Mobile Marketing Platform based on Near Real time Content

http://www.indiaprwire.com/pressrelease/telecommunications/
200804178845.htm

An interesting service where TELiBrahma has partnered with Sportingmindz to provide audience in a stadium to receive real time match linked information on their mobile handsets through Bluetooth. Sportingmindz provides the analytical content necessary for this service. Here is the flow of service:

1. Mobile subscriber enters stadium & activates Bluetooth (not sure whether there is any specific application needed in the handset)
2. Subscriber start receiving information like welcome kit (forecast of the match, pitch report, team composition, history of previous matches), video clips (wicket, best shot, crowd), trivia and updates (bowler pitch mark, partnership.scoring patterns) at every turn of the event at the match
3. Contest inside the match – player of the team, best dressed spectator, moment of the match etc

Right now the content is exclusive to Royal challengers and hence it is aimed at building the mobile fan club. Ultimately it is the brands that would like to ride on the content sent to the subscribers as this throws open a huge opportunity for advertising opportunity at the stadium.

However I do believe this has a potential to grow outside the stadium as well by sending information through SMS, MMS, WAP (even IVR to listen to quick match update). However with do-not-call kind of service becoming norm, it is essential to have an opt-in mechanism for the end users.On the other hand, can also have agreement with different telecom service providers to share the subscriber profile information (but will operator’s share such information?)

Uniceltech mCampaigner

http://www.uniceltech.com/mno09_mCampaigner.html

Unicel’s mCampaigner is an interactive mobile platform that enables the enterprises to create interactive mobile campaign from desktop. Some of the functionality supported in this system are:

- Create interactive campaign from desktop – so what are the channels on which the campaign message be delivered and also the tools available for the advertiser to publish the advertisement, also whethere there are any templates available for some of the standard campaign flows? As per their web site, text, logo/picture message, ring tone can be dynamically inserted as part of the campaign

- Create campaign to be delivered to targeted audience – what are the ways of creating the business rule based on which these target audience can be selected, also from which systems the data can be mined

 - Different attributes of the campaign task i.e., set date & time of outbound delivery of the campaign, select only with certain criteria (again is this business rule?), presence, location etc. Here presence and location based campaign is interesting but that requires to build integration with the location based server. Now how many telecom service providers offer access to the location servers? But how about a third party build location servers on top of other telecom service providers

- Ability to measure marketing efforts and allow access to prospective clients/leads – does this mean creation of the dashboard showing realtime/non realtime statistics?

This coupled with Unicel’s following technology components listed below could make a compelling proposition.

- GlobalOne a SMSC & SMSGW combined virtual number platform for interactive P2A applications (here the understanding is this virtual number platform is nothing but a platform that can host multiple short codes). With service template creation capability, it would be much more useful. Also if such templates support all the business processes identified in the domains, then it would help such companies to integrate their business processes with the campaign.(http://www.uniceltech.com/domains.html)

- eMobileGateway – content management platform to process information from different sources and deliver on diverse set of handsets

- SMS/MMS/WAP/HTTP Gateway – for connection to operator’s SMSC, MMSC, WAP/HTTP infrastructure on the standard interface

- NotifyOne- group messaging – anyway the basic functionality of creating SMS groups would be already part of campaign manager. But creating a group for the end users could help in viral market, also could track the behavior of such groups and with permission, targetted products can be marketed for that group.

But the main concern is the scalability and reliability of the solution as well as the TCO for this total solution. I have not found any information on the hardware required as well as the traffic model that is supported by these solutions.

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)

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?

Nokia Launches Global Ad Network

http://m.contentsutra.com/entry/319837

 Now it is the turn of Nokia to play advertising aggregator’s role for mobile network. This is very similar to Google’s advertising aggregator’s role for Internet. Now with Nokia having its Enpocket’s analytics to optimize campaign and campaign measurements, it can offer the campaign management and advertisements to the telecom operators around the world. If Nokia can couple its knowledge on the handset, its advertising platform can help the advertisers to create the ads that are best suited for the handset. So Nokia even can thrown open this platform for the 3rd parties through APIs and tools for transcoding/rendering the advertisements created for other media, then it can use its relationship with telecom operators to sell this. This is very similar to Ericsson’s IPX infrastructure which allows the content owners to sell the content to the end users and pay the money through their telecom service providers. With these kind of initiatives the operators can get additional revenue and are free to initiate something similar to create competitive advantage. Now a similar initiatives will start for games and other applications (Nokia having Twango/Ovi and N-Gage)