Mobile advertising in India - A closer look

With a 270 million mobile user base, India is one of the hottest markets out there for mobile advertisers. And it is evident from the number of mobile advertising companies that have started up in the past few years. Since Indians use the text message (SMS) facility extensively, text message advertising is considered the best option out there by many.

A lot of companies are already into text message marketing and the results of late have been very, very positive. Hindustan Lever and Coca Cola launched mobile advertising campaigns and have had great success so far and very recently, Ford launched a mobile advertising campaign which was also very successful.

Companies like Affle, Webaroo, Netcore Solutions, and Gingersoft Media have come up with their own innovative SMS marketing technologies to help companies reach their customers easily.

1. Affle’s SMS 2.0 technology is considered the next big thing as far as mobile advertising in India is concerned. You can download SMS 2.0 into your mobile phone for free. Once downloaded, the software will replace the existing SMS system with its own sophisticated browser which has a lot of features such as emoticons, rich colors, icons, signature, and many more. Using this, you will be able to spice up your text messages like never before.

2. SMS GupShup from Webaroo lets you build your own mobile communities. You can send text messages to everyone in your community at the click of a button and at the rate of a single text message. You’ll also be able to send micro blogs to your community members.

3. SMS MyToday from Netcore Solutions has a free text messaging service. You’ll be sent updates every day from your areas of interest.

4. Perhaps the most famous of them all, mGinger, pays you to get ads on your mobile phone.

In all these services, you’ll be served with ads in your text messages. Usually, the bottom space of the message box is used to serve ads. But since these services are free, a lot of Indian mobile users are cool with this idea. In a relatively short period of time, Webaroo has a 7 million user base, mGinger has a 1.5 million user base, and Affle has a 500,000 user base which is steadily growing. With numbers like this, the Indian mobile advertising market looks poised for a huge growth in the future.

Categories: Cell Phone Advertising.

1 comment.