Marketing is the key to ringback success, says Muzicall
Muzicall says Europe’s abysmal track record in ringbacks has nothing to do with attitudes and everything to do with marketing.
In South Korea, the penetration of ringback tones stands at 55 per cent. In China it’s 45 per cent. But in Europe – where mobile penetration is over 100 per cent – the rate is barely four per cent. What’s going on? Either Europeans have got some grudge against playing calls to their friends, or they’re just not selling them properly.
Richard Jackson is withering in his dismissal of a supposed cultural divide. And as for sales and marketing, well he thinks he has the answer to that, too. Jackson is VP of sales and a co-founder of Muzicall, a company that is dedicating itself to making Europe a viable market for the ringback. Or the Color Ring. Or the Caller Tune. In fact, this lack of a agreed name is a problem for ringbacks.
“There’s no recognition,” says Jackson. “Partly because of the name, mostly because operators have failed to market ringbacks properly. Operators sell tariffs, not services. And because they see things from a capex point of view, they think about their own investment rather than the greater good. That’s fair enough, but it hasn’t helped the market.”
Amazingly, Muzicall says only 15 operators in Europe don’t have a ringback platform, so the infrastructure is there. And when operators do support ringbacks, they see results. In Spain, for example, carrier resolve raised the penetration rate to 7.8 per cent.
In Greece, the market has hit 11 per cent. But generally, in a region as fragmented as Europe, what’s needed is operator-neutral marketing and sales. The best companies to do this are D2C companies – whether mobile specialists like Zed and Buongiorno or entertainment brands like MTV. But ringbacks are network-centric. You can’t sell them unless you have a network.
This is where Muzicall comes in. It positions itself as an intermediary that can link the operators (and the platforms they licence from Comverse, NMS, etc) and these consumer-facing firms via its RBT4ALL service. This way, ringbacks are marketed aggressively by incentivised specialists desperate for ‘legitimate’ subscription products.
Muzicall has already won over some operators, most notably in The Netherlands, where it is now working with Vodafone and T-Mobile, and is currently talking to KPN. It believes at least three quarters of the operators in any territory should be on board for the proposition to truly fly.
The critical element in Muzicall’s proposition is less technology than marketing. Jackson says that its contracts dictate that operators must contribute to a central marketing fund run by Muzicall that promotes the ringback concept generically.
But they only contribute when revenues hit pre-agreed targets.
“This way, the operator can’t lose. We fund the marketing ourselves until our partners are making money.”
Muzicall is aggressively seeking new operator deals and is working towards the next stage of its vision – bringing in ad-funded ringbacks and building services for corporates.
MOBILE MUSIC NOW
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To read Part Four of our special series of features focusing on mobile music, click here.
To read Part One, click here.
To read Part Two, click here.
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