Telemedia month Newletter - July 2014

Issue 52 • JUL 2014

Consumers can now buy Google Play apps with carrier billing

News

THIS MONTH...

• Orion Media deploys IMIMobile’s daVinci platform across radio 3 • UK m-ad spend passes £2bn this year, eclipses print next 4 • txtnation enhances number look up service

4 • Cognia and Semafone bring IVR payments to global market 5 • France a hotbed ready for carrier billing, study finds 6 • Sponge gets soaked up, Miesl et al live to fight another day 6

Analysis

O2 AND EE CUSTOMERS can now pay for items in the Google Play store through direct carrier billing. This alternative payment method, known as Charge to Mobile, enables O2 and EE customers to make purchases such as apps, films, TV, music, and electronic books and magazines from the Google Play Store and charge them direct to their monthly mobile phone bill, or take it out of their Pay & Go phone credit.

Google is in talks with Vodafone and Three to add their direct carrier billing to the roster, but no time line has been given.

Charge to Mobile is a fast and seamless way for customers to pay for digital content, and is rapidly establishing itself as a popular method of payment for digital products and services, especially in environments like app stores. Proven to increase conversion by up to 400%.

Charge to Mobile opens up a new payment channel for merchants, providing customers with a safe and easy payment method, removing the need for lengthy registrations, card numbers or PINs. Once registered on Google Play, customers can make quick purchases up to the value of £30 in a few seconds.

This alternative method of payment is growing rapidly, with over 100 merchants already using Charge to Mobile in the UK through O2 and over 10 million transactions having been made on O2 alone. O2 customers can already use the Charge to Mobile service across top brands such as Microsoft, Sony, Spotify and Facebook.

David Plumb, Director at Telefónica Digital UK, said: “This new service offers our Android customers a different method of payment, which is quick, safe and simple to use. The integration of Charge to Mobile into Google Play – the largest app store in the world - will be an integral step forward in making Charge to Mobile a customer favourite for mobile payment methods in the UK.”

continued page 3>>>

EDITORIAL A story we shouldn’t tell you Blah blah judicial review blah blah. No one ready to comment blah blah. Paul Skeldon whispers some thoughts on what that court case may yield 7 OPINION The good, the bad and the ugly Alex Kinch, CEO of Ziron, continues his paen to SMS with a look at some of the key developments around SMS this month – and some of it ain’t pretty 8 OPINION Things ain’t what they used to be Affliate fraud is rampant on the web and its really starting to bite into online and mobile advertising. It is time to act. Rory Maguire, acting chair of AIME outlines the trade body’s plans

9 OPINION A solid foundation for growth With direct operator billing finally coming into its own – in no small measure thanks to Google Play now sanctioning its use – telemedia billing is set to go mainstream.

But it needs to be carefully compliant as never before, warns Jeremy Flynn, director of Empello

10 ANALYSIS Magic moments The mobile is ubiquitous to most people these days: it is the first place most of us go to find or do anything. So how can merchants and retailers manage all this interaction and how can they best capitalise on these ‘mobile moments’?

Paul Skeldon reports 12

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NEWS #MEDIA Orion Media deploys IMImobile’s DaVinci Social platform across its radio stations ORION MEDIA is deploying IMIMobile’s DaVinci Social, IMImobile’s market leading TV and Radio broadcasting platform, across all their radio stations. Orion Media operates five FM radio stations and three AM services in the East and West Midlands.

Together they are the most listened to commercial radio brands in the Midlands, broadcasting to 1.2 million listeners a week.

IMImobile’s DaVinci Social platform will allow Orion Media to manage all audience engagement from multiple mobile and social media sources through one single platform, giving each radio station a coherent and unrestricted view of how their listeners are interacting with their radio stations, leading to better engagement insight and audience management. In addition, Orion Media will use DaVinci Social’s Campaign Management Console to deploy and manage all SMS voting and competition campaigns, which are entered via a short code.

Using DaVinci Social, Orion Media will be able to manage, curate, distribute and analyse user generated content, allowing their radio stations to easily integrate user generated content into the live environment to enrich their programs in order to create a

more meaningful conversation with their listeners, adding a new layer of interactivity to the radio experience.

Phil Riley, Chief Executive at Orion Media commented, “We chose IMImobile due to their strong heritage and deep understanding of the radio broadcasting sector. The DaVinci Social platform allows us to interact with our audience without the need of multiple tools, streamlining the process of sorting, integrating and responding to our listeners to create a more interactive radio experience.”

