Learnings from the USA and London

The Blyk team enjoyed participating in the Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorms in Los Angeles and London in recent weeks. Blyk is a proud sponsor of Telco 2.0, an organization whose aim is, in its own words, “to research and help implement new business models that enable the ‘digital economy’ to grow more efficiently and effectively’. In practice that means putting a lot of high-level, smart people in a room together, from ‘telco operator’ to ‘platform partner’ to ‘service provider’ and asking how we can stimulate significant growth in companies that are already turning over billions of dollars.

If we take operators’ current fiscal objectives into account, this poses a number of challenges for those looking to engage with them in the mobile advertising arena. Perhaps the first is to truly understand the level of benefit potential partners can bring the operator.

Taking the US market as an example, we see that advertising turnover in 2009 was reported as being close to $50bn. If we assume that BTL spend was missing from these figures, it would not be unreasonable to assume a total market figure in the $75-90bn parameters. Verizon and AT&T both made about $60bn from their wireless divisions in 2009. The operators are going to need a lot of ad revenue market share to ‘move’ their own needle.
Continue reading » It’s a numbers game