asia

Hear from mobile marketing start-up InCent on how it entered the Singapore market, the challenges it faced, and why mobile should be the way to go.

Cato Gullichsen: InCent is a mobile marketing company with offices in Singapore and Norway. What we do is help advertisers take a step into the mobile media.

I studied at the National University of Singapore (NUS) as an exchange student a few years ago. We wrote a business plan specialising in targeted advertising and we won a Norwegian business plan competition. We wanted to target the Asian market because of factors like population density, increasing spending power and also adoption of new technology.

But being students, we had to head home after the end of the term, which we did. We set the company up in Norway and then a few years ago we decided to go back to Singapore because that was originally the plan and we thought we would do better here. I came back in 2006 to set up the company with investment dollars from NUS and Spring Singapore.          

Pereira: What are some of the solutions you offer?

Gullichsen: We aim to be a full service mobile advertising company. If we don't develop it ourselves, we have a partner or network that can get you anything that you need. The tricky part today is not so much the technology. There's lots of interesting technology out there but how do you fit it into your marketing plan, and what you can do without having to redesign your whole brand around mobile? Rather, how can you shift it a little bit into mobile, to complement what you're already doing?

Nobody really scraps everything they've been doing for the past 10 years and says lets go mobile, although personally I feel maybe they could benefit from doing so. But you use it now as a complementary medium. It's great for gathering responses, for time sensitive information, and to strengthen your overall media presence.

Pereira: What was your market research before entering the region?

Gullichsen: We were backpacking around the region, and every time we crossed a border we'd get messages for cheap IDD calls, lots of spam and irrelevant stuff. But what if you could profile people, what if you could make it more personalised?

When we got to Brunei, we didn't have a place to stay. Then we got an offer on the phone for cheap hotel rooms, which we took. We saw that the power of mobile advertising, if it's relevant and at the right time. So that became our mantra. One of the more exciting things we're doing right now is a research project with NUS where we're developing a mechanism for segmenting and profiling mobile users so that you can move away from mass marketing into very personalised and targeted marketing, which is where we believe the future of mobile lies.

The whole market has to shift towards targeted advertising. The old way of doing marketing is to craft a message and try to put it across to as many people as possible. The new school of thought is how many relevant people can you reach? And that is something that you can only do with a personal media channel, so you know who is at the other end of this phone number.

Pereira: What kind of segmentation can you do?

Gullichsen: Right now we can segment data such as age or gender. Coming up, we could do user profiling based on text backs and clicks to a WAP site, so that campaigns become more interactive. If you respond to an ad, whether it's distributed to you on your phone, or from posters, newspapers or TV, it means that at that point, you were interested in this product. And through building a history of that, seeing what you responded to, and even more importantly, what you didn't respond to, we can build quite accurate profiling and take mobile advertising to a new level.

Pereira: What's it like being a mobile start-up in the region? What are the challenges you face now?

Gullichsen: The biggest challenge for us is that it takes time to change people's mindset about mobile. I've started two start-ups with InCent. First we launched a company in Norway, and then went to Singapore. In the Scandinavian market, after seeing Nokia and Ericsson come up, consumers are more willing to try out new things. So it was a bit easier and took less time to get traction for our services.

People are a little bit reluctant to go into new media in Singapore. Internet advertising is also not as developed or dominant here than it is in Scandinavia. Just before Christmas, the internet overtook all other media channels to be the biggest channel in terms of ad revenue in Sweden. In Denmark, it will happen in the next few months, and Norway is also on track to have internet as the biggest media channel. Singapore is definitely heading in the same direction; it's just that the market takes a bit more time.

When I speak to Singaporeans in general, I get the feeling that they're a bit annoyed with mobile marketing. At some point, someone sent them something irrelevant at 2am. So there are players out there that haven't been respecting people's privacy, and have broken the cardinal rules of mobile marketing -- it has to be relevant.

It's a little bit of an uphill battle. Someone has irritated people a little bit. I think that advertisers are also wary that if we do it wrong, it's going to cause them damage. So that makes it all that harder. In terms of direct competition, I think the pie is already big enough for all of the players to get their fair share. It's not so much about competing with each other. Right now, there are two big media companies in Singapore that have all the pie, and the rest of us are left to fight for the crumbs. Our challenge will be to run away with a bit more of the crumbs instead.

With mobile, it's hard to draw the line between advertising and CRM, because although it can start as an ad campaign, you can still maintain a customer dialogue over time to develop your customer base. And as you learn more, you can start to inform them about products that are relevant. It becomes a service of convenience rather than just advertising. When you manage that, that's when mobile advertising starts to really work -- when it moves from interruption to interaction, it becomes a very convenient and powerful medium for the public.

Pereira: What advice would you have for digital marketing start-ups in the region?

Gullichsen: Just get started, don't hesitate. In Singapore, if you have a good idea, you will get funding. Be prepared that things will take time.  

Pereira: What is the future of mobile advertising for you?

Gullichsen: Text is disappearing very fast. The next big thing is mobile IM or Twitter, that will replace text in a few years. I see all marketing going in the direction of interaction. The whole idea is you're not supposed to feel that you're being sold to. You're supposed to be involved with the brand. It's a dialogue more than a monologue from the brand. As the younger generation comes up, this trend will grow. Advertisers that realize this now and start adopting interactive channels in their marketing will have a huge advantage over their competitors.

Marcel Lee Pereira is editor of iMedia Connection Asia.