IAMAI i.e. the Internet and mobile association of India has finally got its act together beyond conducting summits for the industry. As this BS article reports IAMAI has gone ahead and submitted a response to the recent consultation paper issued by TRAI on mobile value added services. The response asks for a ‘Level Playing Field’.

So what does IAMAI mean by level playing field?

• Faster process of obtaining shortcodes
• Transparent revenue sharing model between operators and VAS players.
• Payments should be made within 60 days by Operators.
• Additionally, MVAS industry should be treated as the single largest users of telecom services and their rights be protected.

While this level playing field especially with regards to revenue share has been sought by many. A lot of VAS players themselves are finding new ways of monetising their services. One such new ad model is for CRBT i.e. call ringback tones which is a pretty big market in India. As this article suggests around 25% of all mobile subscribers in India have subscribed to CRBT.

Onmobile a large VAS player has launched  Ad Ring Back Tones (AD RBT) with one of the leading Indian GSM Operators in Mumbai and will be extended to other regions in a phased manner. Just recently CS had reported that Airtel was working on a similar Ad backed CRBT Model.

How does this work?

Well one needs to subscribe to Ad RBT and the any callers that call the user hear audio ads instead of the regular tring tring!. These ads are customized to the callers profile. The adRBT platform also has the feature for the user to respond to the ad by the click of a single key. The incentive for users to subscribe to this service is discounts and offers from the operators.

Arvind Rao, CEO and Co-founder of OnMobile said, “Ad RBT is a disruptive evolution in mobile advertising and marketing which so far has been limited to SMS text or small WAP banners. Marketers now have the ability to create rich, interactive, audio ads which are played straight into an individual’s ear for high impact and recall value. With users receiving an average of 10 calls per day from multiple callers all over the country, advertisers have the ability to reach out to a large and diverse audience in a very short period of time with full rich MIS in real time which is not possible on other advertising channels”.

 

Some bloggers have questioned whether this service will be intrusive in nature but I feel as its self subscribe it wont be. Also this is probably the best way to make all phone calls free by giving the option to users to subscribe to this service and let the ads pay for the call costs. But it will be sometime before the effectiveness of such an advertising model is figured out. On the whole quite a smart product by onmobile given that India is the only market where call ringback tones are a rage.

On the whole the industry will see rise in call revenues and the presentation below done by BDA (A research firm) in collaboration with Stanford University gives some deep insights into the VAS Industry and its future in India.

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