Steve Godman, Commercial Director Brands, Media and Agency Group at IMImobile said, “We are pleased to enter a partnership with Orion Media, the leading radio broadcaster in the East and West Midlands. Radio broadcasters across the UK need to adapt to changing listener behavior, who are demanding that their radio station listen, interact and use their content. We believe DaVinci Social will allow Orion Media to drive audience engagement and easily tap into the potential of user generated content to increase their footprint across the Midlands.”

IMImobile, the UK’s leading provider of audience engagement and interactive broadcast solutions to commercial and non-commercial

TV & Radio broadcasters, developed and launched DaVinci Social to allow broadcasters to adapt to the changing demands of the social multi-channel radio listener. DaVinci Social enables broadcasters to manage and curate high volumes of audience inbound content across multiple mobile and social communication channels, such as SMS, MMS, Email, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Inbound content is conveniently displayed in separate streams, allowing content to be easily managed and replied to regardless of channel it originated from.

It listed on London alternative stock market AIM last month, and aims to raise some £30million through the floatation. Sales for the year ending in March 31 last year were £38.5 million, leaving the firm with an underlying profit of £6.1 million. Spark Advisory Partners is advising IMImobile, with WH Ireland and Whitman Howard as joint brokers.

Chief executive officer Jay Patel said: “We have been helping our clients take advantage of the structural trends surrounding mobile communications, social networking and cloud computing for a number of years. In that time, we have built a robust technology platform and strong client relationships”

>>>from page 1 Carrier billing for apps Google itself is being very tight-lipped about the whole deal, which follows a spat with Phonepay Plus about using PRS billing. Many in the industry feel that Google has used its size and global influence to pressure PPP – and the operators – into cutting it a better deal, but no one at Google will say anything.

All it would say is that it can’t comment.

A PhonepayPlus spokesperson did say: “Our pilot scheme for regulating operator billing on app stores is designed to provide consumers with the protections they are entitled to under our Code of Practice, to support innovation and growth in the PRS market and to ensure fair and equitable treatment between new and more traditional PRS business models. In

signing up to the pilot, Google have registered with PhonepayPlus and committed to compliance with our Code of Practice and other regulatory conditions of the scheme. PhonepayPlus will be monitoring the app stores pilot scheme’s progress regularly.”

That clears that up then.

But, while what went on remains shrouded in mystery, the move is an excellent one for carrier billing, which needs a mainstream shot in the arm to kick start it.

Bango is increasing its infiltration of the developing ‘new smartphone markets’ of Africa, LatAm and the Middle East, with rolls outs of direct operator billing (DOB) for apps stores across these regions.

Since the beginning of 2014, Bango has

launched additional DOB for app store partners with Saudi Telecom and Mobily in Saudi Arabia, Mobinil in Egypt, Telkom in South Africa, Telefónica in Mexico and Telenor in Hungary.

Bango provides operator billing for Google Play, Windows Phone Store, Facebook, Firefox Marketplace and BlackBerry World, and an agreement with Amazon has also been announced. These digital content giants are rolling out high performance DOB with increasing pace, enabling more customers to pay for games, music, apps and other content. With more than 120 live operator connections in place, reaching more than one billion consumers, Bango has emerged as the de facto leader in DOB for app stores.

NEWS #ADVERTISING UK m-ad spending to pass £2bn this year, eclipsing print spend in 2015 MOBILE AD SPENDING in the UK continues to show significant growth and is expected to rise 96.0% this year to just over £2 billion ($3.16 billion), up from more than £1.03 billion ($1.61 billion) in 2013, according to eMarketer’s latest UK media ad spending estimates. By 2018, eMarketer expects mobile to claim almost 40% of total paid media spending in the UK. Mobile will account for 13.4% of total media spending this year, compared with 13.6% for newspapers. In 2015, mobile will surpass print’s total, at 20.5% of all spending vs. 17.0%.

Continued robust growth in the mobile channel is driving the bulk of digital ad growth in the UK. The dramatic growth of mobile and video ad expenditures will boost digital ad spending throughout the forecast period. More than half of all digital ad dollars will go toward search formats, while spending on display formats will amount to one-third of the UK’s digital ad market. Display revenues from Google, Facebook and Twitter-three of the UK’s largest display ad publishersare each expected to rise significantly in the coming years.

In addition, eMarketer estimates that mobile will account for nearly 30% of all

digital ad spending this year, with this figure rising to more than half by 2016.

In 2013, spending on digital ad formats (including all paid media spending for ads served to any internetconnected device) rose 16.3% to top £6.3 billion ($9.84 billion). This year, digital ad spending growth will slow to 15.0%, and by 2015, digital will be up just 10.0%. But that’s still much faster growth than that for total media ad spending, which will increase by 6.6% this year to around £15.11 billion ($23.61 billion).

Digital will account for half of all paid media ad spending in the UK next year, according to eMarketer’s forecast.

