Each ‘conversation’ will be relevant and contextualized to the needs of the consumer. The initial opt-in provides the first level of information, which can then be enhanced by third-party intelligence based on the consumer’s mobile usage and behavioral traits. Lastly, and most importantly, each consumer’s response during the conversation with the brand will provide the latest and up-to-date consumer information. In effect, this third stage is real-time consumer profiling. And when applied to the power of messaging, becomes the ideal channel for brands and businesses.
Raghu Kumar is the Managing Director of SinglePoint, India Office, a subsidiary of SinglePoint Inc., which acquired M2Junction.com. He was the Co-Founder and CEO of M2Junction.com. For the last over 15 years, he has been involved in the mobile domain and has over all experience of 20 years. He is associated with other technology companies and Board member of Corpus Mobile Labs and Global Outlook. Earlier Raghu was associated as CEO of Indian offices of JP Mobile and Good Technology and his last association was with TCS managing the mobile solutions group. He led the successful acquisition of Good Technology by Motorola and transition of teams and products.
SinglePoint was founded in 1996 as Wireless Services Corporation. From that point through 2005, the company focused on developing and operating value-added services specifically for the wireless industry such as email to paging gateways, SMS MT launch, Nextel WAP messaging, Inter-carrier messaging and MMS integration. In 2006, Wireless Services Corporation acquired Mobile Media North America and rebranded itself as SinglePoint. Mobile Media North America's entertainment services combined with Wireless Services Corporation's deep carrier background positioned SinglePoint to become the mobile messaging and marketing company focusing on SMS and MMS content delivery. Today, SinglePoint is the leading provider of interactive television solutions in North America working with content owners, media companies, and advertisers to create, deliver, and confirm premium mobile messages. In late 2007, SinglePoint processed 84 percent of interactive TV transactions initiated by mobile text message users.
We have started our sales in India in July 2010 and primarily focusing on educating the market, building the ecosystem and customizing the platform for India. We are projecting few millions in India in 2010.
Q. Could you name a few marketing initiatives that SinglePoint has taken for the Indian market?
We intend to educate the market through the ‘Conversational Advertisement’ and reaching out to the potential publishers and advertisers. At this time we are talking to most of the operators and non operators who have rich inventory.
Q. Tell us about conversational advertising and how it can be big in India.
Conversational Advertising is the messaging-based communication between the consumer and a brand, to deliver consumer benefits to the consumer. Conversational Advertising is first and foremost, based on the consumer’s direct option to receive advertising material from that brand. That is, when a consumer knowingly provides their mobile number specifically for the purposes of being communicated to by a particular brand or brands. Furthermore, Conversational Advertising removes the necessity to deliver the complete branding opportunity in one communication. The creativity element in Conversational Advertising is the creation of that engagement, leading to further interactions on the messaging platform or in potentially richer environments. Not only does messaging have unprecedented reach, it has unassailable effectiveness. About 90 per cent of all text messages are read within 3 minutes of their delivery – and over 99 per cent of all text messages are read by the recipient.
Putting this into context, the mobile phone is in the possession of the average user for 5,840 hours per year. That compares to the average 2,920 hours the average user in developed markets spends in front of their PC, versus the average 1,865 hours spent watching the TV (US only).
With over 500m mobile users and growing around 50%, the highest in the world and the SMS usage is average 29 sms per month per person in India, taking to a whopping 145billion messages per month. According to the various surveys, the Mobile advertising in India will grow at 500% this year, from $4m in 2009 to $20m in 2010. Similarly, it will grow over 400 times in next 5 years, from less than 0.5% in 2010, mobile advertisement will contribute 40% of total mobile messaging marketing revenue by 2015.
Thus, SinglePoint pins great expectations on the growth of ‘Conversational Advertising’ in India.
Q. Conversational Advertising is yet to reach its full potential in India. How do you perceive the next five years to be?
