Mobile Advertising - Airtel
Mobile Advertising - Airtel Mobile Advertising - Airtel
Mobile Advertising 2012
- Page 2 and 3: airtel iCreate 2012 APM recently jo
- Page 4 and 5: The existing business operations se
- Page 6 and 7: The Opportunity: airtel iCreate 201
<strong>Mobile</strong><br />
<strong>Advertising</strong><br />
2012
airtel iCreate 2012<br />
APM recently joined Mdigi, a new media organization as the sales head. He had not thought<br />
that selling advertising on the mobile was so tough. But he is finding it difficult to meet his<br />
targets and is wondering where he and his team have gone wrong.<br />
Just yesterday, he had had a long meeting with a leading mobile handset brand, brand N,<br />
and he still hasn’t been able to convince them to spend Rs.5 lakh on mobile advertising. And<br />
this is a brand that spends at least Rs. 100 crore per annum on television advertising!<br />
Why is the mobile handset brand N not willing to spend? What are their concerns? What is<br />
holding them back?<br />
APM is concerned. Is he following the right selling strategies?<br />
Industry Overview: m-advertising<br />
The Indian advertising industry is currently pegged at Rs.35000 crores & growing at an<br />
average of 10% per annum for the past 5 years. TV and Press have over the last 5 years<br />
garnered 40% each of the total advertisement spends.<br />
However, the world of advertising is changing at a dizzying pace. New media are<br />
transforming advertising and consumer expectations have changed accordingly. There’s a<br />
whole new media eco-system which is evolving by the day. Media agencies are building inhouse<br />
capabilities or acquiring new outfits to tap into the potential of m-advertising. In this<br />
dynamic environment, no communications platform holds more promise than the mobile<br />
device. Over the last few years, the mobile space has undergone revolutionary change –<br />
faster networks, falling prices of smart-phones, growth in mobile internet, apps & data<br />
usage have created a new unique opportunity for advertising.<br />
Marketers are beginning to look at this medium as it has the intrinsic advantages of reaching<br />
the right audience with the right message.<br />
While SMS was the undisputed leader of mobile messaging, recent regulatory changes have<br />
curtailed the use of this medium, though it still holds a lot of potential in terms of reaching a<br />
wider set of audience (one-to-one marketing), ease-of-use and device agnostic working. On<br />
the other hand, more Indians are discovering internet on mobile- search and rich format<br />
advertising is all set to explode. <strong>Advertising</strong> impressions in India are growing at an amazing<br />
pace, Inmobi served 17bn impressions last month. Though mobile advertising is still at a<br />
nascent stage, the potential is large.
<strong>Mobile</strong> Ad PIE:<br />
Business Overview:<br />
Source: IMRB International<br />
airtel iCreate 2012<br />
airtel recently stepped in this segment to help brands discover the power of mobile<br />
advertising. To deliver an efficient advertising experience to both the end user & the<br />
advertiser, airtel has taken pioneering steps by building a state of the art advertising<br />
platform which has integrated advertising inventories across platforms such as SMS, MMS,<br />
Voice portals, WAP, USSD & DTH.<br />
<strong>Airtel</strong> had two choices to decide the business operations model for mobile advertising.<br />
Model 1: In-house management of sales and operations: Would have required building a<br />
complete team of sales, media planners, creative, operations team and in-house inventory<br />
management.<br />
Model 2: Outsourcing the business operations on the well established revenue share model<br />
to ensure rapid scalability.<br />
airtel chose the latter. A business operations partner was selected on its ability to bring in<br />
deep experience of advertising industry and a sound strategic understanding of mobile<br />
advertising. The partner deployed resources for sales, ad-platform operations and analytics.
The existing business operations setup is depicted below:<br />
Current Situation:<br />
airtel iCreate 2012<br />
Marketers consider traditional media as staple diet though digital has now started making<br />
serious inroads. Digital in India has evolved & thrived on its ability to reach younger<br />
audience with response based advertising. This ability has led to selling strategies being<br />
based on cost per lead, cost per click & cost per impression. The same expectations are<br />
carried by marketers and media agencies when it comes to using mobile as an advertising<br />
tool. Advertisers are struggling to cope with this new beast (m-advertising) which they know<br />
is a powerful tool but they don’t know how to deploy this to meet their communication<br />
tasks - be it the inventory/platform on mobile or the message to be used or be it the way to<br />
measure it return on investment (RoI).<br />
By virtue of its pin-pointed targeting and ease of measurability, various models for pricing<br />
have been used by airtel to deliver campaigns. These models are primarily the same as<br />
being used in digital advertising viz. Cost per Mille/Thousand (CPM/CPT) impressions, Cost<br />
per Click (CPC) or Cost per Lead (CPL).