A strong economy, high consumer confidence and increases in spending on digital, TV, radio and outdoor formats will spur what growth there is in total media ad spending. Increased ad outlays for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics and FIFA World Cup soccer tournament will also support this year’s growth uptick. While digital, and especially mobile, are boosting total growth, other channels are flat or even losing ad revenues. Spending on TV and outdoor ad formats will rise at a much slower pace, while radio ad outlays will remain relatively flat. Print ad expenditures will continue to decline as

advertisers shift their budgets to digital formats. Between 2014 and 2018, magazines and newspapers will lose a combined £276 million ($431.3 million) in advertiser spending.

Martin Pugh, CEO of incentivised video advertising platform, Adpoints, comments: “There’s no denying it, mobile is allowing advertisers to reach more and more people whilst they go about their everyday lives and its big business. But, although more people are being reached, there is no guarantee that they are engaging with the ads. Ad avoidance is a growing problem and one that the UK advertising industry needs to address.

“People are becoming increasingly jaded by the continuous bombardment with advertising messages and they consider their time as highly valuable.

In a world where instant gratification is rife, more and more consumers are avoiding ads by using adblockers, buying apps to avoid ads, and time shifting through adverts on TV to get to the content they want. There’s no doubt that the advertising industry is at its peak and content is more creative, but to engage the audience and improve ROI on ad spend, an equal balance between advertisers and consumers needs to be found.”

#SERVICES txtNation enhances its number lookup TXTNATION HAS enhanced the features of its Mobile Number Lookup service, providing more precise Mobile Number Portability (MNP) information and more in-depth results.

Mobile Number Lookups allow businesses to clean their data lists, therefore saving money on their SMS marketing and mobile billing. Over 2.3 billion numbers worldwide now have the potential to be ported and with India and China implementing soon, this figure could grow by another 50%. txtNation is releasing these new MNP services with several new routes being added to cater for the growing demand and changeability in local network porting. This includes multiple routing options per destination to

enable far greater deliverables for service providers, with coverage in over 54 of the 56 countries where number portability exists.

The heavily updated HLR options from txtNation includes linking into more data sources, and localised data checking to provide the best possible information available in real-time.

For many years, txtNation has provided a high quality, real-time number look-up service to clients all over the world. The improved real-time look-up service is the most effective solution to access the information you need. txtNation’s global number look-up service now provides access to accurate information, even faster than before.

Further architectural improvements with this release include cost efficiencies for optimal routing, price monitoring, advanced reporting and the passing over of routing data in minutes rather than days. txtNation’s COO, Ashley Cross, explains: “The latest HLR updates are a direct result of the requirements of several of our clients’ expansion with Number Lookup. Localised Number Lookup and our experience in bringing HLR to service providers over many years has made us a trusted provider. Our worldwide tier-one, network quality platform, gives our clients access to high quality, local results.”

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NEWS #IVR Cognia & Semafone partner to take secure contact centre IVR payment solutions global COMMUNICATIONS intelligence and analytics solutions provider, Cognia, and secure voice payment specialist, Semafone, today announced a partnership that will enable contact centers world-wide to transform the security and compliance costs of handling customer payment information.

By combining the skills and technology of Cognia and Semafone, a new breed of solution will be available to the market that will allow contact center agents to take customer card payments in line with international Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) without the substantial compliance and security costs, and operational limitations associated with traditional approaches such as pause-andresume recording.

Both companies are innovators in their fields. Last year Cognia became the world’s first provider to achieve QSA-validated

compliance with PCI DSS as a Level 1 Service Provider on a global cloud platform.

Semafone who is also a PCI DSS Level 1 accredited Service Provider, holds a PA-DSS certification for its payment solution and is also a Visa level 1 merchant agent; its secure payment processing solutions are rapidly becoming an industry standard for agenton-call secure payment processing and its customer base spans five continents.

The suite of services will include PCIcompliant DTMF-masking, automated IVR payment processing, agent monitoring and recording, and secure archiving for legacy ‘at-risk’ media. A combination of on-premise and cloud based deployment models will be available for ultimate local to global scalability.

Curtis Nash, CEO of Cognia explains: “The crucial element in this alliance is about delivering more choice and greater flexibility to customers. As two leading

innovators in the payment processing and communications capture and analytics cloud space, we feel that the strength of our solutions working together will lead the market for secure payment processing in an area where the security threat is still high and where enterprises of all types need to assure a low security risk as well as compliance.”

Tim Critchley, CEO of Semafone adds: “The risk of fraudulent activity in the cardholder not present sector is growing as criminals use increasingly more sophisticated technology to obtain personal payment data. Customers now hold brands to account for the protection of their card details and will simply shop elsewhere if they feel that their security is at risk. Our partnership with Cognia marks another milestone in the battle against card fraud and in the protection of our customers’ brand and reputation.”