Mobile advertisement itself is in its nascent stage in India and mostly known using the ‘bulk SMS’. Major brands are scared to use the bulk SMS channel because of their brand value erosion or ROI or TRAI regulations. Once the ecosystem is evolved, we are confident that brands will start adopting Conversational Advertising. SinglePoint’s AD Junction platform provides ‘Marketplace’ where publishers and advertisers can seamlessly connect and do business on the platform without any manual interventions. Besides, the exponential growth of mobile users and adoption of SMS for communication and the various survey reports, lead us to one simple conclusion that Conversational Advertising will make huge impact in India. McKinsey predicted a global market size of USD $28 billion by 2013, and India will contribute in a big way.
Q. Since the start of Conversational Advertising, how has the response been and which are the most responsive markets?
Today, we have many players offering mobile marketing and primarily through bulk SMS. However, advertisers have their legitimate concerns more particularly with reference to effective reach to the end-user and ROI. Through Conversational Advertising, the advertisers can plan a long term marketing campaign as the propensity to engage increases from the 1st message to nth message and this also effectively helps in utilizing the budgets.
Similarly, agencies are more accustomed to generating several million dollars for a TV ad or online campaign. It is almost impossible for an agency to justify charging US$100,000 to come up with 20, 40, 60 characters for a messaging campaign, regardless of how successful 20 characters could be.
Conversational Advertising capitalizes on the opted-in database developed by the brand to establish an ongoing relationship with the consumer. In doing so, the concept evolves beyond the traditional campaign ideology that has become the cornerstone of advertising. Campaigns, by their very nature, represent an occasional touch-point with the consumer, and therefore are limited in their ability to encourage the ongoing interaction and engagement that brands desire.
In the digital age, engagement is critical. Once a consumer has opted in and become engaged, it then becomes counterintuitive to send an occasional communication. The effectiveness of the opt-in model is to maintain that relationship between the brand and the consumer, measured by the Cost Per Engagement (CPE).
An engaged consumer also represents a higher response rate. By generating an opt-in database, the likelihood of developing a response from a consumer into a conversation increases dramatically.
Each ‘conversation’ will be relevant and contextualized to the needs of the consumer. The initial opt-in provides the first level of information, which can then be enhanced by third-party intelligence based on the consumer’s mobile usage and behavioral traits. Lastly, and most importantly, each consumer’s response during the conversation with the brand will provide the latest and up-to-date consumer information. In effect, this third stage is real-time consumer profiling. And when applied to the power of messaging, becomes the ideal channel for brands and businesses.
Q. Who are your competitors and what is your USP to stay ahead of them?
Few of the major players in the market are Admob, Cellca, Smarto, Zestads, MobiAdz, 4info, Jumpstart, but most of these players are focusing on display or WAP or apps, etc. SinglePoint is the only player with focus on ‘Conversational Advertising’ and a ‘marketplace’ for both publishers and advertiser to seamlessly connect over the platform and do business without any manual intervention. The major USP of SinglePoint is that we cater to the ‘opt-in’ inventory so that brands can comfortably reach the end user and check their ROI.
Q. SinglePoint acquired M2Junction to foray into the Indian market. What was the most lucrative thing which attracted SinglePoint to venture in India?
SinglePoint has successfully tested and used the ADJunction platform of M2Junction in US markets and realized the benefits. One of the major reasons for venturing in India, is the exponential growth of mobile users (500 million), usage of SMS (150 billion) as means to communicate and above all the maturity of market.
Q. Could you name some unique features that you have introduced? - CPC (Cost per click or action) algorithms which are built in-house and run as agent(s) to figure out the optimal impressions to be served to get the required responses.
- Scheduling reports in analytics in the format of choice. Reports are generated timely and delivered via email to advertisers to measure ROI.
- Effective use of geographic and demographic targeting by the advertisers.
- C2C (Click to call) campaigns where the number of calls are accurately recorded so that the advertisers get to know the ROI.
Q. Tell us about various solutions that Singlepoint provides worldwide and which ones of these are slated for the Indian market?
AdJunction (includes Analytics) and Studio are the products offered worldwide, of which AdJunction is slated for Indian market.
- SinglePoint AdJunction is a mobile advertising marketplace which facilitates advertisers to get optimal returns on their advertising campaigns and publishers to publish the opt-in inventory with geographic and demo data and monetize the inventory.- SinglePoint Studio is a publisher platform to manage the subscription, alerts, content and handle user responses/votes.