Adgully Exclusive | Advertising on mobile to grow at 500%: SinglePoint's Raghu Kumar

Established in 1996 as Wireless Services Corporation, SinglePoint today stands as a leading name in mobile marketing. In 2006 when Wireless Services Corporation acquired Mobile Media North America, the company changed its brand image to SinglePoint. Since then the company has tried to "enable publishers to monetize their mobile messaging traffic and advertisers to access premium inventory to rapidly launch mobile advertising campaigns."

Early this year SinglePoint entered India, by acquiring M2Junction. Since then, SinglePoint has partnered with NetCore, SMS Country (160by2), Ohana Media and Integrid Media and has led the "opt-in mobile advertising" space in India.

Adgully spoke to Raghu Kumar, Managing Director, SinglePoint, to understand the mobile marketing space in India and SinglePoint's share in the big pie.

Talking about mobile as a medium of advertising and the opportunities it provides to innovate in the Indian market, Kumar, says, "Mobile advertising is in its nascent stage and is still evolving in India. What is prevalent is primarily SMS based advertising and very less of WAP or Application based. However, advertisers are keen to spend on mobile advertising as long as there are tools to measure ROI."

However he is quick enough to add that India has over 600mn mobile users with a constant growth of about 35%, which is the highest across the globe. Moreover, the SMS usage is of average 29 sms per month per person in India, taking to a whopping 145 billion messages per month. "Mobile advertising in India is expected to grow at 500% this year, from $4m in 2009 to $20m in 2010. Similarly, mobile advertisement will contribute 40% of total mobile messaging marketing revenue by 2015," he adds.

With an exponential growth of mobile users and adoption of SMS for communication, India becomes an essential market for conversational advertising. McKinsey predicted India's contribution in a big way with an increase of a global market size to USD $28 billion by 2013

Talking about the kind of brands and clients the company is focusing on, Kumar says, "We are currently focusing on few verticals ' Hospitality, Retail, Banking and Airlines and talking to some large companies who are evaluating the benefits of using the SinglePoint platform including our analytics product which measures ROI."

So what is it that is being offered to the clients and how is it really different placed in the slowly growing mobile advertising space?

SinglePoint's AD Junction platform provides a "Marketplace' where publishers and advertisers can connect and do business on the platform without any manual interventions. The company's AD Junction platform provides a "self serve' model to all parties involved in the business. "SinglePoint is strongly of the view that advertisers will adopt mobile advertising only when they can measure their ROI. Equally critical is profiling of inventory so that advertiser can reach their target audience through Conversational Advertising," Kumar adds.

Elaborating on Conversational Advertising Kumar, says, "It is a messaging-based communication between the consumer and a brand to deliver consumer benefits to the consumer."

Conversational Advertising is first and foremost, based on the consumer's direct opt-in to receive advertising from that brand. That is when a consumer knowingly provides their mobile number specifically for the purposes of being communicated to by a particular brand or brands.

Furthermore, Conversational Advertising removes the necessity to deliver the

Talking about the stage at which Indian mobile advertising space is placed compared to the West, Kumar, says, "In USA unsolicited calls or messages are totally prohibited and huge penalties are imposed on the defaulters, similarly in India too, we need such strict compliances to protect the consumer and for the growth of the mobile marketing. Besides, mobile marketing is in its nascent stage and is evolving. The MMA is very active in US which imposes self governance which is helping the industry." | By Prabha Hegde [prabha(at)adgully.com]