Pan-European mobile operator Blyk is using Airwide Solutions' Mobile Advertising Solution to support its business through targeted ad insertions aimed at its Generation Y customer base.

Mobile Marketer's Mickey Alam Khan interviewed Kaj Hagros, vice president of market development at mobile messaging and advertising specialist Airwide, Burlington, MA, on his company's deal with Blyk, a recent mobile marketing survey, mobile advertising and messaging trends and future plans. Excerpts:

What results has Blyk seen so far with its work with Airwide?
Through this strategic partnership, Blyk and Airwide have built a comprehensive ad-insertion, personalization and campaign execution engine for SMS, MMS and browsing purposes.

Overall, the solution is playing a key role in the real-time management of the ad-service operations.

Since the initial study, Blyk has experienced positive results that are encouraging for the entire industry.

For a total number of advertisers thus far, Blyk has 55 representing almost every industry sector, showing that simple messaging ad formats can be effective for multiple uses within the industry.

Since the launch, Blyk has run over 500 campaigns.

For a total number of responses, Blyk has averaged at 29 percent, meaning that the member has either replied to a question or clicked on a link.

Compare this to other rates from the media -- online advertising at .02 percent, paid search at .2 percent, direct mail at 2 percent or other mobile campaigns 3-6 percent -- and you can see the potential of the Blyk offering for advertisers.

Describe the Airwide work for Blyk in detail.
In order to build their ad network, Blyk selected Airwide Solutions, a provider of mobile messaging and wireless Internet infrastructure, to support its mobile advertising business.

Airwide works with Blyk's service delivery platform enabling targeted, personalized ad insertion using messaging, multimedia push and browsing services to allow them to continue providing their young consumer audience with free wireless services in return for receiving personalized advertising.

For advertisers and agencies, Blyk enables mobile advertising in an entirely new way, making planning, booking and designing mobile campaigns as simple and effective as advertising in traditional media.

Airwide is playing a key role in delivering the infrastructure to manage ad-insertion and making these inventories come alive in a reliable, real-time and easy-to-access manner.

Conventional service platforms were designed to deliver mobile services based on traditional pre-paid and post-paid charging models, not services based on a free subscription model.

Anticipating a shift in the market and recognizing the value of mobile advertising to operator customers, Airwide has developed a solution that is optimized for advertising-funded and sponsored services.

With Airwide's help and assistance, Blyk was able to deploy the infrastructure needed with an extremely aggressive time-to-market.

By helping mobile operators open their networks to the advertising business model instead of starting from scratch, Airwide leverages what they already have in terms of messaging centers, routers and gateways and open that up into the mobile advertising arena.

Who is Blyk targeting?
Blyk is a mobile network for 16-to-24-year-olds that is fully funded by advertising, linking young people with brands they like and providing free texts and minutes every month.

For advertisers, Blyk is a new media channel, providing direct access to the thriving youth segment. Therefore Blyk sought to acquire a mobile advertising solution that would power their business model.

How unique is the offering from Airwide?
Due to its ubiquitous, always-available and highly personal nature, mobile has the potential to become the preferred digital marketing channel.

The Airwide Mobile Advertising Solution is the fastest way for operators to ad-enable their service delivery platform to take advantage of this revolution.

The Airwide Mobile Advertising solution lets operators tap directly into messaging and browsing streams, enabling unprecedented control for campaign execution.

Unlike other solutions, the Airwide Mobile Advertising Solution also enables proactive discovery and targeting of appropriate advertising content to recipients based on their preferences, history and profile information.

Airwide is the only supplier of mobile infrastructure able to provide an end-to-end solution for the creation, management and delivery of mobile advertising across all data channels.

Traffic, subscription and campaign management solutions complement the Mobile Advertising Solution for the delivery of content rich, targeted and relevant advertisements to mobile subscribers.

The business intelligence and revenue management capabilities provide the necessary reports to analyze effectiveness and penetration of individual campaigns, while managing the complex revenue sharing resulting from this new value chain.

Something about Airwide and its clients and products.
Airwide Solutions is the leading provider of next-generation mobile messaging and wireless internet infrastructure, applications and solutions.

Its products help more than 120 wireless operators worldwide drive mobile messaging usage and revenues and enables them to leverage multiple delivery channels and next-generation infrastructure in new and more powerful ways.

With a history of industry firsts -- including the first text message ever sent, the introduction of the first SMS router, the first A2P MMS push gateway and mobile service control which enables mobile context, personalization and profiling -- the company continues to pioneer new technologies.

Airwide's open, tiered Fusion architecture offers mobile operators advanced revenue options, a practical pathway to Mobile Messaging 2.0 and a foundation to bridge mobile messaging and mobile Internet.

What were the key highlights of the recent survey that Airwide conducted?
An independent survey of 50 global brand-name companies commissioned by Airwide Solutions revealed significant progress for the mobile marketing industry.

The survey revealed that 28 percent of companies surveyed have already launched live SMS campaigns and 18 percent have launched live MMS campaigns.

Growth in the sophistication of mobile marketing campaigns was reflected in the number of brands considering implementing both SMS and MMS mobile marketing in the next 12 months, which doubled to 28 percent since a similar survey in 2006.

The survey also found that more brands are looking to spend a greater proportion of their marketing budget on mobile campaigns in the near future, with 71 percent of brands projecting to spend up to 10 percent of their budget on mobile marketing within two years' time.

Brand experience with mobile marketing is increasingly positive as more brands are getting higher response rates from their campaigns.

