Mobile Advertising
The term mobile advertising refers to any form of advertising that appears on mobile devices. Companies can advertise on these devices through text ads via SMS or digital ads via MMS. In Recent days, Mobile operators are allowing the companies to do mobile advertising for their subscribers so that companies can promote products and services via digital ads and rich media ads.
Unlike traditional marketing efforts, mobile marketing takes advantage of the fact that many users of mobile devices carry them around wherever they go. As a result, location-based services can collect customer data and then offer coupons, deals, or promotions based on their proximity to a store or a place frequently visited by the consumer.
These marketing campaigns with rich contents can be more targeted and specific to the individual user via MMS and OTT applications. Therefore, the campaign can be more effective for the company which is performing the marketing.
According to Juniper Research in June 2021, SMS messaging revenue will fall from $66b in 2020 to $61b by 2025. As a result, network operators are required to make more investments into rich media technologies such as Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) to compensate the loss of Short Message Service (SMS) revenue over the next five years.
Scarlett Woodford, Research Analyst at Juniper Research, said that operators will take advantage of the growing interest in OTT strategies to foster increased investment in rich media messaging standards like MMS.
According to the website mobiles.co.uk, researchers found that Ssubscribers feel more positive towards a brand which uses messaging platform to communicate promotions. At the same time, companies identified that their communication with consumers to be more efficient after launching latest the initiatives.
What Is MMS?
Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) is a standard way to send messages that include multimedia content to and from a mobile phone over a cellular network. The MMS standard extends the core SMS (Short Message Service) capability, allowing the exchange of text messages greater than 160 characters in length.
What Is OTT Messaging?
OTT (Over the top) means sending and receiving content (data) over the internet, not standard carrier messaging networks. OTT messaging services typically offer instant messaging and online chat services. They are an alternative to carrier network SMS and MMS text messaging.
Benefits of Using MMS as Mobile Advertising Platform
Both Mobile Subscribers and Advertisers have benefits when doing mobile advertising over MMS
- Power of pictures – MMS service creates a richer mobile experience for your customers or subscribers. A picture is worth a thousand words and the video and audio options will give a better understanding of the advertisement to the Mobile subscriber
- Higher click rate and 8x sharing – People prefer MMS marketing rather than SMS. Businesses who use MMS see click-through rates that are significantly higher. Picture messaging is simply more engaging than SMS. Also, if you are an advertiser looking for a bigger impact from your mass texting service, MMS just makes a lot of sense
- Easy setup – If you can swing email attachments, you will be simply fine uploading files to your MMS messages. Just like SMS, setting up a campaign is easy, subscribing is easy—everything is easy
- More space to express – With MMS marketing, you can eliminate 160-character limit. MMS supports up to 1,600 characters per message. Make the text blasts more powerful.
- Data security – As a Subscriber my personal data is protected, whereas OTT messaging apps commonly ask for access to the camera, microphone, and other apps of the subscriber. Whereas MMS does not require sharing personal information or granting access to software or hardware. It also does not require linking with third-party platforms
- Content control – The operator has the complete control over the content shared in the MMS so the content can be filtered before delivering to the customer, whereas the OTT mobile advertising do not have any mechanism to filter the message based on the below parameters.
- Subject
- Message Type
- Attachment
- Message Content
- Changing Party
Hence the advertisement can be filtered before the advertisement is distributed from the MMSC (Multimedia Message Service Center). So, the community guidelines will be maintained for each Ad Campaign.
Benefits for the Brands by Associating with Mobile Operator for Advertising via MMS
- Low Investments – The integration with OTT for a business account is high. The Brands need to keep a huge sum as a deposit to the OTT app provider. Therefore, Small and Medium scale Brands will not be able to do the bear the initial cost.
- Time – The duration taken by MMS to launch an Ad campaign is extremely low when compared to OTT based advertising. This is because if a brand needs to send an advertisement, then the sender’s name approval needs to be obtained by providing their business documents.
Campaign Approval and Local support are given from the Mobile Operator. When it comes to OTT ad campaigns, the approval and local support are given from the regional team and as a result there will be delays in approving the campaigns.
- Low-cost Inventory – The Mobile operators sell their own infrastructure to their customers. So, there is no additional cost involved for them to sell this advertising space, hence the Mobile operator can sell the advertising space at a comparably low price.
- Data Insights – The mobile operator can provide Data Insights to execute the campaign, like Location, Mobile Type, ARPU (Average Revenue Per User), Gender and Age Category.
- Campaign Reports – The Mobile operator can provide the campaign results with delivery status and read reports. So, the companies can analyze the reach or the success rate of the campaign.
Therefore, MMS is a reliable and proven solution for advertising messaging. It has a larger audience than any single OTT platform and is trusted by large brands across the world to deliver messages quickly and seamlessly to customers
In a Nutshell, as mobile operators it is an additional revenue stream for them to generate revenue by selling their advertising space to other brands. In the other hand, for the brands it will be a cost effective and high reachability medium when it comes to modern advertising solutions.
