MOBILE CONTENT: 99 Percent Perspiration

The basic guiding principle for a mobile content strategy is: where there is a device to access, there will be suitable content to be delivered. 

The key to the real successes of major content providers has been their ability to adapt and find their path through the seemingly large obstacles

Getting down to the specifics, the premise of loading content and applications on mobile and handheld devices is that the growth of such devices is far exceeding that of PCs and one is able to deliver personalized service to the end user. He is definitely taking note of what he has received and that's the key to forming the content strategy.

Let us look at the graphical representation given along. This is the how a simple person-to-person device like telephone is evolving. It was a solely voice device which slowly started being used for an application-to-person utility like the interactive voice response (IVR), and further evolved into a voice activated (VA) module with some great speech recognition abilities.

On the data front, the telephone, especially its wireless incarnation, first came the sensational SMS. Then one saw the advent of WAP, the wireless equivalent of dial-up, and later that of the more dedicated always-on GPRS that will evolve to 3G.

The critical factors leading to all these variations are content and content-related applications. In particular, there is the need to concentrate on the data front of the mobile platform and
SMS.

Knowing the Mobile Consumer

The lack of availability of demographic details about a typical consumer of content has been a stumbling block in the development of verticals. However, if the patterns of consumption are taken into account, one can identify four groups of consumers. One, the 'info seeker'. This is the class of users having inclination for simple and straight forward content like news, astrology, stocks, sports, jokes, banking, or railway and airline info.

Next comes the 'community activist', who is an active member of closed user groups or a prolific user of productivity applications. He will be more active on e-mails, messengers, group messaging over enterprise applications, and may even go for dating to an extent.

The third variety is the 'fun monger'. He is willing to pay that extra amount to have some entertainment. The type of content he consumes are jokes, dating, ringtones, bollywood, contests, gaming, movie-related info, and city guides. He is willing to pay a little or even a lot extra to get that additional excitement he seeks.

The fourth variety is of the serious 'buyer'. He is the early adopter of m-commerce, even though in some crude forms.

Differentiating the Needs 

The next thing we need to understand is how these consumers will like to receive their information. Will they like to access it on as-and-when-needed basis or will they subscribe to alerts at predetermined times? The exact answer depends on the nature of content that one seeks. For example, someone may like to subscribe to a joke every afternoon, say at 2:30 pm, just to get away from the drowsiness of the meal. However, his colleague may like to access a joke and lighten up every time he is out of the boss' office. Similarly, a regular investor will prefer to be alerted of the movement of select stocks, while a cautious one will want to access it only when needed. An astrological prediction can be subscribed to every morning, or the site may be assessed on a need basis.

In nutshell, consumers have attitudes and their way of accessing information is determined by that attitude. The same is true for all services in all quadrants. The e-mail user will need to be alerted every time there are, say five or more new e-mails or the mails are from a particular set of contacts. A regular shopper may allow shop owners or catalogue providers to tell him or her about the latest offers. Such a shopper will probably want an alert on the top ringtones of the week. 

The pricing, of course, has to be dependent on the subsequent action. While there are specific monthly or periodic charges that the content provider may levy for the news, astro, stock or joke service that can be at a substantially lower bracket than the pay-by-access model, for services like shopping or top ringtone alerts, the alerts can come at zero cost to the consumer as the subsequent action of buying the service is substantial enough.

Right-pricing the Services 

Is there a rational in determining what the customer should pay for any given service? The quadrants more or less determine this, even though there are exceptions. In quadrant A-termed regular-the content is more or less generic and can be available with multiple providers. There is also no steady pattern of access here, which can be subscription-driven or need-based.

However, the volumes can be so significantly large that the content service provider can afford to have a low pricing and let more pay-by-access customers dominate the scene.

The enterprise and productivity applications are more alerts-based and the pricing can be on bulk consumption and significantly more than the basic price. That applies to quadrant B. The pricing in quadrant C is typically between Rs 5 and Rs 50. The quadrant D is more or less in the Rs 100-plus category.

The Market and Its Logistics

The market is significant and burgeoning. However, the costs of generating content and being able to adapt to the technology, and beyond all, the issue of being able to promote the services are challenges that acutely impact the bottomline and the dynamics of this business. Are there really great challenges faced by the content provider? After all, he has the wherewithal of all the content. He can plug and play as per the market needs. And he is said to be sitting on a goldmine... 

The key to the real successes of major content providers has been their ability to adapt and find their path through the seemingly large obstacles. For one, most of the successful ones have been survivors of the dot-com bubble burst. They know how to manage costs now. They are original content providers and generators who have successfully learnt to package for different media. For example, when a certain news item appears on the Internet, it can be about 800-900 characters in length. When the same item is sent as a headline only, it will be about 20 characters in length. If the customer seeks a teaser for the body it is sent as a 50-character piece. When the story is sought as an SMS, it is packaged into 160 characters. When a customer is seeking through a service like 'HutchAlive', it is sent to him in 400 characters. All this packaging and repackaging costs money and resource. The content that is served is legal, copyrighted and royalty paid. That accounts for a major chunk of the cost. 

There are innumerable small-time technology solution outfits that also double as content providers. These outfits outsource the job to rewriters and their content source is mostly the 'scrap' from leading websites and newspapers. They obviously do not incur any costs or incur only marginal costs and erode a lot of sanctity and ethics from the business.

Delivering the Content

Like all businesses, mobile content provisioning is also witnessing the disintegration of multiple players and consolidation of the large ones, which is a great sign of things to come. The trends that one foresees are the maturity with which international cellular service providers deal with data services where they let content providers determine the pricing of the product and take their charges of collection only. This is a must as the customer is accessing that extra SMS only to be able to get the content that content providers are delivering. The demand arises out of the pull that the content creates.

It is going to be interesting to identify the right yet intoxicating mix of media that can bring great experiences in content delivery; to see how contests and gaming will remain popular in this space; and to discover how mobile marketing will change the way direct marketing will work for brands. The challenges faced by providers in terms of technology, for instance in evolving the content for SMS, MMS, and GPRS-based activities and voice, will be quite high. 

While data can be restricted to the largely English speaking population and the SMS-savvy 40 percent of the mobile user base, voice is omnipresent. Anyone who has a phone knows how to dial a number and listen to the content provided over that number. No wonder, content is one of the 40 fastest growing applications in the world.

TN Prabhu, head (mobile Internet)

Times Internet