Is Stelios planning to take Blyk on in the ad-funded MVNO game? Looks like it, with a model that sounds suspiciously similar to one of Spotcast's original models whereby a phonecall was interrupted with an audio advert - albeit targeted. Via SMStextnews.
Meanwhile, Virgin Mobile USA reported that it signed up roughly 330,000 of its 4.8 million subscribers for its Sugar Mama program, which "pays" them one minute of free call time for every 45 seconds they spend interacting with an ad on their phones or the company's Web site. Since the program was launched about a year ago, Virgin has given away 9 million minutes of mobile talk time. Read more about the programme here.
Mobile advertising works... if you bribe customers with free mobile content. And text based marketing seems to work best.
But others believe that the mobile marketing and advertising future is still too far away. I think the author has a misconception that it's operators who lead the mobile marketing and advertising world, when it fact it's mostly happening outside the network operators. Not least, because, anecdotally, I've been told that one large UK network operator isn't concerned about mobile advertising and it's barely on the radar... "if they make £100m this year on voice and £50m on data (I forget the actual figures) why would they worry about making £100k on mobile ads". And this seems to be borne out in a recent roundtable discussion (subscription required) on the topic with operators.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDelete