I was invited to write a piece for the Internet Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) mobile newsletter a few days ago, on a subject of my choice. After giving it some thought, I decided to do a piece on the opt-in advertising evolution; the way that mobile operators around the world are opening up their subscriber database to advertisers, with the subscribers’ permission of course.

I would mention Turkcell, the past masters at this sort of thing, of course. I’d also mention O2 and Orange in the UK, both of whom have launched such services in recent months. And I would also talk to Out There Media, the mobile advertising firm that is helping several operators around the world to launch opt-in advertising solutions.
As I do when I’m doing a piece like this, I sent out a few emails to set up a few interviews. For Turkcell, who I’ve written about before, I just had a couple of queries relating to the current size of the database, which my contact there. Evrim Dirik, responded to, as he tends to do, within about 10 minutes.

With Out There Media, I played phone tag for a couple of days with CEO Kerstin Trikalitis, before we finally got hold of each other late on a Friday afternoon, and she proved as forthcoming and as knowledgeable as I recalled from the last time I spoke to her. And with the two UK operators, O2 and Orange, I spent three days chasing interviews down and got…er, nothing.
There are a couple of points to note here. One, to paraphrase John Cleese talking to Eric Idle in the Monty Python Secret Service sketch, I’m getting used to it by now, as this tends to be the way it (doesn’t) work with me and UK mobile operators.

Secondly, in various interviews with companies who sell stuff to mobile operators, when I ask about deployments, they often cite operators in Asia, eastern Europe, occasionally even western Europe, but when I ask about the UK, the response is along the lines of: “It’s not worth the effort, they are so hard to deal with.” Second that.

I was also very interested by what Trikalitis told me. She said that in the Out There deployments, the offer is open to all the operator’s subscribers. This contrasts with the UK, where, last time anyone at Orange bothered to talk to us, the offer was only open to people on its ‘Monkey’ tariff. As for O2, they’re not giving out any numbers, so your guess is as good as mine. Trikalitis also made the point that the operators Out There works with make a lot of noise about what they are doing to get people to sign up, which, again, contrasts with the radio silence coming out of Orange and O2, both in terms of advertising, and their inability to talk to the press about it.

“We believe you have to offer it to the entire subscriber database,” she told me. “One advertiser might be interested in women aged 25-34, another might want to reach businessmen aged 45 and over. You have to be able to create something relevant for any segment. If the operator does not truly believe in it, it will fail, because you won’t get enough people to opt in and no one will want to advertise. If you’re serious about it, it will be a big success. If you’re not, don’t to it, because you are doomed to fail.”
I could not have put it better myself.

David Murphy
Editor