By Gregory Cevaer, Product Marketing – Prim’Vision

Whatever the channel, advertisement is considered like a potential intrusion in our life. Unwanted, noisy, unbearable, useless, most of us agree to say that we undergo the world of advertising and we do not want to receive more.

With the rise of mobile services driven by data usage and graphical handset’s capabilities, we are facing a great new challenge. Considered as the most personal device with high level of identification, the internet model with full-spammed mailbox or pop-up’s invasion is forbidden if we want to develop the promising mobile advertising business.

By establishing a trusted environment where the user is at the crossroad of the ecosystem with the brands and the operators, our aim is to create a new kind of relationship based on an interactive loyalty community, a one-to-one marketing channel, where the advertisers are the users best friends.

This conceptual approach has to be supported by an access technology linking the advertisers and the users through his mobile. To be smart, focus has to be directed on:

- Respect of privacy: users do not want to be invaded by ads, but they are still looking for information’s. Our point of view is that to be compliant, a mobile ad solution has to provide an on-demand opt-in system for each ad delivered and to automatically learn about user interests by creating an anonymous target, dynamically updated, without annoying the users with personal information’s’ request. User qualification allows efficient targeting and relevancy. By being relevant and personalized, advertisings are evolving into desirable information.

- User experience: Respect the privacy is a fundamental basis but undesired message will still be considered as boring and intrusive. As a consequence, ads have to be delivered only when the user is requesting for them. For the mobile medium, advertisers has to dismiss their mass communication strategy for a one-to-one customized and interactive communication establishing a dialogue allowing to track user’s experience from the first click to the final buying action.

- Prime Time: Today’s model of advertising’s display without any respect for the user’s context of reception is not adequate. To catch the audience, advertising has to be delivered at the right time within the right context. Conversely to the TV, mobile enables an interactive dialogue in which the user can choose and adapt his availability. Public transportation 8:00 a.m, afterwork 7:00 p.m, before calling the voice mail, each prime time is unique and should be exploited.

- Local ubiquity: To be successful, mobile advertising has to work hand in hand with location based services. Ads coming from the shopping centers where you go twice a week are becoming useful information. By considering where the user is at a precise time, we are opening a new range of communication channel for the local advertiser associating consumer profile’s targeting and precise geographical segmentation.

- Tribe: To grab the mobile advertising opportunities, advertisers have to become the user’s best friends because our friends are our favorite advertisers. The ability to enable a social ad exchange is a key success factor for mobile advertising. When you share with your community – family, friends, and colleagues – you are in a trusted environment in which you will accept and take care about the shared information.

- Rewards: Mobile advertising’s issue is to push up the MNO’s ARPU that is actually downgrading. By introducing a new model in which a part of the ad budget is directly reattributed to the end users, MNO and service provider will keep a part of the budget creating a new ad-funded ARPU and new rewarding schemes for the end users. Free is now available thanks to advertisings.

All of these are key elements to make mobile advertising a killer service for all of us: advertisers, operators, service providers and users. Mobile advertising is more complex than push-SMS or graphic banner. It has to create a smart channel with mixed marketing applications: loyalty, discount, survey, feedback management, after sales…

Based on full screen video format and interactive consumer experience, mobile advertising has the potential to become a social media between brands, consumers and their tribes.

Advertising is now part of the entertainment industry. Digital consumers are getting more sophisticated. Well-conceived and honest mobile advertising associated to consumer’s tribes as most effective media channels can have impact like never before.