NEWS #BILLING Low credit card use makes France a hotbed for carrier billing THE FRENCH market is ripe for carrier billing – and is starting to show signs of a boom – because, while 98.4% of the population has a mobile phone, just 37.5% has a credit card.

So finds the latest mobile operator payment country special report published by DIMOCO. This discrepancy shows enormous potential when it comes to billing digital content via mobile operator payment – a fact that is also reflected in the development of value added data services.

According to ARCEP, an increase from E196 million in the fourth quarter 2012 up to E226 million in the fourth quarter 2013 was measured. This represents an annual growth rate of 15.4% and includes premium-rate services such as various data and push services, like chat rooms, weather forecasts, TV game shows, horoscopes, ringtone downloads and corresponds to all amounts billed to customers by operators, including out payments from operators to service providers.

At the same time the number of valueadded data service messages decreased from 209 million messages in Q4/2012 to 183 million messages in Q4/2013 – representing a decrease of 12.6%.

“More and more payment transactions are made through direct carrier billing”, says Gerald Tauchner, explaining the trends in the mobile operator payment industry.

The DIMOCO country special reveals mobile operator payment specific data and gives insights into the French market.

In France, billing digital content is possible with all four mobile network operators: Orange, which has a market share of 44.2%; SFR, the second mobile network operator in the country with a market share of 34%; Bouygues Telecom (17.7%) and Free Mobile (4.1%).

Three different billing types are available in France. Besides premium SMS and direct carrier billing, mobile network operators also offer ISP (Internet Service Provider) billing. While “SMS+” stands for the French Premium SMS Billing Solution, “Internet + Mobile” is the Direct Carrier Billing Solution and “Internet + Box” is the well-known, commonly used billing interface where consumers are charged via their Internet Service Provider (ISP) in France.

“Including ISP billing in their portfolio is rather specific to the French market, but expands our business customers’ reach”, comments Tauchner. The payment method is well-known and commonly used in France.

Digital content on the mobile and the web channel can be billed as one-off and subscription services and up to a tariff range of E30. Via mobile operator payment DIMOCO provides a by the mobile operator managed Web TAN opt-in process where a unique SMS pin code is entered on the payment page. Via ISP billing and additionally to the mobile operator payment process the consumers has to login with his username and password the first time.

#MARKETING Sponge soaked up IN WHAT LOOKS suspiciously like a rebrand, mobile marketing agency Sponge has been wholly taken over by location marketing company WiForia.

The ‘acquisition’ will see the founders of Sponge, Dan Parker and Alex Meisl, take over at the helm of WiForia as majority shareholders. The whole Sponge team has transferred across as well.

The deal recognizes the significant progress Sponge has made in developing its Shopper Marketing platform.

The combined entity will increasingly

focus on providing location marketing services using Wi-Fi and beacons to enable retailers and a range of other leisure-based industries with similar footfall to recognise and engage with their customers on a one-to-one basis at the point of purchase.

WiForia currently claims to be the only company able to deliver highly relevant and personalised communications on behalf of retailers based on the retailers’ own offers and communications strategies.

OPINION

FROM THE EDITOR

Here is a story that we aren’t supposed to tell you THIS MONTH WE WERE going to run an independent opinion piece on the court case that is rumbling along in London that surrounds a judicial review granted to German companies Ordanduu and Optimus, who are seeking redress over being fined for problems arising from affiliate marketing last year.

But we can’t because it might upset too many people.

That said, the judicial review that it has sparked and the case that is now taking place are worth a mention – so I will stick my head above the parapet and take the inevitable sh*t storm that it will provoke.

The whole case centres around the affiliate marketing scams that went down last year. PhonePay Plus maintains that the two companies were liable for problems with malware on affiliate marketing sites. Emergency powers were invoked and the companies were forced to shut the services down.

Those of you at World Telemedia in Amsterdam last October will remember the heated debate that took place between these two companies and the UK regulator about the issue. Well they have since taken legal steps and, in April, won a judicial review.

Whether the two companies were at fault or not is a matter for conjecture, but that isn’t really what makes this story interesting. What is significantly interesting about this judicial review is that it firstly holds PPP up to the light to see whether it has the right to ‘regulate’ a company based not in the UK but in the EU (or anywhere else for that matter). Secondly, it potentially could open the floodgates of companies looking for recompense for past fines should it be found to not have the right to make such cross-border judgements.

