Mobile advertising on the go

Mobile advertising is one of those fields that has high expectations but hasn't quite delivered to the expectations till now. This week I had the opportunity to interact with two leaders working on cutting-edge stuff in mobile/Internet space: Mr. Sumeet Khanna VP of Microsoft, Canada & Mr. Shane Green, VP of Navteq (recently acquired by Nokia). This article is based on my learning from these meetings & some research.

The two key aspects why mobile advertising has lured advertisers are:
1) Targeting - Mobile ads are highly effective in targeting customers.
Television, called the primary media is a very general form of media. Every member of the family watches TV, hence it's difficult for the advertiser to focus on the target audience. PC advertising has more focus, thanks to content based advertising pioneered by Google, but the effectiveness of the Ad is reduced because of far too many Ads on the screen. Mobile phone, with its personal use & far little display space can be most effective in advertising.

2) Location based ads - mobiles can be carried around everywhere & its easy to track the customer location. Because of these reasons advertisers can run location based ads. For instance assume you are in a shopping mall now. A clothes store that's running a discounts sale can send you an SMS about its sale. This might trigger you to go to that store even though you had no intent of shopping for clothes.


Let's now focus on the mechanisms that advertisers use to sell their product.
SMS, due to its ease of use & basic system requirements, continues to be the primary form of advertising. It leaves way behind other forms of advertising.
An average SMS takes much lesser space than the 160 character limit. Some of the service providers are experimenting with appending an advertisement to each incoming message.

With the advent of high speeds & smarter phones, advertisers can deploy graphics based & more interactive ads. Since mobiles are relatively slower devices with lesser graphics support compared to PCs, displaying mobile advertisements require a company to maintain a separate site for its mobile customers. 26% of top 100 US sites have a mobile micro-site now. Check m.facebook.com for an example. As I had mentioned in this previous article, iPhone seems to be real trend setter & has driven mobile data rates to new high.




To make effective campaings, its good to understand when a customer uses her mobile to access the Internet. According to Interactive Advertising Beureu, a mobile user accesses the Internet mainly in the following scenarios:
1) When the user is busy in a work & wants to access the Internet to lookup for some references. He doesn't want to switch on his laptop/PC for a small job.
2) He wants to kill some time by playing a mobile game or some similar app.
Understading these usage patterns of the user is essential to build effective mobile ads.


The main roadblock in future increases in mobile Internet access seems to be high prices charged by service providers for these services. Going forward, with increasing ad based revenues, service providers may reduce these rates. Virgin mobile with its "sugar mama" campaign is already experimenting on this front.


The future of mobile advertising seems to be on the slow but steady path now..

References:
http://www.iab.net/media/file/moble_platform_status_report.pdf
http://www.telecommagazine.com/article.asp?HH_ID=AR_4357

A new series in terraintamer.blogspot.com

Q1 exams got over yesterday. Q2 will be starting in full flow from Monday. I Need to read through 2 two topics for Strategy class. And by "reading" I mean I need to be completely through with the topics & also gather few points for class participation. My gut feeling that I may need to slog the entire Q2 like we did in last 2 weeks before Q1 exams.


The past few months in Rotman has been a truly International experience for me. My classmates are from 30 odd countries. For any topic discussion in the class, each student brings out her perspective that's so unique to their culture & different from mine that I instantaneously feel "wow !! what an amazing point that was". This has inspired me to start a new series on my blog. I am planning to interact with some of my classmates & understand what's unique in their country/culture that many of us don't know of. Then I'm gonna compile it on my blog with a title like "10 things I didn't know about countryX".
Hopefully, this exercise will let me learn a little bit more about global cultures & also spread the "gyan" to you guys..

For a starter, did you know that "hola" with stress on "A" is Portuguese & "hola" with stress on "O" is Spanish? Basically, you greet a Brazilian with the 1st option & any other person from Latin America with the 2nd option.


Ciao..

What a hectic week !!

It had never dawned to me how hectic MBA is until last Wednesday. I was talking to my team regarding the various submission we had to make in coming week. This was the list:

group assignments:
Stats project step1 - 10th Oct
FIT presentation - 14th Oct
MPO case analysis - 16th Oct

individual assignments:
FIT - 21st Oct
MPO - 23rd Oct

We had planned our team assignments properly, so there were no problems there. But time required for individual assignments are grossly undervalued & we need to slog over now.

In between all this we needed to make time to prepare for the exams starting from 20th Oct, i.e. from next week.

