BuzzCity is a global advertising network linking advertisers to millions of consumers around the world on mobile phones and devices via BuzzCity’s mobile internet ad network. Advertisers can display graphic and text ads on mobile websites to drive traffic towards websites. Hisham, VP of Sales and Marketing, speaks to us about what his insights and foresight of mobile marketing.

1. Tell us a bit about yourself.
I am the VP of Sales and Marketing for Buzzcity and my job is basically to develop our business, particularly to grow our sales and our publisher inventory. That’s the core of our business. Of course our business also has other media divisions which are basically our own media properties.

I come from a totally different industry but I decided to switch a long time ago and online and interactive media was a big interest for me. For the last 13 years I have been very focused on the interactive industry.

2. How big a part does mobile marketing play in your job?
Mobile marketing is my job. It is central to our business and central to my job. My job is to try to exploit as far as possible the marketing opportunities within mobile, particular mobile Internet.

3. How would you define mobile marketing?
Mobile marketing has many different aspects because mobile itself has many different media properties. There is SMS, MMS, mobile internet itself and then there’re other different applications that can go into mobile. In that sense, mobile marketing is the use of all these different media to develop tools to interact with the consumer. That’s what I would think of as mobile marketing.

4. What geographical market do you focus on?
My particular role is a global role. It supports the global initiatives for our business. Our company has offices in different countries. We have headquarters in Singapore, offices in Bangkok, Indonesia, Jarkata, Mumbai, Paris, Johannesburg and also in the US, Los Angeles.

5. What are the latest developments and trends in mobile marketing in the markets you operate in?
I guess the media is developing. That itself is a trend. The acknowledgment of this trend is starting to be recognised by traditional advertisers and traditional agencies. I suppose if there is a new trend within this overall trend, I think we will see more and more companies develop mobile sites on top of websites to support their Internet presence.

6. How do countries and regions differ in their adaptation and use of mobile marketing?
That largely depends on data tariffs. Many countries where data is cheap enough, mobile marketing includes SMS and mobile Internet. In some countries they are just starting to explore SMS as a mobile marketing tool but generally it also depends on how comfortable and how advertisers are at sharing more product information with the consumers so there are many different levels of adaptation and many different levels of adoption and this also depends on the operator and also depends on prevalence of the different type of handsets within each market.

7. What do you think of advertiser’s general knowledge of mobile marketing?
Right now, the average index of mobile marketing is fairly low, many are interested but unsure. It’s important to be able to share more information and educate the market more comprehensively.

8. What is the most frequent misconception about mobile marketing?
That mobile marketing is SMS Spam. Many people think of mobile marketing as SMS blast probably because some of the early mobile players resorted to that to publicise their products. Fortunately, regulatory measures have stepped in to prevent that in many countries but that is misconception lingers.

9. Have you noticed any change in advertisers’ attitude towards mobile marketing in the last couple of years?
Certainly. More brand advertisers are starting to use mobile marketing. They have been very cautious and to some extent, suspicious. But that is gradually changing. There is definitely more interest and in many cases, there has been actual experimentation if not done right, implementation.

10. How do you think mobile marketing will change in the next 2-5 years?
First, I think it’s the more wholesale adoption of mobile internet as a viable media. There will be a lot of content that needs to be deployed and mobile marketing will evolve around the sharing of product information in a kind of sensible dialogue with the consumer.

11. What area of mobile marketing has the most potential for growth?
All. SMS media is prevalent, mobile Internet is definitely set to grow and the next generation of hand phones also with better capabilities and functionalities will also mean that type of interactions with the user will change. I suspect it will be largely around the area associated with the discovery of sites, discovery of content, discovery of information and this is most likely to be around social media.

12. Which is the best mobile marketing campaign you have seen and why?
My favourite mobile marketing campaign are those campaigns that actually use the many different aspects of the mobile phone. And a simple but effective campaign has been one to encourage users, this is quite popular in India, is to get people to test drive new models of a car. Because it uses the phone as a media to capture the attention of the user while they are surfing the Internet and then the campaign gets the user to call using the mobile phone to arrange for a test drive. In thus sense it uses the many different capabilities of the mobile phone has, not just one.

13. What are the most common mistakes in mobile marketing?
Just driving the consumer into a site with no customer support behind it and the activities needs to be more than just grabbing eyeballs and sending to a website. It needs to be part of an overall customer relationship management approach.

14. If you were an advertiser, how would you start to implement mobile into your marketing mix?
Start low. Start with small budgets and see which products are better received by the consumer and fine tune that campaign as you increase your budgets.

Posted by Bernita