This could cost the regulator dear and significantly undermine its ability to, well, regulate. The affiliate marketing debacle has always caused some consternation within industry as to quite where PPP’s powers lie and should lie. This throws it open to a proper legal-based interpretation. Should it lose, then it will have a whole hen-house of egg on its face, be hugely undermined, but most of all will be curtailed in its perceived regulatory clout.

And that could have hugely dire consequences. PPP in many ways has to justify its existence through the number of ‘prosecutions’ it brings each year. Clip its wings and, well, does it have a role to play?

Now, before anyone gets carried away celebrating: consider life without PPP. Would any other regulator charged with looking after PRS as part of a wider remit of say communications or financial services or advertising really make a better stab at it?

Would a world where the ASA, the FSA, Ofcom and more oversee different facets of the PRS business really be a better one? I think we all know the answer to that, don’t we?

But the review will call into question where PPP’s remit lies and it could spark a wider debate into the role of the regulator. At a time when PRS is, while not booming, but certainly doing better than it has for many a year, perhaps the time is right to have this discussion. No one involved is commenting on the case as its still ‘live’, but there is certainly a lot of chatter surrounding it. Where it goes will be interesting to see.

Maybe we’ll get an article or two out of it yet?

Editorial Editor Paul Skeldon paulskeldon@me.com | Sales & Marketing info@telemediamagazine.com | Production Director Annika Micheli annika@telemediamagazine.com | Publisher Jarvis Todd jarvis@telemediamagazine.com To subscribe, please go to www.telemedia-news.com What we’ve been listening to Disney Tunes, it’s school play time | What we’ve been amused by Not much to laugh about when all you hear is “let it go” from Frozen on repeat | Who we’ve been following @Mrskeldon | What we’ve been reading about ISIS| JULY 2014 will bring... My first camping holiday

OPINION SMS

The Good, the bad

AND THE UGLY

Self confessed SMS geek, Alex Kinch, CEO of Ziron, takes a wry look at some of the latest developments around SMS and assesses what they mean for the technology

bad.) These apps were responsible for spreading Android malware, which caused infected devices to text malicious links to contacts in their address books, as well as text premium message numbers.

And just this week there was another tide of headlines about mobile malware called Selfmite, which spreads by using an SMS to trick users into installing a worm app. Hearing about mobile malware used to be somewhat of a rarity, but it’s quickly becoming the norm.

There are some organisations that will stop at nothing to acquire and sell user data, and they are becoming very innovative in how they get in – one of the most surprising stories I was recently told by an industry colleague is that they detected a piece malware communicating with a virtual mobile number via SMS, so there was a server somewhere using SMS to send commands. Even a year ago that would have been unheard of – a clear indication that even the cybercriminals appreciate that SMS is here to stay.

THE GOOD So let’s start with the good news. Mobile is big, and it’s booming.

If you want to target a customer through their preferred medium then it’s a no-brainer – the mobile is king. There were stats out last month that outlined the number of mobile subscriptions worldwide will outstrip global population by 2015. By the end of 2019 the world there will be an eye-watering 9.2 billion mobile subscriptions.

It’s no wonder A2P SMS is growing at such a rapid rate.

But let’s think about how this all pertains to security. Back in the day, the majority of sensitive data was accessed through the desktop or laptop. That’s why hackers and nefarious organisations targeted them, hence PC security software. Nowadays, we’re i accessing that sensitive data on the move – our handsets are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and we’re spending more time on tablets, so it’s no wonder that the Internet nasties are turning their attention to mobile devices.

THE UGLY Finally, the stories that have really grinded my gears this month.

The one that really irked me was research from Ovum that telecom companies are losing $386 billion in revenue to OTT providers like Skype and WhatsApp. For a long time I have been promoting the notion that telecoms is evolving and we all need to play nicely together. Stories like this pit the camps of operators vs. OTT players against each other, when really we should be collaborating and merging our worlds together.

These stats were then somewhat contradicted by IDATE’s world telecom services watch, which forecasted that global telecom services revenue would actually rise from £0.95tn in 2013 to £1.1tn in 2018.

Deloitte then stuck its oar in by outlining that the number of OTT messages vs. SMS will come in at an estimated 50 billion versus 21 billion messages per day, by the end of 2014.

At the end of the day consumers will increasingly turn to OTT chat apps – I for one use iMessage on a daily basis, and I was pleased that with the forthcoming iOS 8 update I’ll soon be able to send SMS as well from my MacBook. But the A2P market is separate and growing. There is scope to work together to protect revenues and protect customers. These negative headlines are trying to create divisions where they really needn’t exist.

THE BAD One of the most talked about worms last month was the “SMS Stealer,” which was detected by Trend Micro. This was hidden in World Cup apps (another reason I have filed this under ‘bad’ – so, so

In this monthly column I aim to share the most interesting updates on SMS – but if you can’t wait to the next issue please do follow me at @ alexkinch, albeit I warn you now I talk about tea, a lot, like a ridiculous amount. I am quite obsessed.

