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Thursday, November 5, 2009

Mobile Advertising and Its Affective Usage in India

Think of a shabbily dressed person, with a broomstick in one hand and a mobile phone in the other. Sights like this are common, not just in the metropolitan areas, but also tier II and tier III Indian cities where you can see farmers, doodhwala’s, postmen, even the humble housewives using a mobile phone. These people are joining the breed of new Indians who talk more and work even more.

As social scientist Shiv Vishwanathan puts it, “The mobile is to India what the motor car was to America.” And he is not wrong. India’s mobile phone subscriber population exceeds 300 million and is increasing rapidly every single day. This is more than the entire population of many small to medium sized countries. One out of every four Indians has a mobile phone.

You do not have to be a rocket scientist to figure out the tremendous potential for advertising and reaching out to millions of Indians in different parts of the country with different demographic status. But, the quality of mobile advertising is lacking.

These days we get lot of junk messages on mobiles. I use Tata Indicom and Airtel Postpaid services. I got bored of reading service messages and their advertising from service provides.

Mobile Marketing should be a service to the customer, but not as an intrusion. Some of my thoughts on How Mobile Marketing can be used.

People are interested in receiving advertising alerts on couple of things but not on every thing. And advertising should be location based mobile advertising and that too as an opt in feature.

Scenario-1


Let's say i am looking for Restaurants in my location where i stay. What i do is i search on internet to find near by Restaurants or call couple of close friends to find about the same.

Why not mobile service providers identify my location and provide me list of Shops, Resturants, Stores... of my interest from the options i choose.

This service should be an opt in feature..
 
Scenario-2

Let's say its a festival time and people are looking for shopping. May be a couple mobile advertisements  with shopping offers and discounts will be helpful.

These days, no one reads newspapers. We Indian's absolutely don't have that much time. Companies spend lot of money on newspaper ads. Mobile advertising is the best available option to reach the right target of people and with low cost.

Scenario-3

GPS systems can help commuters know when the next bus is due at the bus stop, mobile alerts can be designed to give a commuter specific information about the bus he needs to catch and its precise location in real time. And further these messages can be turned into advertising benefits.


Pyramid Research says that, by 2012, India will be the fourth-largest market for mobile data revenue behind US, China and Japan. If mobile advertising is used more effectively tremendous revenues can be seen.

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