Mobile advertising has gained another major backer today, in the form of Alcatel-Lucent (ALU). A truly massive mobile player, ALU provides mobile network infrastructure for operators and carriers all over the world – and it now wants to aggregate those networks themselves into a huge mobile advertising network. GoMo News spoke to ALU’s VP of Mobile Advertising Thomas Labarthe about the new service, and how it works.
GoMo: What is Optism?
Labarthe: The best description for what Optism does is “permission based marketing”. What we want is to help networks expose their advertising assets and monetise them – but we want the entire service to be permission based from the point of view of the consumer who is seeing the ads. We’ve decided to operate exclusively with end-user permission. But we also use what we call “dynamic profiling”. A key element is to understand and update the preferences of the end-users in real time, and respect their privacy at the same time.
GoMo: How does dynamic profiling and privacy work from the user end?
Labarthe: We’ve done end-user surveys, particularly with the young demographic. Doing these surveys across several countries we found out that permission is paramount. Users are likely to sign up for this kind of service if the KEY CRITERIA is that their permission and preferences are respected at all times. This means that campaigns are relevant to their lifestyle.
Optism is completely opt-in. Through the opt-in process, there is very simply information we collect, like gender and age. Depending on the country there may be more, like your post-code. But we wanted to keep that signing in process very quick and easy, so that’s all we ask for. Then, instead of pushing, we encourage dialogue between advertisers and the end-user – a campaign will usually start with a question to the end-user, to see if the campaign is suitable. For each campaign, the user has the option to accept or refuse it. Depending on their answer, we will try to serve something else. And we build a profile based around what kind of campaigns they say “yes” to.
GoMo: What kinds of advertising will you be serving? Is it purely display and banner based, or will you be using other mobile channels like audio, SMS, embedded videos, interactive Flash/HTML 5?
Labarthe: To keep it simple, we’re focusing on display and messaging. Search is not one of our objectives – that’s not a space where we feel we can compete with the leaders. But we are seeing a benefit in messaging marketing, because it can easily provide scale and response mechanisms. It creates a conversational marketing channel and while this is nothing new, we’ve tried to make it very simple and very scaleable through our solution. Optism can plug all “call-to” actions at the end of a call or SMS, so sites, coupons and vouchers are all available whether it’s a display ad or not.
Display is totally powered in Optism. The important point is our insistence that even with display advertising we work within the users profiling and permissions: this is the underlying base-line that it’s important to keep. We’re also working with multi-screen video advertising. Honestly, we don’t want to limit ourselves to one channel – the market will decide which ones work. This is a business play and a human play – the technology is meant to be invisible.
GoMo: So how does this “invisible” technology work?
Labarthe: It’s a hosted solution: this is a key element. Since we started this project 18 months ago, we’ve spent a lot of time with advertisers and agencies, and a key issue that they brought up was fragmentation. Since mobile advertising is still a nascent industry, it attracts limited investment. Our solution was to create something that aggregates content across several networks – and monetises that content in an agnostic manner. All the technical and operational complexities are invisible to everyone else – including the operators, the agencies, the advertisers and the end-users. You should be able to book, create, launch, experience and get analytics on a campaign with almost no effort. Optism is intended to be a One Stop Shop, including booking, creation and ad buying tools.
Beyond the technology, we’ve set up a Media Arm to broker the relationship between operators and advertisers. When building the team for this, I had a great opportunity to match up technical telco people with experts from media and advertisers. We wanted this to be less technical, but to spend time creating relationships with agencies and advertisers (including Group M and WPP). We worked closely with the Mobile Marketing Association to drive the permission based marketing space and help provide standards in the presentation of preference data.
Operators love this – which surprised us. We’ve gotten incredible and positive feedback. The topic of incentive and rewards come up, so that you can give your consumers minutes and texts in return for viewing ads. This differs from country to country and operator to operator. Optism can provide that if the operator wants it. We have a very experienced team of people who can help the operators to build the right system for their market.
GoMo: Where will this advertising inventory be served? Is it going to be portal based?
Labarthe: On the display side of things there is no magical answer – the operators are trying to monetise their portals the best way they can. We want to help to make them make the BEST use of it. We believe that messaging is the channel that operators have a very strong ownership of. There’s no one else competing with them there, unlike in mobile internet. We’re not trying to take a position for one camp or the other. Our solution looks from the end-user stand point. Messaging is a very mass market and flexible comms channel. It’s very complimentary to what exists today – and it can be a very scaleable media, and allow innovation.
GoMo: Out There Media already does operator aggregation, and already has a lot of operators on board globally. It also deals with exclusive operator contracts. In markets where Out There is already operating, what advantages can you offer your competitors?
Labarthe: First, when I look at what we’re doing I see that we have a very powerful and scaleable solution that can handle a VAST amount of traffic. We’re talking to operators with the aim to handle tens of millions of users worth of traffic every day.
Second, there are plenty of solution vendors (not just Out There) that mention they can do dynamic profiling. But this is very hard, and we’ve seen concrete evidence that this is an area where you can fail miserably. We’ve put a lot of time and passion into ensuring that our solution is very accurate. I believe we’ve done something special here. ALU has also a very strong experience in hosting, in operation and maintenance.
At the end of the day, it’s about trust with the end users. And we have that trust. We are extremely excited about Optism. It’s a new journey for us.