ANOTHER MONTH, another deluge of SMS stories in the headlines, which I aim to summarise for you in this SMS column.

The key themes this month have been around SMS security, and predictions on the SMS market in light of the iOS8 updates – but before you lock up your phone and sell all your Vodafone shares, read on…

ANALYSIS AFFILIATE MARKETING

Things ain’t what

THEY USED TO BE

Affiliate fraud is rampant on the web and its really starting to bite into online and mobile advertising – and making a mockery of telemedia as a way to generate money. It is time to act. Rory Maguire, acting chair of AIME outlines what the trade body is planning to do

BACK IN THE GOOD old days of print publishing, if you wanted to promote your premium rate service, you carefully constructed your advert, bought the relevant column inches and sat back waiting for the traffic to arrive from your freshly printed advert. Along came the internet and the environment was similar, you constructed your advert, bought “eyeballs” instead of column inches and had a faster turnaround on your advertising.

However, this model started to decline when the number of “eyeballs” and thus your advertising costs increased, but your revenues did not. In a few cases the eyeball rate seemed ridiculously high and advertisers felt they were being ripped off. Something was needed; payment only on results. This model would drive traffic to your site and as long as your web site had the same level of detail regarding pricing and other terms that your print advertising used to have, things should not go wrong. Right?

Wrong!

The Internet is a breeding ground for scams. Put some money into the internet system and someone is willing to deprive you of it. If a consumer gets hurt in the process, that does not seem to matter. This is known as Affiliate Fraud and has many identities inside the premium rate industry and outside.

Put the name of a famous catalogue retailer into a search engine and you will get their site. Put the word “offers” after their name and you will be led to voucher sites that will tempt you with discounts that do not exist. Your routing through the voucher site earns the site money if you buy something from the retailer and this money is often used to promote the voucher site above the retailer’s site. The retailer loses and the consumer was misled.

In premium rate advertising, we have seen affiliates promising shopping vouchers in value far in excess of the price of the service, free movies, free cheats for games etc. adware downloaded with free games and malware that

forces the consumer to buy the advertiser products. The advertiser has to be vigilant to such practices, understand the risk, mitigate it and deal with any consumers that may have been tricked into a purchase. Most small advertisers are not trained or experienced enough to understand what is required.

To help the premium rate digital advertising community, AIME (Association of Interactive Media and Entertainment) www.aimelink.org has published the first fully comprehensive Guidance to Digital Marketing for Premium Rate Services. The Guidance document details the forms of Digital Advertising that can be deployed and the fraudulent and misleading practices that can used by a small handful of rogue digital publishers to cause issues for the advertisers.

The Guidance covers performing due diligence on your advertising network, what practices should be excluded in your insertion orders, how to detect consumer issues that are being created and how to resolve those issues swiftly.

For a novice or even expert advertiser, this is a goldmine of knowledge, authored by two of the leading premium rate advertisers, Safari Mobile and Zamano, and edited by AIME. Shortly to sit alongside the Guidance is an AIME Early Warning System (EWS) modelled on the Data Room operated by ETX Touchpoint www.etx-touchpoint.com.

This system provides warnings to digital advertisers from other advertisers, other industries, anti-virus companies and regulators about malware and misleading practices that have been detected. It will operate on a community basis and is likened to the Neighbourhood Watch scheme of the Digital World.

The AIME initiatives have also received blessing and support from the four UK Mobile Operators and the Premium Rate Regulator. If any non AIME Member wishes to access the Digital Marketing Guidance and be alerted to the launch of the Early Warning System, they should contact Telemedia@ aimelink.org

OPINION BILLING

Solid foundations

FOR DOB GROWTH With direct operator billing (DOB) finally coming into its own – thanks in part to Google Play sanctioning it for app and in-app purchases – the era of telemedia billing is upon us. But with this opportunity comes great responsibility, warns Jeremy Flynn, Director at Empello and vice-chair of AIME, and it needs to be careful and compliant like never before AS WE ALL KNOW, there is a new generation of consumers who merchants can target – a mobile-only generation.

This puts mobile operators in a position of great responsibility and also great strength. They are ideally positioned to connect merchants to the consumers and to profit from facilitating secure payment transactions.

Of course this is not new, but with the news that Google is introducing the use of mobile phone accounts to buy apps and to make in-app purchases, the true potential of operator billing may soon be unleashed.

Mobile operators can play a pivotal role in this new wave of mobile payments. Operators already have established billing relationships with almost the entire population and so they are in a unique position to enable the low-friction purchase mechanics vital for buying services on the go. Not only that, but for some demographics and markets with low credit card adoption, mobile may be the only viable payment method.

