Mobile Entertainment

It felt like the sort of place a music label might hold a party. And guess what? It is the sort of place music labels hold parties. Just the venue, then, to launch a radical and disruptive service like Blyk.

For the handful of you that need reminding, Blyk is a ‘free’ MVNO that offers 43 mins and 217 texts a month to 16 to 24 year olds. No contract, no tie-in. All users have to do is fill in a form detailing their consumer and lifestyle tastes, so that advertisers can communicate with them.

The 43/217 offer doesn’t seem very generous to me. It makes Blyk more of a subsidised service than a free one (subscribers can top up using the Orange network). However, Blyk is adamant that 43/217 represents the average monthly consumption of 4.5 million 16 to 24 year olds (there are around seven million of them in the UK).

Either way, Blyk is about to pick up the biggest monthly phone bill the industry’s ever seen.

What I find interesting is that, for something radical and disruptive, Blyk is strangely old-fashioned. There’s no content element to the proposition at all. No free ringtones or games yet. Blyk says this is because, when it comes to mobile, its research showed that the target market values text first, then voice, then alarm clock and then downloads.

Oh dear. And even the advertising is very low-tech. Yes, there will be MMS campaigns, but most of it is plain text. It’s a long way from the click through banners of the new breed of mobile ad specialists.

The reason for this is because Blyk is not really about advertising at all: it’s direct marketing. And Blyk is serenely, blissfully confident that users will not regard their new brand ‘friends’ as intrusive.

At the launch, I asked the Blyk execs how they would treat consumers who sign up and then decline to respond to a single advertiser message. They couldn’t conceive it happening. Why? Because their trials have proved that many users don’t even think of ads as ads, but nice offers.

Blyk is launching with 45 advertisers and promises many many more. Among them are huge names like Adidas, Ford and L’Oreal. The only mobile content companies I could see were I-play and Pitch. Again, how different from the typical mobile advertising ‘story’ in which most banners or sponsored searches take the consumer through to ringtone and wallpaper services.

Should be a very interesting few weeks. I look forward to finding out how it all works. Not personally, though, as I am slightly older than 24.