Inventories for m-advertising:<br />
1 .SMS<br />
airtel iCreate 2012<br />
While recent regulatory framework has curtailed the use of this medium SMS still remains a<br />
very potent tool in the hands of marketers. The potential to use SMS to download apps,<br />
discover mobile wap sites or to serve mobile coupons is what airtel propagates to brands.<br />
2. WAP<br />
This is an area where most brands want to make a connection with the young audience.<br />
There is now a greater emphasis on mobile sites, branded apps and mobile games. With<br />
millions of mobile apps being downloaded every year of which 90% are free, increasingly<br />
consumers are finding value in these for infotainment, travel related activities, shopping etc.<br />
While airtel serves advertising on its own wap portal (airtel-live), monetization of<br />
impressions on apps, games, mobile sites are currently controlled by the publisher<br />
themselves or aggregators such as AdMob, Inmobi, Vserve.<br />
3. Voice Solutions:<br />
The limitations of mass media are brought in sharp focus in illiterate, media dark areas of<br />
rural India. <strong>Mobile</strong> with a penetration of more than 51% is the largest medium. TV’s<br />
penetration is just 34%. The opportunity to offer voice based advertising solutions is vast.<br />
airtel is monetizing its own IVR services & out bound dialers (OBD’s) to reach out to rural<br />
areas.<br />
4. Audio Visual content<br />
<strong>Mobile</strong> advertising inventories like MMS thrive amongst consumers but find few takers<br />
within the advertising industry.<br />
5. Mass Reach inventory<br />
airtel has started deploying advertising solutions on End-of-Call-notification, that all prepaid<br />
customers receive post making a call. This inventory has the potential to build rapid<br />
awareness & massive reach in a short span of time.<br />
6. Location Based targeting<br />
airtel is deploying solutions which use location based targeting for highly contextual and<br />
hence effective campaigns.
The Opportunity:<br />
airtel iCreate 2012<br />
<strong>Mobile</strong> advertising can offer specific solutions in the entire buying cycle of a product or<br />
service. <strong>Mobile</strong> solutions are versatile. They can range from eye-balls to actually help drive<br />
footfalls.<br />
ANALYTICS – THE DIFFERENTIATOR<br />
The single biggest differentiator between mobile and all other media is the ability to profile<br />
and target the consumer with great precision. Attributes such as ARPU, handset owned,<br />
data usage etc can yield rich segments for delivering better ROI.<br />
MOBILE -- A GREAT MEDIA MULTIPLIER<br />
<strong>Mobile</strong> adds reach to an advertiser’s media plan, especially for light mass media consumers,<br />
such as youth, who are difficult to catch with print/dailies or even TV. <strong>Mobile</strong> adds<br />
frequency, adds to the OTS a campaign is delivering. <strong>Mobile</strong> adds impact. The mobile phone<br />
is always within reach. Most SMS’s are opened within 4 minutes on an average.
Current Situation:<br />
airtel iCreate 2012<br />
With all these characteristics one would think that mobile would be the preferred medium<br />
but it has not yet caught the fancy of advertisers. M-advertising is still at a stage where<br />
internet advertising was a couple of years ago. Everyone thinks it is good to do, but no one<br />
wants to take the first step.<br />
APM & the sales team, backed with a planning arm, are in touch with the Top 10 leading<br />
media agencies and media resellers. He is also in direct touch with leading brands in high<br />
spending categories such as Handsets, Auto, Banking, Financial organizations, FMCG, White<br />
goods etc. His own analysis of the situation is:<br />
The process from initial proposal to conversion is taking time.<br />
The brands which are interested do not want to commit spends before doing pilots.<br />
The decision makers in media agency are usually form digital background who evaluate<br />
mobile from the lens online advertising undermining the use of m-advertising.<br />
Pricing for mobile inventories like SMS, EOCN etc. are dismally low and therefore the<br />
potential is low.<br />
TASK<br />
What specific actionable will you recommend to APM in his selling efforts, to gain a<br />
disproportionate share of the mobile ad pie?