Pontis’ marketing tool may help mobile advertisers

by: admin Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

Rating: Side-effect of real-time information gathering

Chatting to Guy Talmi, marketing director with Pontis, I discovered that his company’s product might have unexpected implications. Particularly for advertisers.
One of the capabilities the software provides is to monitor clicks on a mobile operator’s portal.

The reason for providing such a facility is to enable an operator’s marketing team to gauge just how well a particular campaign is going. The company could be using Pontis’ tools to monitor responses to an offer promoting a particular piece of content – say, a ringtone.

More than just watching the clicks, the system could also see who clicked on a specific item and if they ended up buying the product via premium rate SMS.

The purpose of Pontis’ software is to gauge how well in-house offers are doing but the techniques could easily be applied to monitor how an advert for a third party placed on the portal is doing.

It also seems to me that the tools can analyse how people are using the operator’s portal during a set period – one week, for example.

So, while Mr Talmi was talking to me about how easily his software can be used to create a ‘buy one get one free’ offer, the reality is that the software might prove extremely useful to those in the operator’s ad department. They can show in real time what response rates are.

The good news is that a system like Pontis takes time to be integrated with a mobile network operator’s lagacy data systems. But Pontis has now reached critical mass and has already integrated with most of the kinds of systems that operators possess.

So it shouldn’t take long to tweak the system for advertising purposes. I think Pontis has a secret weapon it doesn’t know about.