Vodacom has announced the launch of a new mobile advertising service called “On-The-Line”. The new service will allow advertisers to target personal channels such as WAP sites, MMS, and SMS messages. Vodacom will offer banner ads on its mobile internet portals that attract 1.4 million users a months, as well as text adverts on its innovative new “Please Call Me” service.

“Please Call Me” is a new free call-back service targeted at pre-pay subscribers that generates up to 20 million messages a day and reaches both the lower and higher end of the market. It allows a subscriber – even if they have no remaining credit in their account – to send a message, free of charge, to someone with the request “please call me” and their mobile number. This is an ad-funded service, with text ads of up to 100 characters being attached to both outgoing and confirming messages.

For more information, see the Vodacom site HERE.

“More than 25 million cellphones will become a potent new advertising medium with mobile advertising, putting the power to control advertising exposure in the consumer’s hands. This moves away from the traditional advertising medium that ‘pushes’ the message to the consumer, to a medium where the consumer ‘pulls’ the advertising they are interested in,” said Romeo Kumalo, Vodacom South Africa’s commercial executive director.

He added that mobile advertising had a number of major strengths. “Its reach is enormous; it offers advertisers immediacy, can be targeted to demographics, usage patterns and time of day, can generate responses and is an intelligent one-to-one, interactive marketing tool.” This development is expected to change the advertising landscape significantly. Marketing research showed that 52% of brands were expected to commit 5 – 25% of their budgets to mobile advertising within five years.

This is not Vodacom’s first foray into mobile advertising, over the last three months they have been running a trial mobile advertising campaign for Nike. “It proved a very popular pull-mechanism with more than 84 000 content downloads such as wallpapers and 9 200 survey responses, far exceeding the client’s expectations,” Kumalo said.

He added that the feature rich cellphone technology lent itself to many more future developments and enhancements of mobile advertising. “These will include South Africa’s first high-volume, profiled, opted-in database for direct marketing on mobile with messages delivered by SMS or MMS.”

Full press release HERE