Vision

From a very modest level, mobile advertising has grown substantially in the last two years largely on the back of the high growth of app stores and to a smaller extent on mobile websites. Banner ads on applications and websites are effectively using the information they get about consumer, mostly limited to contextual data relating to that consumer. Their reach is a very small % of the mobile subscriber population. Various forecasts indicate that mobile advertising will grow from $1B to $5B or $10B by 2014 largely due to the growth in these sectors but the channel can be much more pervasive than represented by these sectors. The big opportunity lies in realising a broad scope of capitalising on various touch points for engaging with all 5 Billion of the mobile subscribers, and not just 100-200 million who are app store and mobile web users.

To increase the mobile marketing and advertising opportunity by an order of magnitude and in a cost effective and consumer acceptable manner there are certain prerequisites. Marketers and advertisers must be able to precisely target their audience, be able to choose the delivery method and be able to measure the results. The resulting high relevance of offers and ads will go a long way towards increasing consumer acceptability but it must be possible to implement additional privacy controls. To achieve this, the advertiser needs access to elements of mobile operators subscribers data as well as the operators range of touch points and its communication network. On the other hand, the operator will have to make sure that the commercial value of its subscriber data is ring fenced and that subscriber privacy regulations and policies are enforced.

Historically the technology has just not been available to achieve all of these essential requirements and as a result mobile, the most personal of channels and the only one capable of conducting conversational marketing, was very often used in an indiscriminate, spam like manner and the growth of mobile advertising was severely restrained as a result. Availability of the essential technology will unlock the mobile advertising opportunity and Flytxt believes that revenue will grow quickly to be on a par with other channels. Flytxt estimates that the mobile advertising revenue will be of the order of $50 Billion to $100 Billion within 5 years and products and services required to enable this ad revenue will be between $10 Billion and $20 Billion within that same time frame.

Flytxt has the product base, team and insight to be the lead enabler in this domain.