Comverse, best known for its billing and customer management systems has unveiled an attempt at chasing the mobile advertising dream, designed to serve adverts to handsets, based on complex demographic data and location information.
The Israeli-US company says that it has been developing its system for the past 12 months and was showing it off at the recent Mobile Internet World show in the US.
Ofer Razon, Director of Product management at Comverse told us, ‘Carriers are an important part of the advertising value chain, and we are bringing them a holistic approach to delivering the right advertising at the right touchpoints, right across the mobile experience. In the past mobile advertising has just been WAP or search based.’
The new Comverse MobileAd system will deliver on WAP, video, SMS, MMS, IM, voicemail and also ringback tones, he said.
‘The handset is not just an extra screen, and our system will leverage from unique features of the mobile device ‘ using the extra dimensions of location, time and personalization,’ Razon added.
The diagram above shows how Comverse thinks about advertising on the mobile ‘ nothing revolutionary really, simply highlighting the idea that advertising used to be a large footprint that was the same for everyone like in newspaper advertising. As advertising has developed, it has added further dimensions, through billboards (location), TV (time and context), online (user opt in) and finally on a handset including location, context, time and user demographics.
‘Both advertisers and network owners need to see that this all works and that advertising will not be regarded as invasive, a type of SPAM. Mostly right now we are seeing awareness campaigns on mobile, but Comverse is looking more at ad relevancy, and carrying out some target audience prediction, and interactive campaigns using operator assets.’
Razon’s point is that a cellular operator can reduce intrusiveness of advertising and maintain user privacy, but at the same time offer rich interactive media experiences and make offers using valuable incentives for the user.
He argues only on a carrier managed system will the customer be protected from advertising overuse, and the carrier will rapidly learn about any user habits which advertising needs to steer clear of.
The Converse system creates a user profile database which is upgraded as the handset is used, by tracking behavior. This profile can be stored with, or without, user identification. If it is inside the cellular network there is no reason not to have user identification, Razon says, since Comverse’s other applications, such as billing obviously already hold much of that data. But equally if it is outside the network, for instance where Comverse offers a hosted system, the user profile can eliminate all the identifying data ‘ Comverse says it is happy to support both types of system.
‘If advertising results in any help desk calls that’s very bad, because each call costs $10, and each advert is worth just a few cents,’ Razon points out.
‘The demographics we expect people to work with are age, gender, whether or not the customer is pre-paid, how much he or she spends, and their billing address. We should also know what service plan they are on, what their current ARPU is and we know what services they have selected and which portal sites they have visited on their phone. If you are not the carrier you don’t have most of that information.’
No software is needed on the device. If a specific channel needs a piece of client software in order to deliver an advert (such as IM) then the Comverse system just integrates delivery of advertising using that system.
The main part of the Comverse product is an advertising server which knows what your device and network are capable of so that it doesn’t send adverts in a format or resolution that your device/network combination can’t handle This puts Comverse up against operations like Amobee, Admob and Google, not to mention handset vendor Nokia, and companies like Qualcomm which offers operators its Xiam recommendation engine to pick the right adverts to show to mobile TV customers, and which has just partnered with Amobee for other forms of advertising delivery.
Most of Comverse’s success with its billing software to date has been in Eastern Europe and the Asia Pacific region and it says it has one trial of the system live in Asia Pacific already and 7 or 8 more in Europe and Asia lined up for further trials. Comverse claims to have 500 customers in 130 countries, mostly using its billing system.