Anantha K., a 28-year-old software engineer, was pleasantly surprised when he received a message on his handset from a travel website offering discount deals, even as he was surfing a similar site on his BlackBerry. The ad Anantha received could be an indication of how mobile advertising companies are trying to target customers in India — tailoring their ads to meet the specific needs of the customer.
With a subscriber base of nearly 300 million users in India, cellphones are potentially a strong medium for reaching out to customers, particularly through targeted messages — though experts say it may be a year or two before this business really takes off. Investors and advertisers are interested but are yet to fully explore the medium. Efforts are on to see that it becomes a viable advertising medium without violating a customer’s privacy through unsolicited messages.
Advertisers haven’t yet opened up to the idea of product campaigns on handsets. “It takes a lot of time, as much as three-six months, to explain the benefits of this medium to advertisers, unlike for, say, television, where they know the reach is huge,” says Naveen Tewari, CEO, mKhoj Solutions Pvt. Ltd. Also, to make it really successful, the medium needs to be seen on a par with television and print media and not as a stand-alone marketing channel.
The challenges haven’t stopped companies from looking at innovative ways to push mobile advertisements. While mobile value-added services provider Mobile2Win India Pvt. Ltd is creating mobile games based on TV ads that can be downloaded, mKhoj Solutions is focusing on Internet mobile advertising — advertising on the mobile platform becomes an extension of surfing on the Internet via the handset. Chennai-based Mobile-Worx Pvt. Ltd, a mobile solutions company, has launched a service called ZestADZ that enables the delivery of highly targeted, location-sensitive, contextually relevant advertisements over the mobile phone.
A 2008 study by media buying agency GroupM put ad expenditure over the mobile phone medium in India in 2007 at Rs45 crore. Mobile advertising firms say bigger brands are more open to leveraging this medium than small or medium companies, with fast moving consumer goods, or FMCG, and financial services companies more receptive. Brands such as Domino’s Pizza, Pizza Hut, Cadbury, ITC, Coca-Cola, HSBC India, ICICI Bank, CitiFinancial, Max New York Life Insurance and Fullerton India are already using the mobile phone to reach more customers.