Blyk is the mobile marketing and advertising company that started life as a standalone MVNO offering users free or subsidised service in return for agreeing to receive MMS and SMS advertising. That model changed a bit, and the company moved to working behind the scenes, in partnership with operators, and now it powers media offerings for Orange UK, T-Mobile UK, Vodafone Netherlands and Aircel.
Orange Brightstuff and T-Mobile You Choose (launched in November 2011) are two of the operator properties that Blyk runs. Today, Blyk said that it has increased its total number of supported subscribers from one million to four million over the past year.
Eric Kip, CEO of Blyk, told Mobile Europe that he wasn’t allowed to share where that growth had come from, but he could share a little bit more about how the company, which parted ways with one of its founders only in December, is helping its operator partners achieve results.
One finding Blyk liked is that Orange UK has seen a 35% improvement in its brand perception amongst customers receiving Blyk media. Kip said that Orange conducted its own survey of customers of its Brightstuff service, its opt-in marketing service powered by Blyk.
Customers receiving content and messages from Blyk had an improved perception of the Orange brand compared to other Orange users. Kip said this was not to do with pricing or tariffs, but to do with the value that Blyk delivers by delivering targeted messages. “My view is I think an operator becomes more of a value added service for customers than just a deliverer or supplier of voice, text and data. We add something of value that is really coming from the operator – and also build brand perception.”
Customers of Brightstuff can build a “totem pole” of what they like, choosing which sorts of messages they would like to receive. Blyk claims that this approach drives very high response rates. Kip said that the lowest response rate it achieves per message is “something like” 20%, with some campaigns achieving 50-65% response rates amongst users.
So does Kip think that this success rate could be expanded beyond Blyk’s core youth audience? Operators such as Telefonica and Telenor are setting up dedicated digital units that are likely to have opt-in and location based advertising form a key part of their portofolio. Could Blyk’s partners be in a position to expand Blyk’s reach top create their own enhanced digital media presence?
Kip confirmed that Blyk has moved from concentrating from the young (16-24) to the “young at heart”, and also that Blyk has received requests from other operators to look at specific groups, tailoring packages for groups that would be willing to receive specific types of packages. Certainly, there is increasing evidence that mobile advertising and marketing, from within an operator or from other networks, is on the increase.
InMobi and Buzz City both released quarterly metrics this week showing growth in European markets. For instance, ad impressions on Buzz City’s network from French mobile users grew 163% in Q4 2011. InMobi, meanwhile, claimed a 358% increase in European mobile ad impressions over the course of the last year. And there was an interesting nugget from Buzz City as well, who reckoned that “mature” (over 35!) users were driving much of that growth.
I think that’s interesting because, as mentioned, there is a clear drive amongst operators to open up their customer bases to media, marketing and advertising campaigns. Genuine opt-in campaigns, delivered to interested audiences, have the potential not just to boost revenues for operators, but to increase their own brand perception. Sloppy ones, of course, ruin it.
But if Blyk, Buzz City and InMobi are pointing us in the right direction the mobile marketing and advertising opportunity, for so long “next year’s big thing for operators”, may genuinely be approaching.
Keith Dyer
Editor
Mobile Europe