State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

Wireless week has a special report out on mobile advertising- its challenges and rewards. As with any new technology, business is trying to make sense of what will work. The report points out that “advertisers are familiar with working with print, TV, radio and the Internet as separate entities. But mobile networks can bring together the Internet, video, text, gaming, music and more.”  An important point as emphasized in the report is: Advertisers want to buy audiences and not technology.

I am including an excerpt about the sms based advertising in the US. I consider this approach relevant to Pakistan’s market.

Text-based campaigns and WAP sites have become the two main avenues for brands to reach mobile subscribers.

One of the companies involved in text-based advertising is qtags, a Houston-based mobile marketing company that uses short codes to provide mobile interactive content, including promotions and coupons. Its clients include Accenture, NAS Recruitment, Fidelity Investments, Toyota, Verizon Wireless, American Express, CITI and Hewlett Packard.

“Our goal,” says founder Allison Gower, “is to help the consumer control their advertising.” Qtags connects consumers and brands off-line and online, Gower says, by making content interactive via SMS. An example is texting a keyword like “Verizon” to qtags’ shortcode, 78247, and the user gets information about jobs available at Verizon Wireless. The texts are saved online. Many of the current campaigns are job recruitment related.

The service can help brand names build communities of consumers who have an interest in their products, Gower says. The overall service is free of advertising although community sites might have sponsored sites.

Mobile provides context of time and place, she says. When someone enters a store and sees a promotion, a consumer can text to get specials listed on their phone.

Since its launch, Honda also has started sponsoring the site and Hyundai will join soon, according to Sharon Knitter, product management director. When Cars.com started working on the service earlier this year, not many manufacturers had WAP sites, but more are building them, she says.

Air2Web has developed mobile marketing programs for such companies as The Weather Channel and UPS. CMO Bill Jones says Air2Web helps its customers track not only how many people have visited their WAP sites, but also who the visitors are because log-in information is collected.

This kind of user information makes it possible for brands to build loyalty among consumers, Jones says, and also can be used for local search so geographic information is collected.

“You can determine how you did with different demographics and then decide how you can change things to make your campaign better,” he says.

Another mobile marketing company is go2, which owns and operates more than 350 mobile Websites for its carrier-centric go2 Mobile Content Network. The company says it has delivered more than 1 billion WAP page views for local search information and content since it launched in 2001. More than 335 of its sites are dedicated to specific colleges and universities.

Lee Hancock, founder and CEO, says advertising is coming of age on WAP sites because mobile “is a very high-touch, high-value advertising medium.”

In addition to its WAP sites, go2 also runs a polling system which asks site visitors to answer a question of the day. The system, called Speedpoll, generated 1 million responses in its first nine months.

The company’s research of its users determined that the overwhelming majority of wireless subscribers, in the 80% to 90% range, are willing to accept advertising on their phones if they can get content for free, Hancock says.

Credit: Wireless Week