In brief:  This summary – which includes excerpts from an exclusive interview Marc Overton, Orange VP of Wholesale, Business Development & Partnerships – examines the mobile operator’s mobile advertising strategy; outlines Monkey, the first of a slew of services specifically based on the Blyk model; and wraps up with insights from Alan Moore – an authority on social media marketing and founder of the Engagement Communication Consultancy SMLXL – who points out that content/services subsidized by  advertising may have to be more than free to fly.

On the heels of the extremely popular posts on Blyk and MSG’s exclusive interview with Pekka Ala-Pietila, CEO and Co-founder of Blyk, the timing is perfect to deep-dive into Orange UK’s mobile advertising aspirations now that it has formally folded Blyk’s MVNO activities into its wider strategy.

The first service that draws from Blyk’s mobile advertising model – an approach built from the ground up to encourage a dialogue between brands and people that want to her their message by delivering people relevant advertising in tune with their preferences and profiles – is Orange Monkey.

The first Pay As You Go (PAYG) package for the U.K. market offers free music to customers when they top up their mobile. (Although PaidContent suggests the service is not about free music since the tunes you get to listen to (not own) when you top up add up to about 600 minutes each month. This translates into GBP2.14 ($3.53) for customers regularly paying GBP30 ($49.23) in phone credits. But that may just be picking nits since people are getting music at no extra cost.)

More about Monkey: it provides exclusive music, pre-release tracks and other content from Universal Music’s catalogue and relies on British broadcaster Channel 4 to get the word out to the target demographic (16-34 year-olds with mass market phones) via the Channel 4 portfolio including 4Music, billed the most watched music channel in the U.K. A clever twist and nod to the power of multi-channel promotion: The 4Music team will be the editorial voice of the official Monkey website which will carry news, artist features, playlists, exclusive content and competitions. (Check out the Orange site for more details and a video demo of the service.)

The promotion is about building buzz, loyalty and community. So, where does/will Blyk’s mobile advertising approach come in?

The focus on engagement and social networks is baked into the offer. As well as free music, Monkey offers customers free texts, allows for playlists to be shared on social networks, and it “delivers great offers from relevant brands direct to their mobile.”

Prior to the Monkey launch I was pre-briefed by Marc Overton, Orange VP of Wholesale, Business Development & Partnerships, who walked me through the concept and – more importantly – where brands and Blyk fit in the scheme of things.

AN EXCERPT OF OUR Q&A

Q: To backtrack for a moment, Orange essentially owns Blyk and the capabilities it has built to deliver targeted information and ads. What is the plan here?

A: We have been keen to get this [Blyk's end-to-end capability] as a core part of the Orange organization. We already have mobile advertising and cross-platform capability, and for us, this allows us to have fundamentally different relationship with our customers. It’s not about ad hoc adverts or repurposing display adverts; this is about targeting and tailored information delivered in a timely fashion as part of a broader proposition that has great benefits.

Q: Blyk has run over 2,500 campaigns. What sets the stage for what we might see from Orange?

A: The Lucozade campaign stands out. It gave out vouchers and consumers could redeem them for a free bottle of Lucozade. The response rates were overpowering just based on a [Blyk] subscriber base of 200,000. If we can start delivering that to our subscriber base of 16 million, then we can generate results and create something quite special. (By way of background, the Lucozade Energy campaign, documented in this case study, delivered vouchers via a bespoke WAP site Blyk members could visit to read about the promotion. A click on a link on the site sent an SMS voucher sent to their handset. Voucher requests from the Blyk activity accounted for 35 percent of total requests for 1 percent of the media spend.)

To do this you need the ability to design an end-to end creative campaign that delivers campaign and targeted to consumers. It’s something that isn’t easy to do. To do it ourselves means we would be sitting here in a year to 18 months having a similar conversation. It [the partnership with Blyk] gets us to market ahead of the rest of the competition in the U.K., and gives us the experts [Blyk support] that have been doing it and establishing the category so we can have these conversations [with brands] and off the back of it we can do develop some unique and unrivaled propositions.

Q: Such as?

A: Keep in mind that we have also signed a strategic partnership with Barclays in the U.K. to develop mobile payments and that will come online in the next year to 8 months. Linking mobile payments with mobile messaging – being able to tell people about relevant offers and where to redeem those offers – is going to be an exciting proposition, particularly combined with location services.

At a larger level, it’s about us as an operator having a deeper relationship with our customers and giving them assistance beyond telling them what their bill looks like. We are the place they can come to for great offers and benefits that they wouldn’t know existed if we didn’t have this [advertising] ability.

From an awareness level – telling customers about new products coming to market and get that community, dialogue and click-through going on between customers and brands – we are looking to target different segments with different types of messaging and campaigns. It’s a bit of a journey, but we’re confident we’ll get the right mix.

Q: What does this push look like on a practical level? Who is in charge of what and what is my relationship – as a brand or advertiser – with Orange?

A: Orange will do the ad sales, supported in this by Blyk. I see this as a team effort and the way we work together and reward each other is based on that team working. It is without a doubt a different skills set that Blyk has built, and there is a credibility and value to having Blyk support our ad sales force.

