a mobile ad server, campaign management, ad targeting engine, multichannel traffic interceptors and data collectors, ad injectors and comprehensive billing and reporting tools. Comverse says the solution enables operators to provide highly relevant advertising to the largest possible number of their subscribers by using all available channels – such as Internet banners, SMS and MMS messages, visual voicemail and ringback tones.

GSMA’s Mobile Advertising Programme

Five leading members of the GSM Association (GSMA), namely Vodafone Group, Telefonica O2 Europe, T-Mobile International, FT-Orange Group and 3, have formed a working group to define common metrics and measurement processes for mobile advertising. The working group and the GSMA will facilitate crucial engagement between mobile operators, advertisers and agencies, to help ensure that mobile advertising realises its full potential for the benefit of all players in the ecosystem. With this initiative explore the aggregation of appropriate information on a consistent and audited basis to deliver cross-operator metrics to the media and advertising communities.

The GSMA says that a key priority is the definition of a range of metrics that will describe the mobile audience and measure the effectiveness of mobile advertising. The GSMA and its working group will engage with a broad range of advertising industry associations and stakeholders to secure agreement and support for metrics that will form a common mobile media currency. Based on this currency, and subject to the completion of the feasibility study, all five UK operators will work with the GSMA to develop a proof of concept for a cross-operator mobile media planning capability during 2008.

Mobile Application Platform

http://www.netbiscuits.com/technology 

This is a nice diagram that I found on the architecture of mobile application platform. This platform can easily be extended to support any kind of mobile applications e.g., campaign management system etc.  But How would the device detection be made up-to-date and what is the percentage of handsets that can be reached from this database? What kind of media transcoding supported? Similar query for the DRM as well.

However if such platform are to be given for open source, creating eco system of developers to use it is very important. In the NetBiscuit case, BiscuitML is the proprietary mark-up language, so will the developers embrace this proprietary language by learning new language syntax? So can SDK/API based approach work?

Nokia Enpocket Platform

With mobile ad spending expected to hit $11.35 billion by 2011, according to Informa, mobile is quickly becoming a key ingredient in the marketing mix. However, advertisers can’t rely on banner ads alone to get their message across: what happens beyond the click is equally important. So many vendors have started developing the mobile marketing platform as click-through rates are several times higher than the Web and often 2 and 3X higher than other mobile media.

Enpocket platform is a carrier grade mobile campaign management and delivery platform for mobile operators, brands and publishers. Enpocket bringing mobile carriers and publishers together with advertisers for a winning mobile advertising proposition. The platform combines multi-modal mechanics including SMS, MMS, WAP advertising, and video with predictive analytics to deliver the highest ROI mobile advertising. The platform also supports adopting the promotional message according to the channel. E.g., if a mobile operator wants to promote game downloads, we can send a promotional text message to SMS users, a richer multimedia message to MMS users, and we can display a clickable WAP banner ad for mobile internet browsers.  And then we keep track of who has seen what and what works best. So the response can be click to call, click for a store finder, click for a coupon, or click to opt in for SMS alerts.

Enpocket also brings in ad serving Platform that serves close to a billion ad requests per month. This platform leveraging demographic and behavioral data (declared preferences, and user purchases and behavior) –uniquely owned by the operator—for advanced campaign targeting.  The analytics system in the platform predict which products and services a customer might purchase next. With this analytic system platform can provide the right message, advertisement or promotion to the right person at the right time. It can also forecast events, such as customer churn and will recommend effective customer engagements to preempt attrition. When integrated with the Marketing Engine, the result is highly relevant marketing messages, personalized recommendations, less churn, and higher sales of mobile consumables

With this platform, consumers can initiate an interaction by texting into a short code and then receiving a response text message from the brand.

Enpocket also provides the creative services team which will help the customer to compelling, entertaining messages that will thrill consumers. This team not only helps to develop the advertisement for small screen but also helps in developing specifically for a handset.

Looks like Nokia is going to sell ad space of different companies mobile sites. E.g., Reuters has choosen Nokia Ad business to sell their mobile inventory. So Nokia’s media sales team will sell advertising space on Reuters’ UK mobile site as well as offering additional solutions such as branded mobile websites for Reuters’ advertisers. So it appears that all the Internet companies including Google, Yahoo would be focusing on mobile web. But how about the other channels?