LEARNING FROM THE PAST We have, of course, been here before and therefore we now

know of the potential pitfalls. Ten years ago, as Premium Rate SMS became increasingly prevalent, operators saw huge revenues from enabling ringtones, games, voting, chat and numerous other digital products. However, the commercial upside of that business was severely hampered by a number of compliance problems, which caused consumer trust to plummet.

These compliance issues caused customer services costs to rocket and brand perception to be hit as it emerged that many consumers had been misled, tricked or simply not informed that money was being taken from their mobile phone account.

The industry was badly damaged, but has worked hard to regain its standing and reputation. This time we must learn from those mistakes.

WHY COMPLIANCE IS VITAL When consumers buy something using their mobile phone, the contract is between them and the provider of the service: the merchant. However, the billing relationship is with

OPINION BILLING

the mobile operator and consumers expect their mobile operator to protect them from bad merchant practices.

Because of this billing relationship, consumers expect more than they would from an ISP in an internet transaction.

And that means that it is the operator that is likely to be the first port of call if any issues occur. The majority of consumers with queries or complaints about a phone-paid transaction first pick up the phone to their operator. This results in both a short-term cost and often a long-term one too.

The short-term impact is obvious - the cost of dealing with the consumer services issues. However the long-term cost is the frustration these issues can cause with consumers.

When consumers have problems with phone-paid services, unless their issues are resolved quickly, there can be a rapid decline in confidence with the operator. At its most extreme, it can be the cause of giving up on the operator and churning networks.

The US operators, in a market characterised by legal class action, have cleared the ground by banning Premium SMS. It solves the problem, but in an extremely heavy-handed manner and of course at the cost of millions of dollars in lost revenues.

SUSTAINABLE GROWTH AND HAPPY CONSUMERS So how can operators benefit from the position they are in and the billing relationships they hold, without creating frustrated customers who are billed for things they shouldn’t be?

Operators can no longer afford to play a purely passive role and should actively manage the compliance of these services, ensuring that brand owners can enable payments

whilst meeting legal, regulatory as well as customer care requirements.

To do this effectively, and to deliver high levels of compliance, programmes need to be established that work collaboratively with all members of the value chain to tackle any regulatory or operational problems. These programmes don’t necessarily have to be established internally and the operators can outsource this. In fact, at Empello we run exactly this kind of service.

These programmes, when run effectively, can produce impressive levels of compliance. It is estimated that industry self-policing has reduced regulator fines by £1.25m in the UK in the past year. Lower fines are a clear sign that the industry is improving, which in turn means that big brand name merchants are more willing to invest in this sector in the UK. On top of this, we estimate that by running a compliance programme a mobile operator can reduce their customer service costs by at least £100k per annum.

And of course compliant services reinforce consumers’ trust in the operator’s brand and increase consumer confidence in the operator billing payment mechanics themselves.

On top of this, compliance programmes can also provide unique marketing insight data, including detailed information on the type of services being monetised by the operator, with breakdowns on which sectors have the best levels of compliance.

By taking an active role in compliance mobile operators can reduce costs, increase brand satisfaction and foster trust and acceptance of operator billing services - all without regulator intervention.

ANALYSIS

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Magic

MOMENTS

The mobile is ubiquitous to most people these days: it is the first place most of us go to find or do anything. So how can merchants and retailers manage all this interaction and how can they best capitalise on these ‘mobile moments’? Paul Skeldon goes in search of some answers MOST PEOPLE THESE DAYS turn to their mobile to solve problems at any given moment during their day. “Do I need a coat today?”; “Is my train on time?”; “Who won the football last night?”; “What’s that song playing on the radio?”; “Who is the voice of Lucy Wild in Despicable Me 2?”. These are five things I myself asked of my mobile phone this morning at various moments while getting ready for work and school.

This collection of moments – and the way mobile is often the first port of call when needing information – is something that is not only changing how we live our lives (and how well informed my kids think I am), but it is also having a massive impact on retailers. This same need for instant, spur-of-the-moment answers is increasingly driving how people shop.

Consumers now rely on mobile to enhance the moment that they are in and to satisfy their whims and desires in the right here, right now. Consumers are also using mobile to research and delve into brands and products, searching for solutions to immediate shopping needs, then shopping around for deals. This they are then doing in-store, at home and across devices over a long period of time.

So how can you tap into these mobile moments? The primary driver of mobile moments is often location. While the consumer is out and about, inspiration often strikes – either because they have seen a billboard, been pinged a marketing message by you or have seen someone wearing or eating or doing something they want to have or do too.

