Ads help running business of "free"

People love anything free and this has been reaffirmed repeatedly in the value-added services space. Needless to say, there is an industry that gives almost every mobile user their fancy personalised ring tone or wallpaper or game. The unfortunate thing is that there aren’t enough people who are willing to pay for this content. This is where advertising could be brought in to fuel this industry of promise.

The panel discussion on ‘Content Driven Advertising’ was moderated by Neeraj Roy the CEO of Hungama Mobile. The participants included Tushar Vyas, the national director of Interactive Group M, Rajiv Hiranandani, the co-founder of Mobile2Win and Pankaj Sethi, VP of value-added services in Tata Teleservices.

Mr Roy pointed out that the VAS business stood at $ 23 billion as of last December and is expected to grow to $43 billion over the next three years. He started out by giving the audience a sketch of the range of VAS. He said that there are five categories of content— music and it’s derivatives, imagery and its derivatives, video, games and instant voice recognition services (IVR).

The consumer, he continued, has six touch points against those five categories of content— a caller ring back tone, an sms via the operator, mobile Internet, IVR, those leveraging opportunities through retail and the leveraging of internet protals that are going on to mobiles.

Discussing how to project possible business models Mr Vyas said, “The business model with content driven advertising is going to be very similar to what it was in the internet space,” adding, “however the numbers will be enormously larger.”

Recalling one of the earliest methods of interacting with the consumer, Mr Hiranandani recalled the use of the short code. He then took the audience through a quick review of the evolution of mobile marketing. Pankaj Sethi reminding the audience that the ownership of mobile advertising still hasn’t been figured out yet. He also pointed out how Tata went off-portal recently and they too still haven’t figured out how to monetize it.

With the mobile space in India there isn’t a blueprint to go by like there was for the internet. Instead here we find that most of these players are learning as they venture into this field. The only way to learn is to experiment and make the mistakes that need to be made and share them at industry gatherings like this.

Source: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/News/News_By_Industry/Telecom/The_Business_of_free/articleshow/2417912.cms