Mobile Entertainment

Tell us a little bit about your role…
I’m responsible for advertising activity, but also payments and shortcode services for the off-portal market. In terms of the former, the job boils down to matching advertisers with the right people in our 15.8 million mobile customer base and the 5.5 million unique users of the Orange web portal.

What’s the history of mobile ads at Orange?
We were the first operator to launch banner ads in August 2006, having introduced mobile sponsored search in 2005. We also launched zero-rated ad-funded video clips in July this year, on top of trials of ad-funded music and games. We should be ready to share the results of those trials soon. There’s also location-based banner advertising, which we’ve been running as part of Orange Local [mobile maps] and SMS ads within our 118 000 directory enquiry service.

Overall, it’s a multi-faceted operation and we’re in a good position to offer clients cross-platform opportunities, like we did with Shrek 3, and replicate those campaigns on a pan-European basis.

How do you decide what path your ad strategy takes?
The bottom line is this – consumers want relevance, advertisers want targeting. It’s our job to make that happen using a combination of context, location and demographics.

Our ‘Exposure’ research looks at how Orange customers are consuming media on their phones, including advertising. We’ve found that for regular users, mobile is the most accessed media between midday and 6pm – more than TV, websites, radio, magazines and newspapers. We think it’s a pretty good indication for where the mass market’s going to go and one that sends out a very strong message to advertisers.

Our customers have clear views on the kinds of advertising they do and don’t want to receive – SMS-based remains popular, but idle screen and sponsored video have also been well received, with users saying they feel like those techniques are actually delivering something useful to them. More than half of the people we asked about banner advertising said they’d like to see more – only one in ten said the same about TV advertising.

How do you manage ad inventory on a day-to-day basis?
We have a dedicated team that looks after mobile advertising, but we also have product managers who handle specific areas like video and games, so those guys work together very closely. Our web team also sells our mobile display ad inventory – that will eventually become our primary way of selling but we’ll also continue to work with partners such as Screentonic and Rhythm New Media on specific projects.

Tell us about the business models you’re using…
Each ad format lends itself to a particular kind of model. Banners and ad-funded video tends to go the way of CPM, whereas search defaults to CPC. It’s very reflective of how the internet works.

What we’ve not seen yet as an industry is the killer mobile combination – CPC didn’t really exist on the web until sponsored search came along, so maybe we’ll see something totally new emerge in wireless too. Cost per engagement, for example, where ad payments are made depending on users making a phone call or downloading content.

Mobile is often accused of not being as open as it could be with info for advertisers. Will that change?
Three things need to happen in that respect. We need standards and guidelines so that people know that if they buy a banner from Orange it’s the same size as all the other operators, so that execution is simple and more cost effective.

The next thing is education. We need to make sure that advertisers are fully aware of what’s possible right now and the fact that mobile offers both branding and response-based advertising solutions.

Thirdly, we need to provide accurate metrics and measurement tools. From a UK market perspective we’re working with the other four operators and the GSMA on audience measurement. But it’s not an overnight thing – there are lots of different technologies and methods used by the operators, but we’re working hard to get some uniformity.

I think advertising as a segment of mobile is developing faster than it did on the web in the late-1990s. A lot of that has to do with people in mobile ad teams coming from web backgrounds and applying that knowledge anew. Hopefully, we’ll see the revenue line for mobile grow just as fast as online has.