MSearchGroove

June was a banner month for Celltick – but that’s just a taste of what we can expect from the provider of idle screen applications over the coming months. The company, which claims a whopping 50 millions users worldwide, recently chalked up three operator wins (Spice Nepal, Cambodia’s Applifone and Indonesia’s Indosat) – just a fraction of the deals CEO Stephen Dunford tells me has had under his belt. In fact, he’s closed 10 new deals in the first two quarters of this year. (Do the math and that brings Celltick’s total deals to just over 30 by end-2007.) Look for announcements involving operators in Latin America and Central Europe in the next 2 months.

But the deal to watch is a tie-up with a major search engine company “some time in the next three months.” (Actually, I know of several such deals in the works, just under NDA and can’t reveal the details - yet. It seems ODPs and search engines are the new dream team. It’s a game-changing development – so keep checking back for the inside track.)

In an exclusive interview Stephen told me he envisions a service “powered by the search engine company” where the search engine partner also provides the content and the advertising. “Essentially, we would promote wither ad-funded content or [show] content to subscribers that would typically not use the search services offered by the operator.” What’s more, Celltick and its search engine partner would “always maintain the editorial control and the scheduling of the service within the operator’s environment.”

Will 2007 be the year metasearch makes its debut in the mobile space? Connect the dots and this is a potential outcome. Not that operators would mind. An operator that already sealed a deal with a particular search engine, for example, could nonetheless benefit from the extra inventory (and search monetization schemes) Celltick’s partner would bring to the table.

What’s more, search engines that didn’t snag an operator in the first round now have a second chance. They can get in on the action via the active idle screen, and claim a pivotal position in the user experience - even if the particular operator passed them over and picked a rival search engine to deliver on-portal results and ads. Is there strength in numbers? Stephen thinks so. “Operators will use a range of methods of getting to their subscribers, depending on the level of sophistication of their subscriber base….They will look at various segments and socio-economic groupings.” Put another way, search engines (plural, here) help operators get “content and advertising across to their subscriber base.”

Finally, a tie-up with an idle screen app provider allows a search engine company to overcome the usability shortcomings (such as click distance and lack of personalization) baked into mobile search as it stands today. Finding content is a pain and this is a frustration for everyone in the value chain. “The search companies we’re involved with right now are looking at how to get beyond the 10 percent [usage] …and we offer that capability by essentially pushing the content to the subscriber, [allowing the subscriber] to make an impulse decision.”

Listen to the podcast here.

Mighty media: Look for Celltick to close a deal with a “particular media agent” as well as regional media agents. “They [the deals] would bring premium brands to our service and I think that’s where I see our focus initially – where you’ve got handcrafted campaigns to drive a high-quality user experience [and] high levels of revenue for the services offered.”

Campaigns and conversions: “Worldwide we have 50 million subscribers and, generally, we find that half are regular subscribers, click a number of times each month. On average, for each active subscriber, we’re seeing them click [ad-funded content] between 8 and 10 times a month. If it’s not ad-funded, then it tends to be between 3 and 4.”

50 million and counting: Celltick successfully reaches a mass market audience because it has cleverly chosen to focus on the lowest common denominator: the SIM card. In fact, Celltick has agreements in place with all the major SIM vendors. (The releases have more on recent deals with Gemalto and Oberthur Card Systems.) “Most other ODP players seem to be restricted to certain types of handsets and, in many cases, the clients they [offer] take up a sizeable amount of space on the device.” Celltick’s solution, on the other hand, is a “sleeping client that is delivered at course and can be activated when the operator so wishes.”

Personalization for profit: Celltick, like most companies in its space, takes it cues from user behavior (click patterns and content preferences, for example) to personalize the content it displays to an individual user. “Now we also have the ability to offer localized services down to the cell level and then segment in that cell level.” In practice, this allows Celltick to limit an advertising campaign pitch to a specific area – such as a shopping mall. In addition, Celltick can “work with operators to take some of their information and build up a much finer picture of user.”

Datacasting: Stephen and I wrapped up the podcast with a discussion of datacasting, an approach supported by Tom Wheeler in this post. The argument: Mobile operators, like cable TV providers, can get more bang for the buck if they deliver mobile advertising and other offers to a broad audience rather than attempt a one-to-one approach. The ads could be cached on the phone and technologies such as MediaFLO make it all possible. Are Celltick’s days numbered? Datacasting has its advantages, and pushing ads to a mass market does deliver reach. “But I think premium brands would want more handcrafted content.” What’s more, users might vote with their feet if an operator pushes out one-size-fits-all pitches. “If you’re merely datacasting, you’re using a shotgun approach – and I don’t think that sits well with subscribers, generally, nor with brands.”

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• Personalization, Mobile Search, Mobile Advertising, Content Discovery, Podcasts

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