The Reality Check article authored by Tomi T Ahonen that ran in Issue 2 of Mobile Marketing and online, made some broadly excellent points.

It is true to say that people have great expectations of the potency of the medium and it is also true to say that most just don’t ‘get it’ that the mobile as an advertising platform is a ‘different from the internet as TV is from radio’.

However, there are some points that Mr. Ahonen makes that I have to take issue with: SMS is, I agree, the world’s most common form of advertising, but to say that mobile operators are the ‘biggest spammers’ and risk ‘poisoning their own well’ is actually far from the truth in my experience.

At Upstream we work with all of the major operator groups on a global basis, and to assert that mobile operators don’t understand the consequences of spamming their user base is not only naïve, but far from the truth. The mobile operators we work with are mindful of their customer bases and follow strict rules when contacting subscribers. The question is then: how can they make the most from the limited interaction opportunities? This is why mobile operators partner with Upstream – to create a natural personal dialogue with their user base that activates them, engages them and gets them to respond…happily.

Mr Ahonen talks about ‘engagement marketing’ as if it is a new or untried discipline. In fact, this is exactly what Upstream has been partnering with mobile operators on for the last five years. He is right that successful mobile marketing means creating a dialogue and really understanding the customer’s needs, and Upstream works with mobile operators to do just that. The key success factors for any campaign a mobile operators runs are relevance and context.

Mobile operators recognise the inherent value of their own customer bases and are encouraging customers to opt-in in the hope of generating incremental revenues from mobile advertising. Simply getting customers to opt-in is not enough. An opted-in database is not an unlimited hunting ground: the data and insight that is necessary can only be found by micro-segmentation, and this can only happen via a one-to-one interaction with the customer via SMS.

But the real win comes when you consider context. It is the most natural thing in the world for you to have a dialogue with your mobile operators about your mobile internet needs. But it is not natural to receive a message from a brand that you have no real interest in. Mobile operators have billions of interactions with their subscriber bases through SMS, top up alerts, credit card balance notifications, missed call alerts and many other communications. With natural context at the heart of their approach, these communications represent the most powerful sales opportunity, as they are the highest in terms of impressions, and have the greatest capacity for conversion, because they are the most natural in context.

Really smart mobile operators are recognising that they actually own the most natural mobile advertising ecosystem. They are segmenting their bases effectively, understanding the needs, wants and desires of their customers, and then using these communications to upsell their own products first, and only then offer them as advertising media to third parties. This is netting them millions in incremental revenues.

Marco Veremis is president of Upstream