GoMo networks with four industry gurus at MACH Insights

Rating: Brøgger, Bubly, Lewis and McNiece

One of the key benefits of attending MACH Insights 2012 here in Prague was meeting up and speaking to the analysts who attend this event. Best value for money must surely be Dean Bubley from Disruptive Analysis who always came up with incisive questions. Unlike Alun Lewis from Silicon2Synapse, however, Bubly didn’t speak or chair a Panel Discussion. So it was left to Susan McNiece from Software Market Insight to provide us all with some very interesting stats for public consumption. Her major contribution was to introduce ARPA as a term which is apparently the successor to ARPU.In case you are wondering, ARPA stands for Average Revenue Per Account which McNiece reckons will displace ARPU – Average Revenue Per User.

That’s because she believes that an individual person will probably want more than just one single point of access to a cellular network.

The typical person will possess a smartphone plus a tablet, notebook, laptop or other connected device.

So why bill or treat such a person as two or maybe three separate entities? It gets more complicated when you consider that person in question might be the head of a family unit and be billed for a spouse’s or offspring’s cellular communications, too.

Now let’s look at the stats she shared. The communications industry (and these stats are fairly US-centric) is a bit ahead of global GDP which is around three per cent. Compared to that ICT spends about 5.7 per cent of GDP – but growth is flat.

So what’s going up and what’s going down? Well spending on wired voice communications is down 6 per cent per annum. But guess what’s on the rise – mobile advertising which is growing by around 22 per cent.

However, the decline in spending doesn’t equate to ARPU levels. They are all going down apart from wireline voice communications which are actually up by 3per cent (because prices have gone up.)

ARPUs for other areas have gone down because prices have either dropped or remained flat. The worst faller is MMS [– 5.9 per cent] followed by mobile voice [-4.9 per cent].

Even SMS has dropped by 2.6 per cent and – the star of this conference – M2M (machine-to-machine), has seen its ARPUs fall by 3.3 per cent worldwide.

So with all of these revenues decling, where are mobile operators going to make some money? It’s tricky because they’ve already missed to the boat on several potential money spinners such as app stores, for example.

The M2M market is still young so there’s some potential there but McNiece’s gut feeling is that operators can earn a few extra dollars by earning more money from selling mobile data.

There were plenty of figures floating around MACH Insights on this particular subject. Yves Martin, vp group roaming & interconnect, with the Orange Group came up with the best stats.

His group has found that 70 per cent of subscribers turn off data roaming when they go abroad. Mainly because everyone is so scared of bill shock.

As MACH’s CEO, Morten Brøgger, pointed out to GoMobile News, you only have to increase sales from data roaming by a couple of a per cent and you making millions if not billions of extra dollars.

So that’s it, then. Customer service is King. Give subscribers what they want such as Quality of Service (QoS) and talk in terms they can understand – a price per application instead of price per megabyte, and the dollars should start to come rolling back in again.

Tony is currently Editor of GoMobile News. He has taken over this role from Bena Roberts.

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AdMaxim recruits advertising and media industry leaders to enhance mobile marketing

Press release
May 31st 2012. This week sees the UK and EMEA launch of AdMaxim, the first of a new generation of mobile advertising technologies capable of integrating every possible mobile format and creative option, within a powerful real-time optimisation and precision audience targeting system.Developed over five years in the USA, by a group of leading advertising technology developers drawn from global companies such as Netscape, AOL and eBay, AdMaxim’s proprietary technology enables agencies to simplify the often complex process of constructing and managing mobile campaigns.
AdMaxim is led by founders, Sultan Khan, and Shishu Bedi, along with a senior management team including former Clear Channel Group Sales Director Steve Atkinson, who is joining as VP Sales EMEA, Mark Weeks, VP Operations, formerly VP Retail and Wholesale Banking at BT Global Services and Steve Tapping, CFO, who was formerly Partner specialising in technology at PwC.
AdMaxim has secured Series A backing from AdStream, the world’s leading player in digital advertising management technology and has attracted involvement from senior advertising and mobile industry figures including Andrew Edwards, UK Group Chairman and Chief Executive of Leo Burnett, who is a member of the AdMaxim board.
AdMaxim enables agencies to integrate multiple creative approaches from simple banner ads to multi-page interactive rich media executions and direct mechanisms. Capable of delivering large-scale global campaigns, the technology can optimise every campaign strand in parallel maximising ROI and performance management.
AdMaxim has begun working with a range of brands including Budweiser, GSK, Pepsico, Unicef, HMV, Johnnie Walker and media agencies such as MediaCom and PHD.
Sultan Khan, CEO, AdMaxim, says “The future of mobile marketing is integration, but the current complexity of the mobile sector is a barrier to entry for brands; it is holding back mobile advertising spend. We deliberately set out to create a mobile platform that can offer brands the flexibility to use any kind of mobile format or creative approach, combined with precision data optimisation.”
Steve Atkinson, VP Sales EMEA says, “Agencies are investing in mobile strategic planning and creative expertise as brands increasingly look to integrate mobile into their media and marketing strategies. AdMaxim will cut through the complexity of mobile because it is the first platform to bring all the options together and is driven by a bespoke optimisation system that out-performs the competition.”
Andrew Edwards UK Group Chairman and Chief Executive of Leo Burnett, comments: “The mobile advertising sector is awash with nascent technologies that solve just part of the challenge for brands, this is often because early venture capital support has required them to focus their capabilities.
“AdMaxim’s development story is different because the team are experienced advertising software and data architects, used to creating global integrated advertising platforms. They self-funded the original design and build, so having launched in the US, AdMaxim is coming to the EMEA market fully-formed, and we think it will change the mobile advertising sector for good.”
About AdMaxim
Our technology was built for brands. We are the first mobile marketing platform to deliver a complete, through-the-line range of mobile marketing options combined with a powerful real-time optimisation and precision audience targeting system.
Based in Silicon Valley, California (USA) and London (UK), we provide agencies and advertisers with a complete end-to-end, global mobile campaign management system combined with real-time optimisation technology enabling research, planning, creative development, delivery and optimisation in one straight forward system.
About AdStream
AdStream is the world’s leading player in digital advertising technology services and connects the global advertising community by streamlining the management, organisation, validation and distribution of multichannel content.
Our collaborative solutions enable brands, media owners, agencies and production companies to achieve higher efficiency, transparency and profitability throughout the advertising cycle across TV, Radio & Print medias and Workflow platforms.
We currently manage more than 4 million advertising-related assets per year across more than 90 countries, worldwide. We are the largest operational, international service and the only one offering a cross-media portfolio of solutions designed to work in different markets and to integrate seamlessly with locally designed components.

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