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South Africa Leads Mobile Marketing Adoption
Published Oct 4, 2009
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MMS Marketing campaigns are set to take off over the next five years with annual growth rates reaching 94 percent, hitting $87 million by 2014 according to a new report.
Eddie Groenewald, Multimedia Solutions CEO, says while the research from Juniper entitled Mobile Messaging &IP Evolution: Players, Strategies & Forecasts 2009-2014 indicates that the Far East would lead the MMS marketing adoption followed by North America and Western Europe, South Africa has led the way in terms of the technology, which will drive these adoption curves.
“South African companies have been using MMS marketing for a number of years now. While high prices, poor interfaces, unpredictable rendering of MMS and frequent delivery failures impeded MMS growth in the beginning, these issues were resolved here in South Africa before anywhere else in the world, placing us at the forefront of MMS development,” he says.
As a result, the case studies from mobile operators and other corporates in South Africa are being used internationally as the bench mark for how to roll out MMS campaigns, with Vodacom’s very successful use of MMS resulting in significant interest from Vodafone in the use of the technology.
Multimedia Solutions has seen queries come in from almost every continent with the possibility of international expansion becoming increasingly closer, Groenewald says.
The reason for the growth is simple. Response rates to MMS marketing campaigns in South Africa are regularly above 40 percent, which is a light year ahead of current response rates from traditional media.
“A key reason behind MMS’ popularity is the multimedia aspect of the message that allows consumers to see a product and hear a description on it at the same time,” he says.
Furthermore, customisable MMS content which has been made available by the mobile operators has resulted in a large amount of MMS content getting out into the market in the form of greeting cards, birthday cards etc.
“Application to Peer (A2P) traffic is what caused SMS to take off, stimulating Peer to Peer (P2P) usage. As MMS content has spread into the market, so it has fuelled the use of P2P MMS traffic as well,” he says.
By contrast, SMS traffic which represented over 80 percent of total non voice revenues at the end of 2004, is now on a sharp decline as MMS becomes more popular.
Groenewald says the fact that MMS can be filled with information, and provides the ability to communicate almost instantly with a base, gives it the edge over traditional marketing channels.
“The costs of producing a MMS campaign are also substantially less than other mass media forms of communication which, together with real time reporting provided for MMS campaigns, makes it one of the most effective channels for companies to communicate with to their customer bases,” he says.
Posted by
VMD - [Virtual Marketing Department]
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