3G Opens Floodgate of Marketing Opportunities for SMEs

Debadutta Upadhyaya, VP, Vdopia India

Mobile devices are fast becoming the place where numerous technologies meet and create applications that are useful for both consumers and businesses across the globe. And with the explosion of Internet video consumption, it is assumed that mobile video has been largely adopted across the world.

Improving economic conditions and the low cost of handsets and connections are driving mobile adoption in India and across the world. While India is still into advanced feature phones, smartphones are catching up dramatically. Already, India has around 30-40 million 3G enabled handsets. By 2013, the numbers will jump to 260 million users, which I would call the inflection point in mobile advertising.

Again, it is this high-volume mix of 3G connectivity and powerful handsets which are driving engaging brand media onto mobile devices. India now boasts of being Asia Pacific's single largest mobile ad impression market. Today small and medium enterprises are clearly acknowledging the potential and fierce growth of telecom and the growing numbers of addressable mobile audience. Because video ads can effectively deliver brand-driven creative —while complementing existing TV spots in a way static banner ads cannot — SMEs are now directing their interest toward mobile.

SMEs marketing themselves through Mobile Ad

The biggest advantage for SMEs in India is that, the future is already here and innovations will only keep coming.

The future is already here

With India already catching up on smartphone adoption at fast pace, there are companies like Vdopia that serve hundreds of millions of video ad impressions each month via InWAP and PreWAP ad formats. In the days, months and years ahead, companies will power a distinctive range of video innovations which best serve marketers by engaging, entertaining and serving the needs of mobile users. For example, by enabling users to download branded apps, interact with an In-App WAP site or replay a video ad, and targeting video consumers with contextual video advertising while offering a call to action (namely clickable icons like 'Email advertiser', 'Call advertiser' that solicit an action from the user) without interrupting their view experience.

Recently, an SME in the online travel domain took advantage of mobile video advertising from Vdopia to greatly expand its customer reach. The online travel company decided to open up its special travel offers to more than one million smartphone users of Indian origin in the US. However, the offer was available for the limited time frame. To help them do so, Vdopia delivered a pre-app video solution that synched with the travel company's outreach marketing. The format allowed smartphone users to respond to the marketer's video ads by calling or emailing the travel company. Smartphone users were served 5-10 second special offer video ads as they waited for their chosen application to load. Frequency capping significantly reduced the risk of overexposure for any creative while maximizing reach —thereby driving sales with full accountability (every user action was tracked by the platform). On the publisher side, Vdopia simultaneously delivered for app developers and South Asia-based publishers by enabling them to earn several times more than their typical revenues from traditional display advertising. With these types of efforts already coming to life, where does the industry go from here? Here are a few thoughts.

First off, ads will continue to get more and more engaging —taking us ever closer to true one-to-one interaction. Live streaming, for example, enables contextually-relevant video ads that engage users while soliciting actions from them based on highly relevant, hyper-specific characteristics such as one's location in real time. Another area ripe for innovation is the manner in which mobile video content is served to users. Right now, there are multiple competing mobile platforms —iOS, Android, BlackBerry, etc — and their video serving solutions are not compatible. While Flash is the de facto video standard on PCs, that's not the case on mobile devices; only around nine percent of all smartphones in the market support Flash. What the industry needs is an HTML5-based 'create once, run anywhere' video solution to cut through the platform fragmentation maze. This innovation will make marketers' lives easier by enabling an easy-to-implement, unified video ad experience across any device. I'm confident we'll see these innovations — and more very soon, to help marketers truly maximize the mobile opportunity.