Blyk scraps it! No, it doesn't!

Blyk, the ad-funded MVNO for 16-24 year-olds has been in the news lately a lot. The trigger was a piece by NMA according to which Blyk had announced it would scrap its consumer offering and concentrate on selling its technology/concept/both to other operators. This was quickly refuted by Blyk. The "final" position appears to being a little unclear.

Now, quite a while ago, I issued concerns about the viability of their business model as a stand-alone ad-funded MVNO (see here), and I stand by it (even if they have varied their model a little recently: from 217 free messages and 43 minutes of free calls per month to a £15 discount voucher). If they now claim that this was "only" a proof of concept, I must say that this smacks more than a bit of hopeful PR although this may just be semantics:

The pitfalls of an MVNO-only model aside, their approach is rather intriguing: if you can segment the market as they do and thus create consumer (or people) clusters that are much more homogenous than most media will be able to assemble (18-49-year-olds anyone?), you have a fairly powerful opportunity to interact with your people more directly, more intensely and - most importantly - more relevant messages than you otherwise could. And this has value, and lots of it!

Combine this now with the headaches of your ordinary operator, of which the biggest one probably (still) is churn. I am lacking current accurate numbers but, historically, an operator's churn rate (the percentage of users it would lose in 12 months) was up to 1/3. And this is painful, very painful! So get a tool that allows to reduce that churn significantly and you're off to the races. Combine this with a (functioning because highly targeted) advertising model and you can even increase your margins on this model. Sounds good? Certainly does to me!

And so it is not a big surprise that other operators are said to have shown a lot of interest in the model. Vodafone, for one, have had their own advertising-related announcement in the last week, and the use of Blyk's model and expertise could be quite compelling to them (as some voices already suggest). From Blyk's point of view, such a model is also easier and more quickly scalable than a stand-alone expansion and it should therefore greatly aid Blyk to build the critical mass it needs to stay (or become) relevant to advertisers.

It might still fly, you know...

Image credit: http://asetcenter.net/images/article/mobile_adv.jpg

Mobile Advertising works!

We seem to be having another successful showcase of mobile advertising: this time, mobile ad firm Greystripe and research firm Dynamic Logic have produced a report that confirms that mobile ads are uber-effective: they report about a case study for a mobile advertising campaign for The Golden Compass (which was broadcast during load times for certain mobile games). The campaign brought about a 19.3% increase in awareness of the film’s title a 9.5% increase in interest in seeing the film among all respondents. The ad apparently also outperformed a typical online advertising campaign by 52% in terms of brand awareness.

The case study also states that results showed that WAP sites were effective in influencing
a highly-engaged audience, particularly when advertising new movies:

• Among overall respondents, 35% say they use their mobile phones for “finding theater and movie times,” and 29% “watch movie trailers.”
• Frequent movie-goers — those who have seen at least two movies in the theatre in the past two months — use the mobile Internet more often than non-frequent moviegoers (79% for frequent movie-goers vs. 58% for non-movie goers).

It would have been interesting to know if the game was actually the mobile game for the Golden Compass (published by Glu, which was surprisingly absent from any mention) or if it was just more or less random games selected. There was also only little to read about the details of the survey, etc, etc. As Greystripe has somewhat of a vested interest in this, one might be querying...

The naked numbers from above are in themselves impressive. However, I am calling for more information here as this is per se not substantial enough to merit a whole big new world... I am inquiring for more details... Fingers crossed.

Mercedes Markets Mobile

It is another one of these examples where PR speak dilutes the message till no one knows what it actually is but here goes: Mercedes has instructed an agency to increase its use of mobile phones for marketing purposes, and the good folks from the PR agency do not forget to mention that "no other automotive manufacturer in the UK has implemented and maintained such a large mobile presence" So: what does that mean?

They want to "encourage active response from traditional advertising such as poster, print, TV, and DM, via mobile text calls to action, driving users to Mercedes-Benz mobile sites." But how, with what, what for? I don't know and they don't say. Now, mobiles and mobility - there surely is a common theme here somewhere. But will they do more than inform customers via SMS and try this Bluetooth trial? I would really wish they'd be somewhat more aggressive in communicating initiatives.

12Snap back at home...

Neomedia has sold 12Snap back to its management incl co-founder Birkel for $5m (remuneration is $1.1m cash plus debt, services, etc), reports PR Newswire.

That means that Neomedia wiped out a cool $17m value in little more than a year: you may remember they acquired 12snap for $22m early 2006.

All the very best to the good folks of 12snap!!!