Rating: SMS classified ads
Mobiya’s applications for mobile advertising will be used by the free Metro newspaper in Belgium. Metro readers will be able to place ads via SMS. The service called SMS Deal will also users to generate and create their own adverts for immediate publishing on the Metro website. People interested in the advertisement can respond by sending an SMS to the adcode. This will then send out the corresponding mobile phone numbers of both parties involved (the advertiser and the interested).
From the press release:
“We want to capture new classified revenue streams but don’t have enough knowledge of the mobile industry,” says Monique Raaffels, general manager at Metro Belgium. “We want to offer a self-service environment for our users and automate the back-office internally but don’t have the time to develop a classified advertising platform. That’s why we are collaborating with Mobiya. The interaction between online and offline services fits perfectly with our progressive image and the reader profile of our paper.”
Martin Davis, CEO of Mobiya, says: “We are transforming the business model of traditional classified advertising and capturing the explosion of mobile user-generated content, combined with the introduction of mobile advertising. We expect the mobile classifieds industry to be worth $4.2 billion in 2010. The traditional classifieds market is saturated. New business models built around SMS and MMS are the future.”
What we think
Sounds interesting; but there should be spam filters in place. It might just be one way of getting mobile phone numbers. But this is a very interesting concept – user generated mobile advertising with a twist.
Many thanks for picking up our release. It is interesting to read your comment about the spam filters. As co-founder of Mobiya I would like to explain that we have no intention to release the mobile numbers to third parties for mobile advertising purposes. In contrary, the mobiya platform just avoids that people currently advertising in classified sections of papers and free classified sites with their mobile phone numbers, are being protected from crawlers that index mobile phone numbers for future spam purposes.
On the other hand, we do have plans to introduce mobile advertising within the dialogue that the user experience with our application. We have signed NDA’s with some large mobile advertising networks to introduce such a concept to allow large corporate advertisers to sponser a free classified section in certain media. Mobiya has the contextual content such as the buyer intention, e.g. looking for a second hand car, you probably need insurance? Happy to bounce more ideas around. Thanks for the post.
Sacha Vekeman
Co-founder Mobiya
Mobiya sings up to deliver mobile classified ad system for Metro
It is amazing how quickly information travels globally these days. We have wired our first international announcement 3 hours ago and it has been syndicated to Google News, while editor’s of two important blogs on the mobile/wireless industry have posted
Sacha, many thanks for your feedback. Please keep me informed with what you are up to. Kind regards,
bena