mGinger
Few posts back , I had written about Onyomo - a local search engine for Indian cities. mGinger has come up with a business model of targeted SMS advertising albeit with a catch. The end user selects what category of ads he/she wants to receive and earns money on every SMS received. mGinger folks write about the chicken and egg problem in their blog. Maybe they should get in touch with OnYoMo. There could be some interesting synergy when you can receive ads based on your sms search results and the sms search results are based on a) your interest and b) your location. I think SMS advertising is not for big impact; a Nike user will not switch to Adidas with an sms ad. Infact, I believe sms is suitable only for local deal advertising i.e. discounts, new products, etc.
Asking people to sign up for ads to earn money is so stone age. And passe. Whether it works , time will tell. I am more interested in the way mginger is trying to attract new users - through social networking sites and word of mouth. Lets see how far it goes.
On a more cautious note, mginger is still in early early beta stage, so website will be down and you may not get enough ads to pay your bills , as they claim. On a pessimistic note, online media spend last year was not more than 300 mn USD. What amount of media spend was sms based? I would be surprised if it was in multiple tens of millions USD.
2 comments:
i signed up or rather was forced to sign up for mginger but i am still to recieve any ads. don't know whether it would work or not but one thing is clear, the concept of micropayments is not tailor made for the indian population where a significant lot is free enough to listen to even upto 50 ads per day. and what are the products mginger would be advertising, is it going to be products like pizza hut(as they did in US) n stuff who already spend way too much on brand promotions in India...so would they be willing to burn some extra hole in their pockets???
SMS/Mobile Marketing is still in its infancy here and it will be very interesting to see how it shakes out, but I think it shows promise. As long as the end user is given a choice (to receive ads or pay a premium and not pay), I think mobile advertising can and will be a very effective method of brand messaging.
Thanks for the thoughts!
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