IAMAI Mobile Ad Conference – Opportunities In Mobile Advertising
The first panel at the IAMAI Mobile Ad conference held in mumbai on the 16th of January was Opportunities in Mobile Advertising in India. The panelists for this session included:
Moderator: Abdul Khan, Vice President & Head Marketing, Tata Teleservices
Panelists:
- Sanjay Tripathy, Executive Vice President & Head Marketing, HDFC Standard Life
- Jai Maroo, Director, Shemaroo Entertainment
- Vibhas Mehta, Business Head, Shaadi.com
What opportunity does mobile have?
Sanjay Tripathy gave the following statistics:
- Mobile market will be 11B$ by 2011 Globally
- Mobile usage is for Communication, Personal productivity & Fun
- India is fastest growing mobile market in the world
- 60 million users acces mobile internet
- 4% would be smart phone users by 2011
Types of marketing possible on mobile:
- Sms/mms
- WAP
- Voice calls
- IVR
- Blue casting/bluetooth
- 2d bar codes DM/QR Scan codes
Approach required mobile marketing:
- When going mobile Think pull not push marketing
- Integration – common glue for consumer touch points
- Clear call to action – Recognize and reward customer for engagement
- Test – Determine lead generation by testing
Mobile advertising value chain:
Brands -> Marketing/buying agencies -> Enablers -> Content Providers -> Aggregators -> Device makers -> Wireless operator -> Subscribers
3 P’s of Mobile Marketing:
- Permission based marketing
- Privacy oriented marketing
- Prefence – Content should be decided by users
Mobile marketing trends:
- Increase In Mobile Web Apps
- Sponsored content will move to User generated content
- Mblogging
- Personalization of content
- Barcoding
Jai Maroo stated that advertisers are looking for advertising thats non-intrusive, targetted, contextual, integrated, transparent & interactive. This is a wish list of the advertiser – Now the real question is How can mobile bridge the gap between this wishlist and whats available on the medium?
What does mobile offer?
- Industry is nascent. Dont judge it yet,
- Its a myth that one can reach 380 mobile users via mobile. The only guys who can do that is bulk sms pushers and even they reach only a subset of users,
- Many forces working to make available inventory discoverable and accessible.
- Profiluing of customers
- Cross platform – Voice, SMS< WAP, USSD, Video
- Can be contextual targetted
- Transparent reporting
- Simple interactive tools
- Mass unique users
The tools with most reach on Mobile platform:
60B voice minutes a day – 100% penetration
10B msgs a day – 90% penetration
These tools provide highest reach, no issues with handsets.. Simple effective campaigns.
He stated that marketers need to work on:
Expection management i.e. what can and cannot be expected off the medium.
Metrics – unique impressions i.e. making mobile metrics comparable to other mediums.
Vibhas Mehta gave examples of what has worked for shaadi.com and not worked on mobile:
Mobile marketing did not work for us when we tried to drive traffic to the internet via the mobile medium. It made sense to start a mobile service and drive traffic to that service.
As content providers we are still not geared up to provide services on mobile. Operators have different servers and multiple requirements for different platforms.
What worked for us?
Sms worked for us -We used voice and wap banners as well. On days we did 15-20 minutes of usage and thats very high in mobile vas terms. Sms alerts are more than a lakh a day.
In the panel dicussion following the presentation Jai Maroo of shemaroo suggested a google contextual model for smses. Would you like a short ad under your incoming smses from friends.
Sanjay tripathy – HDFC Standard Life said Online agencies need to learn about mobile and provide integrated solution. He felt that Integrated advertising would give a higher returns on the mobile campaign.
Jai Maroo added saying that growing mobile marketing spends is all about expectation management with clients. In 2009 TV will decline by 20 % followed by print and radio will be flat – digital will grow 2-3% while mobile will have the largest growth within that as per his expectation.
We felt that the issue with Digital Agencies handling mobile marketing is that even on the internet digital agencies dont go beyond top 20 sites/publishers with their digital campaigns. While the ad networks aggregate the others. I doubt if any agency has the bandwidth to aggregate multiple providers on the mobile end and for what kind of spend? 2 lakhs? 5 lakhs?
Also as per the panelists themselves the current spend on mobile was just 10-15% of the online pie. I feel its too much of a hassle for digital agencies to work with such a long value chain which is showcased above in this post to drive revenues which don’t even represent 10% of the total Online budgets.
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So far in the Mobile Marketing and Advertising segment, the most commonly used, available and feasible option for Merchants and brands has been Bulk SMS Marketing. All other channels are for niche and specific brand requirements as compared to the larger segments of generic merchants who use this media as information and advertising alerts. I think if a new media has been introduced by a company, it also needs to define a marketing strategy for resellers and aggregators who can create a downline much faster than 1 single company trying the sell it.
Mobile Advertising certainly looks interesting. I think that like mobile VAS, here also telecom operators will call the shots. With massive Business Intelligence Systems installed, operators are collecting data about every user. When it comes to targeted advertising, who else will have the best data repository. You may see bits & pieces of egoism by telecom operators once mobile advertisement becomes a reality.
It’s strange not to see USSD in all of the above; and so much IVR/voice.
It is also interesting to note no mentioning of promotion methods apart from advertising — such as mobile coupons, info campaigns, entertainment sponsored models.
I would like to add two more things to the 3 Ps of Mobile Marketing.
- Relevance and
- Timing