Mobile phones in India to come preloaded with ads?

With a mobile user base of around 250 million and growing, India continues to be the hottest market for mobile phone manufacturers. However, the rates of mobile phones have gone down sharply over the years. There are two main reasons for this.

First, the target customer segment of mobile phone manufacturers as far as India is concerned is the middle class people. According to surveys, the number of middle class people in India is estimated close to 300 million. In order to target this segment, mobile phone manufacturers have introduced new models which cost very little. And since the middle class also happens to be the most active customer segment in India, the low-priced models usually sell well, leaving the mobile manufacturers with no option but to continue with them.

Second, there is hellacious competition in the market. Both CDMA and GSM phone manufacturers are hell bent on capturing the biggest market share and as a result, they’ve cut down their prices sharply.

As a result, you can now get a mobile phone for just over $20 in India. Due to this reason, mobile phone manufacturers are looking for different ways to make money. One such way is mobile phone advertising.

Already, Nokia is planning to generate revenue through its mobile internet platform Ovi. Also, some of the mobile phone manufacturers in India are in talks with UK based mobile media firm Affle.

Especially, Affle’s SMS2.0, a mobile application, seems to have caught a lot of attention. This application adds a lot of new features like color, graphics, signature, and emoticons to an otherwise ordinary text messaging service. When the customer sends a text message using this application, there will be an ad at the bottom of the message and a full-screen ad while the message is being sent. Affle is also planning to add features like social networking and mobile search to this application.

Some of the big names in India including Airtel are interested in this technology and might soon incorporate it in their handsets. There are plans of releasing handsets which will have this application preinstalled. However, mobile manufactures might want to test the waters and see the user response for such handsets before taking any major decision.

Categories: Cell Phone Advertising, All things mobile phones.

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Local mobile search to have huge growth

Juniper Research has recently released a brilliant report which analyzes the future of advertising supported local mobile search services. Some of the important points mentioned in the report were

1. Around 1.3 billion mobile users, a whopping 30% of the user base, will utilize local mobile search facility in 2013.

2. Currently, North America and Western Europe are the best regions for local mobile search. However, this will change soon and China will likely become the leading market for local mobile search.

3. Experts feel that users are more likely to respond to ads that come with local mobile search facility than to generic ads that get displayed in mobile internet or mobile TV.

The research firm has pointed out that this service can only be as good as the local conditions. You need to have good coverage of points of interest, enough mapping data for the place, and lots of high quality local directories which can provide you with the necessary info about the place.

Personally, I think it’s great to have such a facility which you can use to find your way in an unfamiliar place. Especially, people who travel a lot and are constantly on the move will love this service. So, in my opinion, an ad-supported local search facility would be a great success with mobile users. However, the local infrastructure needs to be developed to a great extent in order to make this possible. Hope this happens soon.

Categories: Cell Phone Advertising, All things mobile phones.

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