@ MobileYouth: Blyk Pleads: Just Don’t Call It Advertising; ‘Will Attack O2 Prepay’
By Robert Andrews - Fri 09 Nov 2007 06:41 AM PST
A month and a half since its UK launch, Blyk - the mobile virtual network operator that offers customers aged 16 to 24 free calls and SMS in return for receiving mobile ads - thinks it’s hit on a formula for success: just don’t call it advertising! Head of sales Jonathan MacDonald, on a very strangely moderated panel about branding, said the word “advertising" should be replaced by “giving you stuff that you like” - “this isn’t advertising, this is what you want, surely you want it!”
- Stats: In January tests involving 690 users, only half of those surveyed said they would use an ad-funded mobile service and 80 percent of them said mobile advertising was spam, MacDonald revealed - so specific offers need to be made, like “offer “25 percent off an iPod in exchange for free calls”. Later, he told me Blyk has “several thousand” customers so far and a waiting list with “several thousand” more. They’re receiving ads with a 50/50 SMS/MMS split.
- Marketing: And Blyk is letting just such customer surveys and demographic profiling show the way ahead: “We’re not going to dictate that we have a clue what people want - we just set it up.” MacDonald called it “open co-design” - “you should let it be what users want it to be.” If it sounds like Blyk’s strategy is a void the company wants filled by someone else, that’s right. But Blyk doesn’t have a problem with that - the company consciously eschews having a set, single brand identity and MacDonald said Blyk has online and offline communities designing logos and other materials: “I can’t pretend to know what 16-to-24-year olds think is a cool design.”
- Orange: On the branding theme, during the panel, an Orange employee in the audience was asked whether the network’s customers trust the company. His response: “They have no choice!”
- O2: And a member from O2 let spill the company felt threatened by Blyk: ”It’s going to attack our prepay market for sure - we looked at Blyk and said ‘Oh! This is going to be quite surprising to see what’s going to happen.”
Posted in: Advertising, Mobile