Time to head back now..
bye..

Indian Railways @ Rotman

We got this article from our Media Relations office this tuesday:


Indian Railways Return to UofT’s Rotman School of Management.

Toronto – For the second year in a row, a program at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management will provide a look at the latest trends in management thinking and transportation for 40 senior managers from The Indian Railways, the second largest railway network in the world. Managers, from the finance and human resources functions of The Indian Railways, will be in Toronto from September 22 to October 4.

The two week program will provide participants with focused classes in finance, human resources, strategy and marketing. In addition to the classroom-based activities, the participants will have site visits to transportation and logistics firms.

“The Indian Railways have underwent a grand transformation in recent years becoming one of the most successful transportation companies in the world,” says Prof. Dilip Soman, Corus Chair in Communications Strategy, at the Rotman School, who is the academic director of the program. “Education and training, such as this program, are important for the company to continue its renaissance.”

The Indian Railways is the second largest railway network in the world and the largest civilian organization under a single management. It carries over 13 million passengers and 1.2 million tons of freight every day, runs 12,000 trains daily with nearly 8,000 Railway stations.

The Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto is redesigning business education for the 21st century with a curriculum based on Integrative Thinking. Located in the world’s most diverse city, the Rotman School fosters a new way to think that enables the design of creative business solutions. The School is currently raising $200 million to ensure Canada has the world-class business school it deserves. For more information, visit www.rotman.utoronto.ca.



This explained why we were seeing so many well dressed Indian men & women in the School over the weekend. I has initially thought that Rotman had rented out our CIBC Hall on 3rd floor for some Indian business meeting..


Later, I was able to collect some more info from Prof. Dilip Soman. This program was previously being done at NYU-Stern & Prof. Soman was instrumental in getting this program to Rotman.


Indian Railways has been a life-line of sorts for India, ever before Independence. So much so that there's a separate Railway Budget presented by the Central government.
It has been performing brilliantly well of late, very much inline with the economic boom in India. Contrary to most of the PSUs (Public Sector Undertakings) that have crumbled post liberalization, Indian Railways has been one of the few organizations that was able to capitalize on the booming economy.

Imparting top-class business education to top management is one facet of its willingness to innovate & revamp itself. But I think this is one the most important steps towards nurturing a better organization. Its this top management that's going back to implement new strategies to increase profits & at the same time move to around tonnes of freight & millions of Indians at least possible prices.

This program is going to be a good image building for Rotman as well. Now you know Rotman is behind all those innovations Indian Railways is going to roll out in the coming years. Hope delayed trains will be a thing of the past soon.. :)

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RIM's shares down by 25% on a single day

If you are in Canada, you would realize the weight of this blog's title. Of late there's been a strong correlation between RIM's performance & TSX's performance.
RIM is a household pride & is the newest face of Canadian technology prowess.

Today's value is the lowest in more than a year.
There have been two opposing reasons given for this downturn.
Some market analysts say that this negative dip is in line with the current global cues that hasn't spared even the best performers. More specifically, RIM has been over-evaluated for quite sometime & this downward slide was market correction.

On the other hand, RIM sympathizers argue that the reason was that RIM's Q3 results haven't met the market expectations. The market was expecting a return of 98 cents per share whereas the actual earnings have been around 88 cents!!
The markets may seem to be a little too severe on this company. Given the kind of cutthroat competition that's happening in mobile handset business, its imperative for RIM to invest more into R&D and bring out several more products to retain its market share.

RIM officials have clarified that R&D costs that were incurred in the present quarter will show profits in the coming quarters.

yet another new bottom..

Whoever thought that we are coming out of the slump of sub-prime crisis after the Citibank & Bear Stearns turmoils was mistaken. He would have been under a swirl of shocks in the past few weeks. It was Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac first & followed by Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch & AIG on a row this week.


There's a heated debate on why should the US Fed government bailout these firms for their follies at the cost of tax payers' money.
It seems to me that the sub-prime crisis has turned out to be a night-marish situation to the entire Capitalist society. The government is bailing out these firms so that they survive to disburse more loans to the people, people who are already neck deep with loan defaults.

But it seems this is the only easy & visible path that the Fed officials can see as of now. US is the richest country, its GDP is $13.8 trillion, Japan, the 2nd richest is a paltry $4.3 trillion. Developing economies such as China, India & Brazil are extremely dependent on the US for selling its goods. So if there's none buying in the US, these countries take a big hit. Although there are burgeoning domestic markets, they are in no comparison to the US market & they need more time to grow to the size of the US. So retaining the US market liquidity is crucial in maintaining global economic stability.



