The telecom industry has form when it comes to predicting “next big things. WAP-based services, location- based services and MMS all were going to be killer. Voice and messaging revenues continue to provide the vast majority of revenues, and while growth has gone out of many western markets, global players The problem is that it is very difficult to change habits of entire nations overnight. Internet search is really useful and, being free, has been a slam dunk in the “useful new things” category. Next big things are mobile advertising. Mobile advertising is just taking the next logical step. So those dreadful SMS ads that mobile phone companies insist on sending you when you roam from one network to another are useless, call internationally by using calling cards and resented because they are completely irrelevant. Context and usefulness to the user are the primary bits of learning that comes out of Web advertising. So people, who are talking about mobile services for free, where the user has to put up with receiving ads, are doomed to failure. No such thing as a free lunch
All of that juicy data on the user is locked up in a myriad of systems owned by the service provider. Then you have a gazillion different handset operating systems, so you multiply all of that together and you end up with data fragmented into billions of parts, all in different formats, and all making it very hard to get a single picture of the user. Just call your phone company and see the challenge they have in tying up various bits of information on you if you have more than one service. And while mobile service providers are often large, the fact is the global market is split across over 1,000 providers. So if an advertiser wants to hit the U.S. market for, say six-toed, red-haired men aged over 50 called Kevin, AT&T, Verizon and the rest can only offer them access to a slice of the market. To get to the whole market, the advertiser would need to work with several companies, or maybe those providers need to work together in some kind of service syndication. Users can opt-in to exposing certain information, just like Face book only monetizes what you choose to expose on your profile.
Tags: airtel, airtel india, airtel phone, calling card, Telecommunication