The percentage of big brands who said that up to 10 percent of recipients of mobile marketing campaigns requested more information as a result of receiving a mobile marketing message grew from 32 percent in 2006 to 58 percent in 2007.

And the news is even better for financial transactions, with 73 percent of brands stating that up to 10 percent of recipients subsequently undertook a financial action as a result of the campaign as compared with 28 percent in 2006.

Every responding brand agreed that their most recent mobile marketing campaign was successful in increasing customer familiarity of their brand.

Most significantly, the experience of brands using mobile marketing demonstrates that the actual campaign response rate is even higher than the expectations of those who have not yet implemented mobile marketing.

According to the survey, 57 percent of brands not yet using mobile marketing anticipate that customers will request more information, while 83 percent of brands that have already implemented campaigns said they received requests for more information.

The numbers for financial transactions are even higher, with 38 percent of inexperienced brands stating that they expect consumers to undertake consequent financial actions, while 82 percent of experienced brands have said that recipients completed a financial action as a result of being sent a mobile marketing message.

However, despite enthusiasm for mobile marketing, there are barriers holding back even higher growth rates, with more than half of brands not yet employing the use of either text messaging (58 percent) or multimedia messaging (60 percent) systems for marketing purposes.

As brands have learned about mobile marketing the perception that SMS is a reliable and measurable medium has increased, with the number of brands that find SMS too complicated for marketing dropping significantly from 24 percent in 2006 to 8 percent in 2007.

Additionally, more brands now know how to measure its effectiveness, with uncertainty about how to do so dropping from 18 percent in 2006 to 11 percent in 2007.

In contrast, however, the perception that MMS is difficult to use has grown from 14 percent in 2006 to 29 percent in 2007 and concerns about reliability have grown from 12 percent in to 34 percent in the same time frame.

Almost half of big brands (46 percent) are concerned that mobile marketing is too intrusive, with many feeling that customers will perceive messages as spam.

Of these, 41 percent are unsure how to rectify the problem by targeting specific audiences. Over a third of brands (36 percent) would require detailed information on how the user responded to the message, and one in five want proof that the message has been received by the user's handset -- concerns mirrored by recent high profile issues with TV text voting.

For marketers, mobile offers brands the ability to put the consumer at the heart of the communications process. Unlike PCs which tend to be used by multiple users, mobile phones are much more personal devices. They are the nearest thing to a direct connection into the consumer's mind anyone is likely to attain in the near future and this makes them a powerful channel to deliver highly targeted and relevant information.

The arrival of ad-funded content is almost certain to fuel further interest and given the popularity of mobile entertainment such as games, ringtones, TV clips and music, ad-funded mobile content looks to be popular with consumers too.

However, there are certain obstacles that must be overcome to ensure that the customer does not feel exploited by being inundated with irrelevant messages.

When it comes to marketing through text messages, companies need to build a level of trust with the consumer before they start to build a campaign.

What's Airwide's biggest challenge and opportunity?
One of the most significant opportunities for Airwide is to help mobile carriers to deliver innovative new technologies -- for example, mobile content services or mobile advertising -- in order to create new revenue streams.

Although voice and messaging are still predicted to provide the lion's share of ARPU [average revenue per user] for years to come, many carriers, particularly those in developed markets are feeling the pinch on ARPU from customers who are increasingly demanding discounted bundles of minutes and messages.

However, although the mobile content and services market offers many possibilities, it is important to remember that it is complex in nature and involves many new challenges unlike those presented from voice. These include:
â?¢ The need to quickly bring new services to market

â?¢ The need to cost-efficiently handle the growing amount of services and content providers, sped by the introduction of more advanced handsets

â?¢ The need to increase the uptake of mobile content through improving service discovery and quality. Quality can be improved significantly through automation that handles device management, but also provides the necessary information to an operator's customer service help desk. Customer helpdesks need to be able to see profile information as well as the history of the service attempts in an easy and concise manner to aid in troubleshooting.

â?¢ The need to utilize a carrier's existing network infrastructure to handle the more complex services without having to invest in a completely new network component for each technological advancement.

Thus far, most operators have had to build their networks per delivery channels. The financial and operational viability of content services will require that services be bundled across delivery channels in the future, and operators are looking for a way to properly control services at a higher level to manage the business.

Furthermore, as handsets evolve, operators need device management to ensure that a subscriber can in fact use a particular service.

â?¢ The need to implement dynamic portfolio management which can be changed from one hour to the next and make services easily available and usable for end users in a personalized manner.

Dynamic portfolio management means a shorter time-to-market with new services allowing operators to capitalize on lucrative yet short-lived trends, such as mobile games or the latest ringtones.

Manual provisioning, to some extent, of services is a common practice still used by many of today's operators, and the result is that short-term service management is not possible due to the lengthy service time-to-market.

Moreover, a business need for operators exists to be able to identify a trend and then be able to respond by creating and launching a new service in, for example, less than one day. This will either require automation or a lot of manpower which means high overhead costs; therefore automation for service provisioning is the most viable solution to shorten time-to-market.

â?¢ How to handle peaks of success with limited capacity. If one ringtone is popular during one day, certainly an operator would like to make sure that all subscribers can easily download the tone.

This is however difficult to handle if the network capacity is limited and many users are trying to access the service at the same time. The result is that many users will not try more than once and may even burden customer services if they are charged for a service that was not successful, thus creating a loss in revenues where there should be a gain.

What next for Airwide?
Airwide will continue to roll out next-generation products, services and solutions that help mobile carriers capitalize on their infrastructure to take advantage of new revenue streams like mobile advertising, mobile content and a variety of new revenue-generating applications that are in high demand from mobile subscribers.