MoMo#8 Highlight: “50 billion ad impressions on mobile globally”

MoMo#8 Highlight: “50 billion ad impressions on mobile globally”

A full house at the Mobile Monday session (titled “A look at Mobile Value Added Services”) spurred on by the enthusiasm of a bunch of great international presenters, resulted in takeaway experiences that was said to be “ valuable” for everyone working in the mobile value added space. It was most encouraging to hear the stats from Paul Berney (Mobile Marketing Association, Europe) showing that there are “ 50 billion mobile ad impressions” recorded per month globally. He further says, “if this does not get you paying attention, then I don’t know what will”.

There are numerous case studies in Europe using Value added services to improve  customer relationships (including acquisition and brand building) e.g. European airlines and rail receiving feedback from customers and proactively responding to issues based on SMS’s received. These cases were extended to the retail industry e.g. getting SMS feedback from customers and being responsive about re-positioning of items in the shop floor.

According to Michael de Souza (Buzzcity), the increase in branded mobile content value added services is a noticeable trend creating better utility of that marketing budget. The visual cues by Thabiet Allie (Vodacom’s content management division) juicily illustrated the point that people still buy based on strong emotive associations and not necessarily money value e.g. the case of popular You magazine – people like to feel comforted that TV or film stars also have the same issues as the common man!

Brett St Clair (Admob, the international mobile advertising network) asked the magic question, “Where are we heading with mobile considering South Africa is a developing country?”. According to Paul Berney, there are no benchmarks and they see new countries springing up like mushrooms developing strong revenues even from an emerging infrastructure perspective; the current case to watch is Turkey (just getting into 3G). Turkey has many similarities to South Africa, one which is notably the tendency of earlier mobile value added service adoption by younger market segments encourages highly ramped revenue generation for newer value added services e.g. in the social networking space.