Its believed that the market goes into this scary, bearish mode every 5 years. Last time it happened during the Internet companies fallout & 9/11 crisis. That slump wiped out a good portion of the enthusiastic Internet startups in the Silicon Valley. The picture has never been the same for those who survived. They never again saw the kind of appreciations they saw in the last 1990's.

The situation today is somewhat more difficult. The companies involved are the biggest names in the financial world, the amounts involved are way beyond a common man's imagination. The blood-bath seems to be not over yet. How will the future be for those who survive this?

Have we hit the bottom? Or are we still to see it? Are we getting back to revival?

camp Manitou - an unforgettable experience

"Dude, this orientation camp was so dis-orienting" -- this was what one of my friends said after we came back from the 3 day camp to Camp Manitou (http://www.manitoucamp.com)
It was 3 days of exhausting fun. We had lots of team building competitions during day & we then partied all night. The entire period was so action packed that we didn't have time to gasp a breathe.



On the way to the camp, we had speed networking sessions (a 2nd year's idea, inspired by speed dating) by which we were supposed to meet many of our bus mates. I had a nice conversation with Jen Provan, a sailor who had represented Canada in Beijing'08.

After reaching the camp, we were shown to our cottages where we threw our luggage & headed to the dining hall to have lunch.
After lunch we had the Finance competition. Were given about 30 cards of 4 different colors, each representing land, labor, market & money. The mission of the competition was to form as many possible combinations of land, labor, market & money of the same color. If we needed any cards to complete our combination, we could trade it with any of our cards in a trading session that was held for 10 mins at 3 intervals. My team ended up garnering 880 points, the winning team had about 1200 points.


After the competition, the Desi gang went out to play cricket. Guess where we played? In the baseball ground. Indian improvisation right over there.. :)

Later, our Dean, Roger Martin visited the camp. We had an interactive discussion about his brainchild & the main buzzword at Rotman: Integrative Thinking.

That evening we had a casino event hosted by the faculty, including the Dean & the Vice Dean. We got to play with all these big guns in a very informal environ. There were free drinks to further relax our nerves when talking to them.. :)



Next day morning after the breakfast, we had the Consulting contest. The case was to come out with a recommendation for a leading credit card company that wants to enter the calling card market.
We came out with quite an out-of-the-box idea & we presented it quite well, so we got a clearance for the final round.
But in the finals, we missed out the 1st place by just 2 pts & had to content with the 2nd prize.

After lunch we had one of the best events in the camp: the Olympics. We were again split up into teams of 5 & were to play some of the more popular games such as basket-ball & volley-ball and some customized games such as "Grapefruit passing" (its a very interesting game, you've to play to know it). I got to play ice-hockey for the 1st time & I thoroughly enjoyed it. I even scored the winning goal for my team !!
By the end of the Olympics all of us were completely, all-and-out exhausted.
The soccer fans still had some batteries left, we went & had a good game of soccer.

As the sun came down, the party animals started coming out. Today's theme was movie costumes. We had been previously informed about the theme, so all of us had brought some kind costume along with us. I had brought a flashy "jhink-chak" shirt that I had brought in Pune, a pair of sun glasses. These were enough to make people believe that I was some Bollywood star.
One guy in my cottage had a costume of Ghost Busters while another had dressed himself as some Star Wars characher.
At the venue, it was amazing to see so many colorful people. One girl was a Marlyn Manroe in her famous white dress, there were a bunch of pirates & a whole lot of Jokers, inspired by the cult icon Heath Ledger. Can't forget his line "do you how I got these scars?"
Some of the Desi gang recognized me as Rajinikant, so I decided that's what I am gonna be. I was boasting some of the heroics of Rajini such as lighting a cigarette with a gun, etc to some of the curious "phoren" students..




Next morning was our last day in the camp. All of us were dead tired by now. I saw most ppl limping around. It must be either coz of the Olympics or they had tripped while heading back to cottages after all the drinking & partying. I confess mine was because of the Olympics.. :)

We had a marketing contest right after the breakfast. Most of us were too tired to participate. Winners were decided based on which team receives the max numbers of claps or table banging for their performance. The winning team had put in quite a good show.

We then had lunch & got on to the buses & head back to the school.

All-in-all, it was a great effort & co-ordination by the 2nd years that made this event a great success.