Faster speed will allow better brand experience.
Mobile marketing companies offer solutions, which include the plain vanilla SMS, wireless application protocol (WAP) banner ads and mobile applications. They are now gearing up to raise the bar with 3G. Its faster speed, they reason, will allow for more value-added services (VAS) and a better brand experience.
Jasper Infotech, for instance, provides a mobile coupon facility through 15,000 retailers in India. When the 3G rollouts take place, the company plans to introduce applications through which a consumer can take a 360 degree look at a restaurant as well as photos of dishes, and decide on the bill he would foot, even before entering the restaurant. Jasper would also come up with travel or vacation offers, tailor-made for the next-generation mobile advertisers.
“The advent of 3G telephony in India, data access and video streaming would become faster. This would enable a host of new marketing and advertising innovations,” says Kunal Bahl, CEO of Jasper Infotech. He believes mobile content usage is bound to grow, which is why more interactivity can be delivered on mobile, compared to two-three hours of television exposure.
“Companies are currently not excited about mobile advertising because they cannot deliver the brand experience through bland SMSes and WAP banner ads. But 3G will allow more creative advertising content. Brands will get an additional platform to reach out to users with increased interactivity and acceptance. The mobile advertisement will get greater mileage as the smartphone device is just six inches away, compared to 12-14 inches for PC and 120 inches for TV,” says Bahl.
Likewise, Vdopia — one of the leading online video advertising networks — is planning to introduce an advanced version of its mobile advertising platform in India. It has done so in the US. Saurabh Bhatia, chief business officer Vdopia and iVdopia India, says his company has an 80 per cent market share in the online video advertising market. “Once 3G is fully rolled out in India, we would look at introducing a more advanced version which is already available in the US. The advanced version will have social media interactions, multimedia video, among other features,” he adds.
iVdopia’s video and social networking solutions would also be tailor-made for mobile applications on iPhone, Android and Blackberry Smartphones. These would allow advertisers to reach audiences with more creative and engaging advertisements. iVdopia’s in-application mobile video ads from Coca-Cola’s Coke Zero, Miller Brewing’s Miller Lite and Warner Bros Entertainment’s New Line Cinema have outperformed their online counterparts. Each brand tapped mobile video advertising service provider iVdopia Inc for the campaigns.
Users could click on the video ads to open the mobile sites for Coke Zero, Miller Lite and New Line Cinema’s 17 Again film without leaving the application. In fact, advertisers could collect even more information about users based on the video they choose to watch, how they fill out a form, or what social network they chose to use. Each choice a consumer makes provides that much more information. The company also plans to provide application developers with a large inventory of brand ads and the ability to serve their own ad campaigns.
Affle India, another mobile marketing and advertising solutions company, is planning to introduce “Pinch” — an application that the company has successfully implemented in mature 3G markets like Singapore and Australia. Anuj Kumar, business head, Affle India, says: “Pinch is basically an application which is useful across smartphones, for social networking and messaging, tracking locations, sharing video content, among other benefits.” These also allow location-based alerts. So, if a consumer is in a shopping mall, Affle’s application would enable an advertiser to send promotional offers ongoing at that particular mall at that time.
Fast Trax restaurant in New Delhi, too, has seen a surge in coupon redemption that was at 2 per cent when the restaurant used paper fliers to reach customers.
Today, with its customer relationship management (CRM) solution, it has increased to 6 per cent with coupons that are texted straight to mobile phones. With 3G services, the offerings will only increase.
