mKhoj has announced the ability to power relevant mobile advertising tailored to local languages in seventeen different countries. With this announcement, mobile advertisers can leverage mKhoj’s ad network to display ads in hundreds of languages, including Afrikaans, Arabic, Bahasa, Hindi, Tamil, Turkic, and Zulu. In essence, these new advertising units, which target the exact location of an ad and serve it in the corresponding local language of that region.
mKhoj has basically built a system which allows advertisers to upload their mobile advertising in any local language and in any alphabet. These ads will then do rounds based up on the location of information access by a consumer through any of the featured publishers (which add up to around 600 according to mKhoj) in their network.Abhay Singhal – Head of Global Sales for mKhoj, says that “Empowering advertisers to speak to consumers in their native language enables them to make more personal connections with their target audiences.”
To give a better idea, this is how the ads will work and function.
Arabic Ads 
Ads in Hindi
mKhoj had first gone local with a platform that connected consumers with local advertisers back in 2007. It had introduced a feature where users could find discounts and deals on everyday products then. In our interview with Naveen Tewari, CEO of mKhoj last week he mentioned that mKhoj currently serves over 1.5 billion impressions and that the FMCGs and consumer durables are beginning to try mobile advertising more actively. In India they serve around 500 million impressions per month so certainly they have to have pan national reach considering this number. In a country that defines diversity that means a lot of scope for regional content, and with FMCG’s and the likes coming into play this can be a very useful feature to tap into the market for them.
Regional content has been in the news a lot this year, we began by with the IAMAI report and then followed it up with a lot of publishers showing interest in regional content play and also jumping the bandwagon including international biggie Facebook. Local languages take a lot of precedence in markets like India and Africa especially given the variety in dialects.
For instance, though the four states of South India is often clubbed together as a segment, all of them separate languages and unique scripts. So, if any advertiser needs to go local in that market it is imperative that they adapt to these four different languages. mKhoj on mobile has basically made this move easier. Another important point here being that unlike PC access mobile usage is not tilted heavily towards a niche literate users and covers a wider spectrum.
Though what happens beyond the click is a matter that needs to be considered here. Their current advertisers include Reebok, Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Bausch & Lomb and how these advertisers make the conversation and conversion happen beyond the local ad becomes an important point to note for the success of this system.
