Orange has confirmed to Mobile Marketing that it has signed up 300,000 customers to its Orange Shots opt-in mobile messaging and advertising service.
When we learned a week or so ago that O2 had signed up 1m customers for its O2 More opt-in mobile advertising service, the news prompted us to ask Orange for a figure for Orange Shots. A figure of 100,000 was mentioned at launch, but we have heard nothing since, and to be honest, given the UK operators’ general reluctance to talk about numbers, we weren’t expecting this enquiry to generate anything either.
Then today, out of the blue, comes an email from Orange confirming that it has 300,000 people on its database. A statement from the operator reads:
“Oranges Shots service is unique in its (sic) offering to UK consumers. Orange has developed a fully interactive service that allows brands to communicate with its customer base in a variety of engaging ways. Working beyond standard text offers, Orange Shots provides great content, downloadable exclusives and great competitions. In addition, Orange Shots encourages customers to talk back and share their views – developing a unique form of consumer engagement. As a result, over time Orange we learn more about each customer – what they like and what they’re interested in – so we can send highly relevant and targeted information direct through the mobile phones. We currently interact with 300K users in the UK and this number will only continue to grow as it is rolled out in a controlled manner to our wider customer base.”
That’s a pretty long response to the question we originally posed: “I’m trying to find out how many people have signed up for the Orange Shots service.”
But we shouldn’t complain I suppose. For now then, O2 will claim to have the upper hand. But I get the feeling that even an audience of 1m is not going to be enough to satisfy the big-brand advertisers. After all, the whole point of these databases is that advertisers can slice and dice them to get to the target audience they want. So any campaign involving any sort of segmentation and targeting is only going to have a subset of that 1m to play with. It will be interesting to see how O2 and Orange plan to boost their opt-in numbers going forward.