Here location based services come to the fore and they are being driven by networks in the high street or mall, or in the stores themselves.

Consumers again are way ahead of the retailers here. A study by public wifi provider Purple Wifi found that 48% of people use public WiFi at least once a week, 18% use Public WiFi at least once a day, and 25% at least once a month. 75% of the 2500 consumers survey said that they are more likely to stay in a location longer if it offers WiFi, and 63% are more likely to spend additional money in a venue that offersWiFi. Beacon technology is making even bigger in roads, with technology companies and some forward thinking retailers really starting to get into the idea. London shopping thoroughfare Regent’s Street is to become a beacon hotspot, with every store along its mile length – including Apple, Hamleys, Longchamp, Burberry, Banana Republic, Hugo Boss and Anthropologie —

expected to install beacons to broadcast offers to shoppers as they walk past the shop front. About 100 stores have already been fitted with the technology.

The street will get its own app that will then receive offers and information from retailers and restaurants along the length of the world famous street. The mobile retail initiative, which is part of an on-going £1 billion Regent Street modernisation programme, will be advertised on double-decker buses and on signs along the shopping area.

“We want Regent Street to continue to evolve as the world’s most successful shopping destination, which means bringing together online, physical and mobile retailing and using the latest technology to create an experience which delivers across all of the platforms that appeal to 21st century shoppers,” said David Shaw, head of The Crown Estate’s Regent Street Portfolio.

Paul Lorraine, UK general manager of Longchamp, which has gone live with the technology, adds: “Success in retail in the 21st century is strongly linked to how you engage your customers in store and online. Regent Street already has a reputation as being the place to be for brands like ours and the new mobile app will bring the digital and physical together, providing an exciting new way for us to speak to our customers.”

Many retails have grown wise to this and have started to use mobile as a personalised marketing channel to target shoppers, hoping to tap into this idea of getting shoppers ‘in the moment’.

However, this has in turn made consumers ever more demanding.

But this degree of desire for instant gratification is making consumers more demanding than ever and they will not tolerate shoddy service. It is one of the little expected downsides of personalised mobile marketing that consumers now demand a seamless, personalised service in return.

Research by eConsultancy in 2013 found that 75% of online adults believe there is no reason why a mobile transaction cannot be completed on the first try.

In addition, the research found that customers are intolerant of any faults. If they do encounter problems, 16% admit they would become more likely to buy from a competitor, while 13% would abandon the transaction altogether and try a competitor’s website or app instead.

This surge in customer expectations creates an opportunity for businesses to transform their customer’s perception of their brand, by identifying crucial instants –“mobile moments” – where

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a customer uses their mobile device to access instant service or information.

The key thing to do is to identify the moments in the customer journey and adapt the technology to fit, suggests Bill Loller, Vice President, Product Management, Mobile at Tealeaf Technology – an IBM company. “You have to make mobile customer experience the priority and deliver what people need, not what they think they want – move from doing things because they are cool to doing things that help customers buy on mobile devices,” he suggests.

This is backed up by eConsultancy’s research, which finds that 60% of companies said their customers typically research products on mobile devices for later purchase online. Almost half (48%) of respondents said their customers purchase products directly using a mobile device, up by 5% since last year.

A similar proportion report that customers research products for later purchase offline, while 17% say their customers use their mobile devices for research in-store. Businesses must understand the context in which their customers use mobile devices, and adapt their sites and apps to reflect these.

The second tier of trying to meet consumers in these moments is to look at how best to deploy your assets across channels. Loller believes that it is best to now build for mobile, not adapt for mobile. At the most basic level a customer wants to search for something and then complete a transaction. If the search function is not easy to find and use, the experience is seriously flawed.

“Work to understand where customers are struggling on your mobile channel; one bad experience with your brand via mobile can cause a customer to abandon the transaction entirely across all channels,” says Loller.

The final piece of the puzzle for retailers is to analyse and refine.

Your mobile engagement initiative is not complete if you’re flying blind: you have to capture, track, analyse, and act on the data to improve the engagement.

As a business you should already be analyzing site and app performance, but you need to also look at how easily consumers

find your site navigation, zoom functions and even how big the buttons are. With mobile less is usually more – and the fold is no longer an issue.

These are all significant questions to ask when really analysing the mobile customer experience. Ideally, a business must be able to replay the customer experience through the eyes of the customer to get a real feel for any challenges they came across.

And you have to keep refining what you do – not just as the technology such as beacons and wifi changes, but as customer habits change. Mobile has the power to make your business so much more engaging and therefore much more profitable. But it comes at a price: it is an increasingly complex task to get it to work well across all channels for all customers. It may only be a moment to each consumer, but its is many hours or work for your business to make it look easy.

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