Mobile Marketing - What Do Mobile Operators Really Know About Us?

An article in Marketing Week, 14th January 2010 – “Google, Apple deals show major potential of mobile” suggests that whilst these deals highlight the mobile marketing opportunity they will not offer advertisers the type of benefits that the operators can. True or biased?

Well, the idea hangs on the premise that operators:

1. have access to more channels
2. know their users’ interests
3. can offer incentives such as mobile services in return for receiving ads

Access to more channels?
Numerous third parties offer access to all mobile channels and they do this by going through the operators themselves or through mobile service aggregators. The advantage that the operators have is that they can make it unnecessarily hard or expensive to access these channels. Location based services is an example of this. However, they still make revenue where request for access to these channels is via a third party so I can not think that they will be too concerned.

Know their users?
What do they really know? They know what handsets we use, how often we use them and the tariffs that we are on. They know what services we use, when we are most likely to use them and how much we spend. For newer customers, the more forward thinking operators may know which mobile websites we have visited and which social networks we interact with but will have no idea what we thought of the banner ads that might have been presented.

Unless we use our mobile phones to engage in mobile commerce transactions, operators are unlikely to know which brands or advertisers I might like to hear from with a view to completing a transaction which is one of the things that an advertiser would like.

Opting in to receiving specific alerts and information from brands or advertisers is not the same as opting in to receiving information about brand categories.

Can offer incentives?
Blyk, albeit an MVNO proved that this would not work. Does more need to be said?

So What Do Mobile Operator’s Really Know About Us? Not As Much as The Brands and Advertisers Already Know
On balance, operators do not by themselves have enough information to deliver, on a consistent basis, relevant ads or information to most of their customer base.

Drawing up a set of algorithms that can take what information operators do have about their customers and converting this into accurate data about the brands and advertisers that we have any affiliation with or the lifestyle that we lead is someway off.