Tools Emerge to Reward Mobile Ad Watching with Service Discounts

Five diverse software suppliers have pre-integrated a solution that could allow mobile operators and advertiser partners to target ads to specific users while empowering those users to opt in to ad viewing through service discount incentives.

Although mobile video, music and games are on the rise, mobile operator attempts to monetize those services via advertising and sponsorship continue to struggle with finding a formula for delivering relevant, targeted ads in a way that is palatable to significant numbers of consumers.

Enabling subscribers to opt into ad-watching in exchange for content access incentives may provide one way to hurdle consumer resistance. But to facilitate such opt-in programs will require integration of mobile operator billing, rating, messaging and media streaming with ad-insertion systems, ad campaign management systems and handset applications.

Toward that end, software vendors Anam, Cibenix, Mobile Cohesion, Openet and SLA Mobile have formed a collaborative venture to deliver a largely pre-integrated solution:
• Mobile Cohesion’s content management system enables third-party advertisers to access the mobile operator’s ad server and campaign management systems;
• Anam provides messaging systems that append ads to Short Messaging Service (SMS) or Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) messages sent by subscribers who opt in to advertising in exchange for free or discounted messaging;
• Cibenex provides an on-device Java portal that takes control of a mobile handset idle screen and connects to a network ad server to enable ad streaming to the handset;
• Openet provides a transactional intelligence platform that collects ad-insertion ‘events’ and transmits them to the campaign management system and to operator billing and rating systems to fulfill service discounts according to ad consumption on a per-subscriber basis; and
• SLA Mobile provides campaign management and service systems integration services.

The overall challenge for operators seeking to experiment with offers of free or discounted service in exchange for viewing ads lies with integrating ad-management and ad-insertion platforms with operator billing and subscriber management platforms, says Shane O’Flynn, Openet’s vice president of managed services and support. We connect to the ad server, and as it inserts an ad, we collect that as an event and pass it to the billing system.”

To optimize the relevance of each ad inserted, the joint solution from the vendor partners—introduced at the Mobile World Congress in February as the Mobile Advertising Alliance—will leverage an operator’s per-subscriber intelligence.

The operators have the exact demographics and behavior of the subscriber, and marshalling that data becomes very attractive to advertisers, but it’s still unclear what that information is worth,” O’Flynn says. Nobody’s quite sure. If they pay 10 cents per eyeball on a Super Bowl TV ad, how much is the eyeball worth if you know it is in the key demographic you want? The only indication is Google is making a fortune. Everybody knows there’s a big market.”

O’Flynn insists that the Alliance approach will ensure not only that ads are relevant and delivered only to volunteering subscribers, but that the ads will be relatively non intrusive. There have been successful opt-in campaigns,” he says. There are people willing to accept ads. What Cibenex can do with the idle screen is not intrusive any more than an operator logo” found on most handset idle screens.

On the business-to-business side of the platform, the Alliance system provides third-party access into the ad server, campaign manager and operator back office. Through what O’Flynn calls Mobile Cohesion’s low-touch” portal, an advertiser can log into the system to manage a campaign and upload ads.

To manage targeting, the system queries subscriber profiles held in the ad server. The ad server ‘answers’ whether a person has opted in and then matches that person’s demographics to the demographics identified by various ad campaigns.

The Mobile Advertising Alliance partners further believe that their integrated platform can become something of a learning machine, in large part through continual recording of transactional events across large operator networks. As one measure of how granular transactional intelligence is becoming among operators, Openet’s top five operator customers together processed more than ten billion records per day in 2007, using its real-time event processing FusionWorks Platform, and Openet predicts that this volume will quadruple in the next 24 months.

We watch and monitor everything that passes through the network, and over time we collect data on click-throughs,” O’Flynn explains. Every time there’s an SMS ad insertion, for example, we’d collect and pass it to the campaign manager. Perhaps we sent an ad to 45,000 subscribers, all 25- to 35-year old males, and the click through rate was 7 percent, and of those X percent made a purchase. It is kind of the bit that Nielsen does for TV: once a person engaged with your campaign, this is what they did. With usage data, there’s no reason we couldn’t provide more and more granular visibility into what people are doing or not doing and enable correlation of usage with a range of profile or behavioral activities.”

As Anam executive Gerry McKenna put it during the Mobile World Congress, Flexible campaign management and real-time feedback reporting ensure that advertisers can continually refine campaigns and only pay for results.”

In practice, the cost of computing real-time personalization across tens of millions of subscribers will have its limits,” O’Flynn says. One-on-one rating plans where every subscriber gets a personalized plan and personalized targeted advertising have been discussed for years, but the value of getting down to that level of granularity probably isn’t there. Google rarely targets me exactly, but on a rough idea of my demographics. I’m not sure people are comfortable with computers having that much knowledge of them. When you get down that granular you’re paying too much, but the industry can continue to define more and more precise demographics. The challenge is maintaining privacy while still bringing the value to the advertiser. The balance is the cost of the specified hit versus the value you get form the hit.”

To ensure that operators don’t break trust with their subscribers, It’s important that nobody can abuse the information,” he says. Advertisers are able to self provision, but they’re not able to move outside the demographics you’ve assigned to them.”

The Alliance may add additional partners to the mix, he says. We’d like to also link with the folks who are already doing the ad aggregation. That’s one area where I’d think we might sign somebody additional up to the alliance. They’d be the next thing at a top layer. At the lower level, we also might want to integrate with an IVR system or other components of devices or data messaging.”

O’Flynn describes the Alliance’s Mobile World Congress debut as very successful. People of high caliber among the operators confirmed this is exactly what they’re looking for. The real confirmation will happen when they come to us with a check book.”

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