Q: You mention other segments and I left us hanging in our last post with the observation that operators can use the Blyk approach to target more than youth. What are your plans in this direction? Will we see a Blyk-like offer for customers over the age of 24?

A: Absolutely. We’re keen to offer this capability to all our customer segments. The model will likely change depending on the segment and type of customer, so it is our intent to have this as a core capability for our media business. We’re not restricting it just to the youth market and not just to consumers; it will be business professionals as well. In our view, Blyk has created a highly intimate way for a mobile operator to communicate with its customers, and it shouldn’t just be restricted to young people.

Q: Would it be a messaging option you offer to brands? Or would you use this to promote your own offers and perhaps also do your part to solve the content discovery dilemma: surfacing all the apps and content people can’t find and buy because mobile search doesn’t cut it yet?

A: It’s a conversation and we could us it to draw customers’ attention to a variety of offers, including our own [two-for-one price movie deal] Orange Wednesdays. We could also use it to launch propositions for [content/app] partners, or simply package it up for advertisers. Filling up the pipeline won’t be a problem.

Q: Earlier you referred to Orange as a ‘media company.’ That’s very different thinking for a mobile operator. Can you elaborate on this strategy and how it ties back in with the group and what I imagine would be your big-picture goal to offer brands a cross-media approach?

A: You’re right about the cross-media possibilities. That’s the group ambition and one that brings together other [group] capabilities such as our heritage as an Internet provider and portal provider with Wanadoo, our content production facilities in Spain and our mobile ad sales force in the U.K. We have capabilities – from a media perspective – that other operators don’t have. It’s a core part of our strategy to leverage these assets and capabilities and relationships into the media world. We’re doing a launch in a couple of weeks and talking to the media agencies about our ambitions in this space. We can brief you on this, if you like. This is a serious part of our business and the upcoming announcements demonstrate this.

Q: Sure thing –let’s connect then!

MONKEY BUSINESS

Since Marc couldn’t go into the specifics of the Monkey launch, I checked back in with Mat Sears, Orange Head Corporate & Consumer Communications, to fill in the gaps around the service and find out how it’s done to date.

Predictably, Mat couldn’t provide stats on a service that only launched July 30th. However, he did say the offer is “flying off the shelves.” Will advertising follow? Orange is getting in gear, and MMS and SMS ads (again, following the Blyk blueprint) are next on the agenda. The focus is on lifestyle companies around music (clothes, cosmetics, soft drinks), rather than other music labels or individual artists (extending their message to the community through a dialogue), although we may also see some campaigns to promote music and related events.

WHAT WORKS?

My take: Orange ranks high in my book as a mobile operator making the inevitable shift from access company (telco) to audience company (media player). It was one of the first operators out of the gates with a comprehensive mobile advertising offer, opening its Orange World portal to advertisers back in August 2006. Incorporating Blyk’s operations is a logical step in the strategy and choosing to focus on segments beyond youth makes hard business sense. I wonder if Orange will crack the code and grab the attention of the prosumers or any of the other potentially lucrative segments Novarra outlined it is path-breaking report. (Look for more on Novarra, next in the series Getting Personal, a special MSG report on personalization technologies.)

While it’s a smart move for Orange to target other segments, it begs the question: how should Orange tweak the Blyk blueprint to achieve its business objectives?

Free content/services works with cash-strapped youth. But how do you get the attention of affluent mobile professionals or life-stressed muli-taskers? (And let’s not forget the same dilemma faces Blyk copy-cat service providers such as Croatia’s ad-funded MVNO Tomato Plus and Gigafone, a mobile marketing services group that borrowed more than a page from Blyk’s founding concept.)

Happy coincidence that I was thinking this through when I bumped and connected with Alan Moore, an esteemed colleague and renowned social media/engagement marketing  pundit you’ll see a lot more of on MSG. (In fact you can get in the mood for our regular laid-back, hands-on look at what YOU need to know about social media marketing by checking out my two-part interview with him on behalf of bnetTV here.)

So, what are the do’s and don’ts for Orange (and really any company serious about advertising) moving forward?

1)   Think beyond offers that are about content and apps. Youth may like them, but the real value may lie in the mashups that bring it all together (with calendars, contact books, communities, you name it!) to simplify/enhance our lives on mobile.

2)    Don’t get hung up on free. As Alan pointed out in an invigorating rant on Skype, and again in his must-read post, Spotify is a case book example of how functionality (allowing people to do something with the content they get for free and share the end-results with the people who matter to them most) beats out freebee. As Alan puts it: “Last.FM or Spotify have understood that “FREE” is not the kicker, it’s the quality of the service that ‘enables’ its users in a rich variety of ways. Playlists, recommendations, personalization, discovery, contextualization, location, sharing are again part of this new vocabulary.”

3)    Think big – and think networked. Enabling people to interact with content on their terms is they way things are. Get it right and reach will follow.

Tags: app store, Barclays, Blyk, bnetTV, Channel 4, Gigafone, Location-based services, Lucozade, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Coupons, Mobile Marketing, Mobile Music, Mobile payment, Novar, Orange Monkey, Orange UK, SMLXL, Tomato Plus, vouchers, Wanadoo

This entry was posted on Monday, August 10th, 2009 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Mobile Advertising, Mobile Social Networking, Personalization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.