By
Tim Young
Personalization is a wonderful idea. Who doesn’t value the ability to customize a user experience? We can mix our own paint colors, even at big-box home improvement stores. We can create our own ingredient combination at pretty much any burrito joint or sandwich shop. We can name our own price on travel websites.
Customize. Personalize. Press a fiery-hot brand into the hides of everything around you.
People like personalization, and communications service providers are in a unique place to provide them just the sort of personalization they crave.
Mobile companies are the best at this. A mélange of optional services, third party apps, device choices, and accessories make cell phones the custom street-rod for the 21st century everyman (and everywoman. And everyteen.)
Granted, there are still a million hurdles for providers to overcome in this realm, and a wide variety of OSS and BSS tools are out there to help them do it.
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“Addressability”… something that advertisers have pinned their hopes on for some time. |
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McLellan from early December 2009 outlines how the union of the two companies could create just the sort of environment in which ads could be specially tailored for consumption by specific users targeted based on a wide array of demographic characteristics.
The keyword here is “addressability” — the idea that an advertiser could buy a national TV spot that would run only in homes that fit a certain profile for maximum impact—and it’s something that advertisers have pinned their hopes on for some time.
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Providers can do far more with the customer data they have readily available to them that would enable them to customize pricing and service options, and even information on improving advertising, packaging, the sales and support experience, and a host of other elements related to customer satisfaction, retention, and acquisition.
Furthermore, location-based services demonstrate a great deal of opportunity, but it doesn’t seem to be the providers who are really driving the innovation in this area. Which seems to be an ongoing problem, doesn’t it?
However, even with these shortcomings, mobile providers are still worlds ahead in the realm of personalization than their stationary cousins in the telco and cable world.
At the end of 2009, I recall a flurry of discussion in several advertising and entertainment publications (like AdWeek and The Hollywood Reporter) on how the Comcast-NBC Universal deal could change the face of advertising. A story appearing in The Hollywood Reporter by Brandweek’s Steve
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However, talking about the heavy potential of addressable advertising is still a somewhat academic exercise. Parks Associates, an advertising analyst firm, released a report in Q4 of 2009 that estimates the value of addressable ads at less than $50 million in 2009, and only slightly better in 2010. However, the same report, by research analyst Heather Parks, says that the market could hit $2 billion in 2012 and top $4 billion before the end of 2014.
Of course, it also bears mentioning that the aforementioned Comcast-NBCU deal is still stalled in regulatory review, and may remain so until sometime in 2011, some experts predict. Even so, there seem to be no signs that the Obama administration will kill the deal or that a strong enough legislative or judicial movement against the deal will block its eventual approval, especially if the companies agree to comply with net neutrality. Still, if that deal will be catalyst for massive growth in addressable advertising, then that growth may be a ways off, yet.
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