May 28, 2008
Streamlining and Safeguarding the Relationship of Content Providers and Mobile Operators through Campaign Management and Analytics
Evanna Kearins, Director of Marketing,Valista
Operators need to ensure that off-deck services are legitimate, appropriate and consistent with their brand. Content providers also have a responsibility to ensure that their content and marketing efforts are aligned with the operators’ policies to safeguard and strengthen partner relations. Operators can do this by evaluating and approving the content providers’ campaigns and the campaign lifecycle, including the business rules associated with age restricted content and services.
Campaigns are used in the US to provide details of a marketing campaign such as voting associated with an interactive TV show, a competition on a drink bottle or the latest song from a particular artist to operators. Campaigns can be one off such as voting for your favorite singer in American Idol or a subscription such as ‘ringtone of the week’ where the customer pays a fee every week. Operators review the details and approve the campaign for their network or they reject it and prevent it from being used by their customers. This model provides the operator strict control over access to their customers and the use of their customers’ bills as a payment mechanism and enables operators to provide good customer service should things go wrong. This is very different from other markets where anything can be sold to customers and the operator has no visibility as to what is being sold and how to support the customer when things go wrong.
Campaign Management provides facilities for the on-boarding, review and approval of new campaigns and is specifically relevant for the Premium SMS-based off-deck market, although it can also apply to other forms of billing such as WAP billing. The requirement for Campaign Management is driven by the mobile operators in the US, where a strict set of guidelines and rules are enforced by operators that require the prior submission and approval of all Premium SMS campaigns before they may be billed for by each operator. This is designed to limit consumer exposure to unsolicited billing by third parties or abuse of the Premium SMS charging mechanism by content providers.
The problem however is that each operator tends to define a campaign in a different way. They do not have a common set of guidelines, workflows or data fields for campaigns submission and approval. In order to enable a more robust and consistent method of managing campaigns, operators in the USA need to come together to agree a standard which would define common workflows and a consistent approval process. This would make it much easier and quicker for aggregators and large content providers to collate and submit information for campaigns which would also speed up the time to market for new content and services by automating the process for on-boarding content providers and setting up and approving their campaigns. It would also reduce the time required to deal with queries and increases customer satisfaction, making it easier and more efficient for operators to support their partners, reducing the costs and staff requirements for the operator, aggregator and content provider.
The use of campaign analytics allows mobile operators to more accurately predict specific metrics of campaigns based on partner performance history, related popularity of similar campaigns and other trends. This enables operators to better determine which campaigns may be successful and plan performance from both a revenue and network traffic perspective, assisting in partner negotiations and strategy by producing objective, measurable results of partner performance and ensuring predictions match reality. The reporting piece of campaign analytics shows with great accuracy the performance of a given campaign. It can be broken down into detail such as price points, charging models, least and most popular campaigns etc. Operators can then use campaign analytics to manage network bandwidth, predict and view bottlenecks in the system due to high volume campaigns running simultaneously and can give priority to more important campaigns e.g. interactive TV. They can also plan network sizing for messaging and data throughput and determine where the most revenue is coming from.
Campaign Analytics can be used to:
- Ensure the network has sufficient capacity
- Allow the operator to work out quiet periods in the network and then construct marketing programs to fill the quiet periods
- Predict if it is worth processing the campaign. For example a partner may state that campaign will generate 100,000 transactions per month at $0.99 each. However, historically they only achieve 10% of the number of transactions they claim indicating this campaign will achieve only achieve a revenue of $999 per month which may not be worth the effort of approving, testing and managing it. Alternatively the operator could use different settlement terms.
These projections start with campaign submission and during the approval process the operator can examine the projected transaction volumes for the campaign. This can be used to determine the value of the campaign to the operator and guide the approval process. Once a campaign has been approved and is active then the operator can monitor its progress against the projection. The operator can also determine when they have peaks of campaigns and when they may be able to handle additional campaigns and fill gaps. Operators can also potentially share the results of campaigns with their aggregator partners, which would help them to fine tune future marketing campaigns with the content providers. This would further help to streamline and safeguard the relationship between content providers, aggregators and operators, as they work more closely together to be successful.
Business conditions are changing more rapidly than ever before, putting pressure on mobile operators to become more agile and proactive in building and strengthening relationships with valued customers. By applying predictive analytics to their existing marketing processes, operators can engage with customers more profitably. Campaign management and analytics tools can help to increase both customer value and loyalty by optimizing interactions across all channels—including outbound marketing campaigns and inbound customer contacts. It also helps to streamline the relationship between operators and content providers ensuring that the right metrics are in place to ensure their mutual success.
Competition for brand share grows constantly as operators strive to improve their marketing strategies, reduce service costs, increase customer loyalty and work more closely with their content provider partners. To compete effectively, products must be marketed to the highest value customer segments through the most efficient distribution channels, and supported by effective messaging. Consequently, campaign management and analytics have become necessary and invaluable tools in improving the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
