Blyk
is a UK mobile phone service targeted at the 16-24 year old market.
Instead of users paying for the service, they agree to receive 6 ads a
day, this seems to fly in the face of conventional thinking.
I have
often written about the privacy invasion problems of advertising on
cellphones, but this Blyk is looking like a big success in advertising
terms and in the build out of an installed base.
The advertising
appears to be performing amazingly well, the network has achieved an
average 29% response rate for the close to 500 campaigns it's run to
date. The advertising success is due to the format, Blyk sends text and
picture messages to its user base who see it as part of a conversation
and don't have the hassle of browsing around mobile websites.
The
company's installed base in the UK currently numbers 100K.
Advertisers
seem to find the opportunities of brand conversation and interaction
appealing with the likes of Adidas, Ford, L'Oreal, McDonald's all
participating.
It appears Blyk is worth looking at for mobile
operators and MVNOs in the US who are struggling to find ways of adding
advertising revenue.
Blyk has looked at its whole model from the
perspective of the user and provides the low-cost
service that this demographic requires and thinks about advertising
as an on-going information-rich conversation that the user interacts
with, rather than simply media placement to grab eyeballs.
