The Hindu Business Line : Jingle beeps

Behind the small display screen on our ever-evolving mobile devices, a huge marketing arena is coming into its own. Welcome to the world of mobile advertising.

“No other medium offers substantial reach combined with precise targeting,” says Beerud Sheth, Co-founder and President of Webaroo, the Mumbai-based company behind the popular group messaging service, SMS GupShup. “Print and TV are t oo un-targeted, radio and Internet don’t yet have the reach in India. This medium helps brand advertisers make sure their message reaches their specific audience, on a personal device, any time, very efficiently, thereby increasing the effectiveness of their campaign.”

Sheth should know. Webaroo, the company he founded in June 2004 with serial entrepreneur Rakesh Mathur (of Armedia, Junglee and Stratify fame) to develop innovative mobile solutions for the consumer market, is celebrating the first anniversary of its foray into mobile advertising by way of SMS GupShup. “SMS GupShup was inspired by a desire to bring more content to mobile phones, even the most basic handset,” says Sheth, also the founder of Elance. “It is a free group messaging service that helps mobile users create and join groups and send or receive group messages or greetings.” This content can emanate from diverse sources ranging from other users to publishers such as bloggers and news organisations.

Since its launch in April 2007, SMS GupShup has grown dramatically. “It is actively used by lakhs on a daily basis to share content across a wide variety of categories such as finance, entertainment, colleges, clubs and associations, religion, jokes, politics and so on,” says Sheth. So while Nikstock is used by stockbrokers to send tips to clients, LetzParty allows organisers to announce parties. And as the spiritually inclined share religious thoughts on the likes of SikhNetwork, jokesters are having fun on SMSWorld.

SMS GupShup allows users to send messages to their groups by sending them to the service’s short code (567678) and receive messages like any other SMS. They can also log on from their PCs to the SMS GupShup Web site ( http://www.smsgupshup.com) or from their data-capable phones to its WAP site (http://m.smsgupshup.com). “The Webaroo servers on the backend are designed to be highly scalable to handle high message volumes and high-performance to ensure fast messaging speed,” explains Sheth.

No spam, please

However, mobile advertising, if not used carefully, can be perceived as intrusive. The challenge is to find ways of delivering messages via mobile devices without ticking consumers off. The traditional bulk SMS spam, for instance, has elicited outrage from annoyed consumers.

But SMS GupShup, Sheth says, is strongly opposed to spam. “Our service is entirely user-driven: We only forward messages from publishers to subscribers. These are like personal messages coming from a trusted source, in this case, the group publisher. Furthermore, this service has features to let users easily join, leave, mute and block the messages.”

To many, the idea may seem a bit stretched: The typical display screens — occasionally still monochromatic and, in some cases, text-only — are too small and the experience too limited. To Sheth, however, the limited screen space actually spells significant advantages when delivering compelling advertising. “Small screens are mobile, which gives the ability to advertise anytime, anywhere. A small screen also implies there are fewer distractions for user attention. Basic handsets with limited features make mobile phones affordable, which increases the reach of the mobile medium.”

Sheth is convinced it’s time mobile advertising became an integral component of brand advertising. “When executed well, the mobile advertising campaign draws the attention of targeted users. Since the ad message on SMS GupShup arrives on their personal device, anytime, anywhere, embedded in a group message, consumers are likelier to notice the ad.”

Mobile campaigns

So what really do the brands expect this medium to deliver? “Brand advertisers are starting to launch mobile campaigns for various purposes — to increase awareness, educate customers, announce new products, and so on. For example, on SMS GupShup, airlines announce the launch of new flights, mutual funds announce new fund offers, retailers announce new sales campaigns and cinemas announce show times of upcoming movies.”

The greatest hindrance to mobile advertising until recently, according to Sheth, was the lack of good advertising options. “What passed for mobile marketing so far was essentially spam marketing. But spam is both annoying to the consumer and ineffective for the advertiser.” He is positioning SMS GupShup as a viable advertising platform that works for both the consumer and the advertiser.

But are the right infrastructure and ecosystem in place? “Before any advertiser can start advertising, you need to have a medium that users love to use. All media companies must first build a large audience. Furthermore, the ads must be contextual and non-intrusive so that they don’t hurt the user experience. The right ecosystem for the mobile medium is just developing with services like ours.”

In India, like elsewhere, consumer digital mobile communications have been adopted much faster than the Internet. However, mobile technology still seems to be largely embryonic, even experimental. But Sheth predicts that both the devices and the networks are well on course to becoming faster, better and cheaper in the next few years. “This will provide a fillip to new generations of mobile services enabling content, commerce, collaboration, messaging and so on.”

Sheth is also confident that new technologies will soon enable display in Indian languages. “SMS GupShup, for example, has picture messages and ads in Indian languages that can be sent via SMS. Besides, users have creatively adopted the English language phone for Indian languages.” If interactive marketing over mobile phones is one of the fastest growing areas within marketing, as growing evidence suggests, the reasons are clearly long term.

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