Ad man: Creative, not technology, must lead mobile ad push

“There’s certainly a very big need, which is already being delivered well by [some] service providers, for an [technical] enablement layer,” Seaborn said. Beyond that, “service providers would do very well by learning to speak advertising-speak and learning to talk to us and inform us and give us the confidence that we can engage with their technologies on a technical partner basis.”

Seaborn explained, and will detail further at the TM Forum show, how his company thinks about crafting mobile ad campaigns. First come the “three Ps,” he said – permission, privacy and preference – which make the consumer a willing participant in an information exchange rather than a target for an unwanted ad intrusion. Next comes what Seaborn called the underpinnings of an effective mobile campaign: Engage a user with a mobile ad; acquire a phone number and customer data; and, finally, activate a relationship with the user – figuratively and sometimes literally inviting them to join a “club” – that ultimately leads to further sales for the brand, he said.

Going this route, “What we end up with is a very, very open dialogue with these people, one they very much appreciate,” he said. “There are some very important bits of transparency [necessary for an effective mobile campaign]. We need to have a plain and simple statement to them about what we’re doing. We need to be relevant in what we communicate. And we need to make it easy; don’t make them jump through hoops to get to us. I think going forward, you’ll see agencies and telecoms and other partners work together to create this solid, secure, trusting environment for a dialogue between a brand and a consumer with information. Again, this needs to be a creative-led thing because you need to understand the consumer to do all that.”

In addition to educational events like the ad summit, the TM Forum is focused on the needs of advertisers – and many other industries and use cases – as it works on standards and specifications, especially in the area of subscriber data models, said the TM Forum’s Creaner. In addition to a solid data model “that can be mined in hundreds or thousands of different ways,” service providers need to think about a policy-driven approach to advertising that automates ad delivery based on all the information they know about their customers, he said.

“This is absolutely critical,” he said. “Service providers have a goldmine of very valuable information that, quite frankly, is quite poorly catalogued, structured and indexed. They need to understand how to make use of it to open up an entirely new set of targeted advertising opportunities.”