MOBILE COMMUNICATIONS
DON SAMBANDARAKSA
Stacy Fassberg, Celltick's marketing director, is gunning for a slice of the mobile advertising market that could reach as high as $250 billion in the near future. |
UK-based Celltick is trying to grab a larger share of the mobile advertising market in Asia through what it claims is a unique combination of SIM-based application distribution and cell-broadcast information, that together allow a much wider reach to virtually every mobile phone.
In Thailand, the system, called Livescreen, has been working with AIS since 2005 and has over 10 million SIMs in use with the software installed.
Stacy Fassberg, vice-president for marketing, said that the market for mobile advertising worldwide is expected to be anywhere from $11 to $12 billion according to most analysts, or up to $250 billion if you take the optimistic figures from the GSM Association.
Asia is leading the way in acceptance of this new form of advertising both by users and operators. Traditional SMS marketing has not taken off and research shows that the average user wants out after a maximum of five advertising messages a month. WAP has been very slow to take off, and for the 15 per cent of users who do use WAP, the interface is cumbersome. What Livescreen does is use cellular broadcast technology, which like SMS and WAP is supported almost universally, to push small teasers to the phone's idle screen. It provides a complete service, from managing the categories such as news, sport, lifestyle or religion, to optimising the content such as ringtones or wallpapers for each device.
"If you look at it, it's great, if not, it goes way," she said.
Companies could also sponsor news and other information delivered through this system, and in fact China Unicom used it to push out news on the Olympic Games to its customers. Celltick works with over 25 network operators around the world and is building relationships with content providers and brands. The system works with an application installed on the SIM card though it could also be installed on the phone as a stand-alone application. Richer versions are available for Symbian and Windows Mobile. The SIM-based distribution ensures a wide reach and zero configuration. The teasers are delivered via cell broadcast but the actual content is usually delivered over data or MMS connections.
Fassberg said overall, 80 per cent of users keep the service on rather than turn it off, and of those who keep it on, 35 per cent are actually clicking on advertisements an average of eight times a month, which is a very healthy response rate. Taken another way, Celltick has to deal with 35 million transactions a month that go beyond the initial click. In the early years, the system was licensed, but Celltick has moved to a revenue-sharing model, taking an active role in operations and partnership deals, and sharing revenue with telcos. The system has its own well-defined segmentation and provides advertisers with some feedback as to device capabilities, screen resolution and previous clicks. It also integrates with customer management systems to augment Livescreen's own demographic profiling.
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