Innovative Ways to Drive Advertising Revenues
Two recent stories really caught my attention as innovative ways to drive additional advertising revenue. The first comes from Sky TV in the UK and the second from MTV Networks (part of Viacom). I would consider both case studies very significant and unique.
In the case of Sky, which does not own mobile assets, they will now offer cross-platform advertising placements on their TV and online assets in addition to T-Mobile and Vodafone mobile portals (http://www.nma.co.uk/Articles/40382/Sky%20takes%20possession%20of%20mobile%20ad%20sales.html). This direct sales relationship allows for Sky to offer a full bundle and effectively compete with a quad-play (voice, broadband, TV, mobile) telecom service provider. Alternatively, T-Mobile and Vodafone deserve some credit for opening up their platform to allow this type of direct selling which creates value for all parties in addition to generating more mobile advertising opportunities. Supposedly Adidas and Fiat would be the first brands to take advantage of this bundled capability from Sky.
For MTV Networks, this seemed to be a case of “if you can’t beat them, join them” as they will be serving advertisements with their pirated content on MySpace (http://www.crn.com/software/212000095). No, that was not a typo considering the battles Viacom has been fighting to stop piracy of their content, just simply a different way of going about things. When MTV Networks metadata is detected for a video clip posted on MySpace, instead of forcing the clip to be taken down, an advertisement provided by MTV will be served. Now I do not agree with piracy, but the value of content does increase with distribution (assuming it has been properly monetized) and this is a unique way of creating value via an undesirable distribution method that is difficult to fully police. A tip of the hat to MTV Networks for coming up with an innovative way to address this problem.
Do you have any interesting new twists for monetizing advertising opportunities? I would like to hear them. At Infosys we realize the value of advertising to our customers (particularly telecom service providers) and have multiple ongoing research projects to create IP for making multi-channel advertising more effective. It is just one more way to stabilize average revenue per user as other parts of the bundle (voice, broadband, TV, mobile) come under price pressure.
