Reliance Communications Ltd., India's leading telecoms player, announced the implementation of an integrated carrier?class mobile marketing software platform called Neon on its network.

Neon is a product from Flytxt, a mobile advertising and marketing technology provider with experience in various global markets. It features a mobile CRM database and all the mobile applications required to conduct large?scale mobile customer engagement programs.

"Reliance is a mobile operator with more than 60 million subscribers, the vast majority prepaid, so the easiest way for Reliance to communicate with them is the mobile channel," said Tim Williams, London-based cofounder and executive vice president of worldwide sales for Flytxt.

"They use text messages and voice messages to communicate about their products and services, to let their customers know what they have available, provide good customer service and maximize revenues, and they need a platform to do that effectively," he said.

"We have a long history in mobile marketing, and we serve customers doing high-volume mobile marketing as a core activity, so operators are our key clients."

With the implementation of the Neon system, Reliance Communications hopes to get a competitive edge in growing brand awareness and driving sales by reaching out to millions of customers in a cost-effective manner through targeting.

With Flytxt Neon in place, Reliance Communications will be able to leverage its existing business data and boost voice and VAS revenues through mobile marketing.

"We help them target people who are most interested or likely to be most interested in the messages being sent," Mr. Williams said. "The challenge is one of scale, because they have tens of millions of customers, and they want to communicate with them in a personalized way to target them with offers that appeal to them.

"The challenge is to use the information that Reliance has available for targeting," he said. "At the moment Reliance is focused on promoting its own products and services, but if you look to the future, this information -- demographic and behavioral information such as what they like to buy and what Web/WAP sites people like to spend time on -- will also be very useful to advertisers.

"Advertisers are keen to pay to help them to reach their subscribers, so we anticipate that very soon this will become a mobile advertising platform for brands as well."

Reliance Communications has enabled mobile marketing and advertising campaigns in the past.

Apart from using mobile marketing for existing products, Reliance Communications also offers mobile advertising services for other companies.

More than 50 well known brands in various sectors such as fast-moving consumer goods, finance and automotive have run mobile marketing campaigns on Reliance Communications' network.

Reliance Communications is the flagship company of the Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group, which currently claims a net worth of more than $14 billion, cash flow of $3 billion, net profit of $2 billion and zero net debt.

Reliance Communications is the only Indian wireless carrrier on the Asia-Pacific board of the Mobile Marketing Association.

The company, with a customer base of more than 65 million, including 2 million-plus individual overseas retail customers, ranks among the top 10 Telecom companies in the world by number of customers in a single country.

Reliance Communications corporate clientele includes 2,100 Indian and multinational corporations and more than 800 global, regional and domestic carriers.

Reliance Communications has a pan?India, integrated wireless and wireline, convergent (voice, data and video) digital network that covers more than 20,000 towns and 450,000 villages.

Flytxt is a technology provider for Mobile Marketing 2.0. Neon, the carrier?class integrated mobile marketing platform from Flytxt, enables carriers and service providers to use mobile as a customer engagement channel.

Flytxt's past mobile initiatives include Orange Wednesdays and Cadbury Txt ?n' Wins. Incorporated in The Netherlands, Flytxt has its main development center in India and offices in Britain, Germany and India.

Flytxt currently serves customers in Britain, South Africa and India.

"Mobile advertising is an area that has seen a lot of interest, and we see a lot of potential in the future," Mr. Williams said. "The area where a lot of companies are focusing is WAP banner display advertising, which has been a very successful model for the likes of Google.

"We see an even bigger opportunity for text-message advertising, especially in developing economies, because subscribers in developing economies don't have access to mobile Web display advertising," he said. "Push message advertising will generate a lot more revenue more quickly."

Even though the regulatory environments are somewhat different in the United States and India, mobile marketing is growing in both countries.

"Everyone recognizes the world over what a powerful medium mobile is in terms of a communications device," Mr. Williams said. "Mobile has a lot of power for marketers and advertisers when done correctly using good targeting and personalization techniques.

"There is a complete transformation where marketing and advertising are perceived as a benefit to consumers rather than an annoyance, when consumers are being told about services that they're interested in using the mobile channel," he said.