MobiAD News has conducted an interview with Pascal Thomas, mobile visionary and VP of Orange NExT (the mobile media division of France Telecom Orange), on advertising through social networks. You can read the full interview here, but here are some of the highlights:
- Segmentation – the traditional view is that all subs fit in to 6 or 7 categories – new thinking says that segmentation should be dynamic and that subs can fit in to one or more categories at the same time, and that over the course of say a week, these categories might change – either by the day, or even the hour!
- Collecting data – to identify these transient segments, data can be collected through the multiple social networks which people sign up for. Orange for example has been trialling a social network aggregator that connects subs to multiple social networks. Pascal says “This is something we will introduce as ‘Mobile Open Communities’”. Obviously the app is collecting usage data on you at the same time…
- Multi-play operator – because Orange is a multi-play operators, it should be possible to gather data across the various “channels” (bearers) people use to consume media. However, this is apparently not so easy to do. Pascal explains that the issue with identifying not with Mobile, but with who is sat in front of the PC or Television, which are often shared devices.
- “Rewind-TV”- the central thread here is tha Orange have chosen a strategy to record everything they broadcast, because then a user can pick the channel on which they access the content, at their leisure (often called “on-demand”). What is means for advertising is dynamic ad-insertion, because you always want the most up-to-date and targeted Ad, irrespective of when the content was from.
- New Metrics for consumer engagement – essentially, how do you correctly measure the effect of this new wave of advertising? There is a very interesting quote from Pascal here:
“What we want to do is to build a bubble, and have our customers sit within the bubble. We will bring outside services into the bubble so they get what they want. It’s the time spent by people on a service that’s important, that is where the value will come.”
Obviously some interesting stuf here, and a glimpse in to how one of the big Tier 1 OpCos in Europe in facing up to the challenge of next-gen Advertising…
[Via: MobiAD News]