Out There Media’s VP Business Development & Asia Pacific GM Fabrizio Caruso presents a convincing case for opt-in mobile advertising.
Mobile phone use in Asia continues to grow, with over 2.65 billion mobile phone subscribers in Asia as of October 2010, with 300 million new mobile subscribers from India and China last year. These mobile subscribers represent a market that many agencies and brands are eager to target.
Working out the best method to reach out to these users can be problematic, especially since a broad based information blast may be taken as spam, which can in turn create negative public opinion. Instead, there is value in moving towards a kind of consumer cooperation, where consumers themselves play a role in the marketing effort. This cooperation is called opt-in marketing, turning standard marketing paradigms upside down.
Instead of sending messages out to a large audience (and hoping that some people will be interested), consumers are offered the chance to opt-in (to a particular program) in return for some incentive – advance information, discounts, electronic coupons or other special treatment. Consumers are also offered the opportunity to share some information about themselves, in order to ensure that they do not receive information that they are not interested in. The option to opt-out is available at any time.
This combination of opt-in marketing with a degree of consumer profiling creates its own mutually beneficial mobile advertising eco-system. Consumers give their consent in order to receive valuable information, offers and promotions, all tailored to their lifestyles. In return, marketers gain much-needed traction and higher-than-average engagement rates.
As a measure of the popularity of opt-in mobile advertising, Out There Media’s base in Asia has grown to 4.2 million as of February 2011 after four months of exponential growth. This growth rate is the result of promotions on several channels, including traditional and online.
It turns out that opt-in mobile advertising has surprisingly broad reach. While the audience is not particularly divided along gender lines, with slightly more men (51%) than women, as expected, opt-in marketing appeals to a young audience with 77% being under the age of 30. But appeal also extends beyond the youth market, with 72% coming from consumers aged between 20 and 39.
In addition, response rates for opt-in mobile advertising are very high. The average response rate for opt-in mobile advertising campaigns stands at 25.15%, considerably higher than the rate for mobile display ads (in the low single digits), over twenty times the response rate for direct marketing (1.38%) and very much higher than web advertising (where 0.2% is considered a successful campaign response rate). It is worth noting that, in some cases, the rate of response to opt-in mobile advertising was as high as 50%.
The broad reach and high response rate of opt-in mobile advertising shows how well it is tailored to the personal nature of mobile devices. It taps into users’ desire for customised information, and offers marketers a highly-targeted way of reaching out to the large mobile audience.
Fabrizio Caruso is VP Business Development & GM in Asia Pacific at Out There Media. He is a Digital Media and Mobile executive with extensive experience across multiple markets in regions including EMEA, APAC and North America. Prior to joining Out There Media he held the position of Managing Director, Southeast Asia, Shanghai and Manila at Buongiorno Hong Kong, while his previous professional roles include senior positions at companies including Amdocs, Qpass, Epok Inc and T-Mobile International. Caruso holds an MSc in Computer Science Engineering from the University of Catania, Italy.
