Chat with Andy Bovingdon Top Mobile Marketing Man Bango

Now, I have been accused of giving Bango a hard time. Perhaps it’s more about me having one of the worst interviews of my life with Bango about two years ago? Or perhaps it’s because one of the VPs of Bango didn’t accept my Linkedin invitation (you know who you are!).

No really. I had put Bango in the bucket of not really very important companies and felt quite confused by the recent jumping into the mobile advertising and analytics bandwagon.  Why? Well because that is my area.

So, following some comments on analytics in the last post on Bango -  I got on the phone to Andy Bovingdon.
We started the call by clearing the air about our blog comments. I then said, so you mentioned that Bango was in the traffic business – what did you mean.

Andy then went on to give me a complete background on Bango. The good, the bad, the nearly there, the not quite there and the ugly.

In very brief:
1. Bango started off in boosting mobile internet traffic off-portal  but was a bit early (1999)

2. It uses mobile marketing from its own brand of wap.com sites to mobile SMS marketing services and Bango buttons or shortcode URLs – to drive traffic for the mobile web.

3. Then the push went onto payments. But Bango is not your standard mobile payment provider. For want of a better word it is an aggregator.

4. With partnerships with operators, content companies etc it offers a dynamic mobile payment home page. The value of this is that it finds the securest way of ensuring a successful transaction without having to enter a password or special code.

I listened with great interest and surprise to the number of hats Bango actually has. It was strange actually as I was listening about a company that I thought I knew well.

So then I talked about revenue leakage within mobile payments and what Bango was doing and if this effected the business/ billing model.

This was interesting and Andy said that revenue leakage was alive but it was fighting against it as was the UK initiative PayForIt.

But after the general overview was over – I wanted to get down to nitty gritty. Traffic great. Bango buttons – great. But – why analytics.

Basically, Bango (Japanese name for number) has had the ability for a long time to get unique stats on mobile visitors, repeat visitors, where the payment or buying process stopped etc. When it was pitching services to customers – time and time again marketing companies with free or sponsored and advertising business models focused on the analytics.

So with three packages – free – USD 50 and USD 500 – Bango is re-launching its Bango Vision service which seemed to flop last year as it was just too early to market and the business model was wrong.

Now, with experience and insight – Bango is offering unique insightful information to users.

What we think?
Well, Andy can talk (a lot!)  –but everything he said was very relevant and he did his best to answer my questions. As I said, I will integrate Bango Analytics to my Wapple site (gomonews.mobi) and then report back.
I am also interested in the wap.com url. WAP might be dead for the industry but if marketed correctly – who knows.  Thanks Andy for getting me up to speed and now I understand the history it all sounds a lot more credible.

Related News:

1. Can this be true? Bango first to offer both Site and Campaign mobile analytics
2. Bango pinpoints best performing mobile advertising campaigns and avoids advertisers paying too much
3. Bango Analytics – is that it?
4. Measuring the success of mobile ad campaigns
5. Bango seeks to remove uncertainty from mobile downloads