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.

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Greystripe and Simyo to offer free, ad supported mobile games

Greystripe is one company which sure knows the pulse of its customers. Ad supported mobile games are considered the next big thing and Greystripe is sure cashing in on that. First, it was the much-talked-about partnership with Myxer and now here comes another partnership with the German mobile operator, Simyo.

According to this deal, Greystripe will create a games portal which will have more than 800 free mobile games. Mobile users will be able to download them without paying a penny, as all the games are ad supported. Surprisingly, these games are not exclusively available for Simyo subscribers alone. Any mobile user from any mobile network can download these games. The reason is pretty simple.

Both Simyo and Greystripe will split the revenue generated from the targeted ads in those mobile games. So, it doesn’t matter who downloads the game – whether a Simyo subscriber or someone else – as long as the revenue comes in.

Also, one of the highlights of this mobile games portal is that it supports over 1400 handsets, which is a very good thing for mobile users. No matter what handset you have, you’ll be able to download these games. So, this will be pretty popular with users.

Btw, have you guys tried out any of these ad supported mobile games? What are your favorites?

Categories: Cell Phone Advertising, All things mobile phones, Mobile Games.

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Weekend news from the world of mobile advertising

Hello folks. It’s weekend time again and I’m again digging deep into the RSS feeds I’ve subscribed to. To begin with, here’s a couple of interesting tidbits.

1. Email giant Critical Path has published a report which says that around 79% of mobile users in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Italy, and Spain are ready to accept ads in their emails if their mobile email service was free. I’ve discussed the concept of mobile web in this blog quite often and to be honest, this news doesn’t surprise me at all.

Just think about it. How much do you pay for your Blackberry email service? What if it was available free of cost? You’ll be able to check emails on the go, right on your mobile phone, for free. So what if the emails had ads attached to them? It’s just a small compromise to be able to use the mobile email service for free, right? At least that’s what a majority of mobile users seem to think. And it’s not just in the U.S. Check out the list of countries – Spain, Germany, UK, US, and Italy. And I’ve not even taken China and India into consideration where mobile web is thriving. So, if you’re a mobile user, be prepared to get a free, ad-funded mobile email service from your operator soon. And if you’re a mobile advertiser, you know where the money is.

2. We already know Google’s penchant for free mobile phones, and it’s been confirmed once again. In a recent interview, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that mobile phones have become so important in people’s lives that a lot of people spend as much as 8-10 hours talking on their phone. With this being the case, advertising on mobile phones looks like a no-brainer. So, he said that the mobile phone should be free. A free mobile phone funded with advertisements is the future, said Eric.

Well; it sounds enticing. A free mobile phone up for the grabs. But the problem is, you need to advertise sensibly. Customers, at least a majority of them, will not be interested in buying a mobile phone if they get bombarded with random ads round the clock. Like I’ve said a million times before, mobile ads should be targeted, relevant, and most importantly, should provide some value to the user. Let’s see.

Categories: Cell Phone Advertising.

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Ready to watch live TV on your Nokia phone?

Monsoon Multimedia, a California based company, has come up with HAVA Mobile Player, digital video service, which has made quite an entry into the market. The video service is interestingly called the ‘sling box killer’, as it is considered a direct competitor to the famous Sling Media.

Monsoon Multimedia’s HAVA Mobile Player allows you to watch live TV from your mobile phone. Not just that, you will be able to pause, skip, rewind, and schedule your DVR recordings right from your phone. Monsoon Multimedia is confident that people will find it very easy to use this service on their high-end Nokia phones. They also believe that they can outdo Sling Media with this service. However, this service is meant only for S60 Symbian phones as of now whereas Sling Media’s TV service is available on Symbian, Palm, Windows Live Mobile, and it’s rumored that it will be soon available in Blackberry. With this being the case, I don’t think the HAVA Mobile Player is much of a competition for Sling Media, at least as of now.

This mobile TV service will be made available to the public for free next quarter. However, Monsoon is also planning to run a beta program in between.

The way I see it, mobile TV industry is headed for a unique battle. On one hand, you have devices like HAVA Mobile Player which make live TV available in your mobile phone. On the other hand, you have carriers coming up with separate mobile TV service.

Now, as a mobile user, what would you choose? A mobile TV service from a carrier which lets you choose a certain number of channels for a fixed sum every month, or a device like this one which lets you watch live TV right on your mobile phone without any restrictions?

Categories: All things mobile phones, Mobile TV, Nokia.

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Mobile video advertising platform from Velti and Vantrix

Velti, the leading mobile marketing platform and value added service provider, has announced that it has signed a partnership deal with Vantrix, a mobile content delivery company, and will be using its technology in its universal mobile video advertising platform.

This video advertising platform will deliver high quality video content funded by targeted advertisements to mobile users. These video clips are completely free as advertisers pay for them and mobile users can view these clips as many times as they want.

Velti has incorporated a unique technology from Vantrix in this platform which can identify the network conditions and the type of handset a mobile user has and adapt the video content accordingly. This is the reason why they like to call it ‘universal video advertising platform’.

Now, Velti is known for its mobile marketing platforms which are usually good, but this universal video advertising platform, as they like to call it, is very unique for one reason. The ads delivered with the video clips are extremely targeted. In fact, they take three different sets of data into consideration to make sure the ads are rightly targeted.

They are

1. Details from mobile users like age, gender, locality, income range, and so on.

2. Behavioral and contextual data which is provided by the personalization engine from Velti.

3. Carrier, network, and device performance characteristics from Vantrix.

Combining these three sets of data, the platform targets users pretty accurately and delivers highly relevant, highly targeted ads.

This, I think, is a very good example of targeted advertising. Using so many parameters, you can easily break down people into several groups and categorize the ads to be delivered accordingly. Such ads usually stand a good chance of getting clicked by the users, which is exactly what the advertisers want.

Categories: Cell Phone Advertising, All things mobile phones.

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