Can Mobile keep up its promise of delivering zero media wastage!
By : Chintan Katare
Head of Sales - mADmart
It is now a fact proven beyond any doubt that mobile advertising is a rapidly growing opportunity for marketers and mobile adtech firms. Mobile screen has become the third largest advertising medium in India and there are enough reports and numbers out there which confirm this going up in the future. It is one medium that follows the consumers wherever they go. Also, it is a platform where an ever—increasing number of consumers are spending their time.
There are about 1.1 billion mobile connections in India as of November 2016 and about 968 million active connections as per a Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) report. The total unique mobile subscriber base stands at nearly 616 million as of June 2016. This is way ahead in terms of reach to consumers any advertising medium could offer to the marketers. Hence, the share of overall advertising spends being allocated to mobile media is increasing steadily.
Every channel adds up to the reach
In its initial years, SMS and Voice (Outbound Dialers or OBDs as we know) were the most common channels of mobile advertising connecting brands with consumers. In fact, they are still the preferred medium of brand communication in mainly rural markets. An excellent example of the OBD’s success is HUL’s ‘Kan Khajura Tesan’.
However, with the advent of affordable smartphones, high speed data connectivity, cheaper data plans, India has got online from mobile in a big way and naturally the advertisements followed them too in the form of WAP and App banners, video ads, SMS, USSD and what not!.
Innovative media delivery channels like Rich Content Message (RCM) offered by the telecom operators are gaining popularity among brands. It is fast emerging as an alternative to the text SMS. With this channel, advertisers can send now images and videos as an SMS to the user’s inbox making it a rich media SMS. In the last couple of years, the usage of RCM has almost exponentially grown, with many brands across automobile, retail, real estate and FMCG sectors using it to great success leading to repeat usage.
While mobile advertising has met with its fair share of success, can brands reach out to the entire chunk of over 600 million Indian mobile subscribers to cross-promote their products through rich media banners, videos, native, etc.? The answer fortunately is ‘They can!’ There is only one stakeholder who can truly own the mobile consumer and deliver this kind of reach to consumers across segments and regions. And it is the Mobile Operator!
Consumer insights make the reach worth gold
Reach is not the only factor when it comes to measuring advertising ROI. Media wastage was a significant challenge for brands when they depended on traditional media like TV and newspapers. Precisely reaching the right segment holds the key to reducing media wastage. This is where mobile operators have a telling advantage as a media owner, where insights derived from data available with them can help substantially in improving the preciseness of targeting.
Apart from the basic location (rural/urban), usage (prepaid/postpaid, data/non-data, 2G/3G/4G, voice/data consumption pattern) and device (smartphone/feature phone, Ios/Android) attributes, the operator also has access to the confidential KYC registered details like name, gender, home location (circle, town type, division, civic body, district, city, area, pin code, village). While there are stringent norms for this personally identifiable information (PII) to protect the privacy of the consumers, this confidential data can be used to provide aggregated behavioral insights by age-group, income class, etc.
In addition, the mobile operator can also provide some advanced data analytics based targeting. It can categorise consumers into several tags like E-Commerce users, M-wallet users, Fleet taxi users, Credit card users, international travelers, food lovers, movie goers, car owners, Online grocery shoppers, Mutual fund and stock investors, salaried people, tax payers and many more. With these micro levels of targeting, a brand can accurately segment its own target group from the vast consumer base of an operator and engage with them. This drastically reduces media wastage, in many cases to absolute zero.
Targeting, retargeting for better results!
With the wide range of insights coupled with unparalleled reach, brand owners can rely on mobile operators to promote and cross promote their products. A leading bike engine oil manufacturer promoted its bike servicing initiative to support independent, non-franchisee motorcycle workshops among more than 10, 000 two-wheeler owners in a city while reinforcing its brand image.
Such targeting can also be used across a number of sectors like Banking, FMCG, Retail, Online Travel, Online Food Ordering and so on. The potential of identifying the correct consumer for a brand to cross-promote is unlimited with a mobile operator as brands can get to even the most granular target segment like a zip code or a segment of consumers using mid-end handsets only and so on.
Mobile media definitely is operator’s pride and others envy!