Maxis new mobile advertising
Filed Under (Business News) by Webmaster on 22-06-2010
Tagged Under : Maxis
MAXIS Bhd (6012) yesterday became Asia’s first mobile phone operator to introduce mobile advertising among its customers.
Its chief operating officer Jean-Pascal van Overbeke said the service will be made available to all customers with various models of handphones.
“The service is free of charge once customers permit us to send them the advertising materials to their mobile phones,” he told a press conference on the region’s first permission-based mobile advertising in Kuala Lumpur yesterday.
Van Overbeke declined to reveal how much the new business would contribute to Maxis, but said that advertising via mobile is the next big thing in the advertising medium as television and print advertising are now almost obsolete.
“We already have 12 clients who have signed up with us, including Malaysian Airlines and BMW,” he said.
Maxis is partnering Austria-based Out There Media (OTM) for this venture.
OTM chief executive officer Kerstin Trikalitis said mobile advertising is cost-effective and has a wider reach compared to other forms of advertising.
“(For example), a car company, which had opted to use mobile advertising, increased their test drives by 650 per cent in comparison with the traditional advertising,” she said.
Trikalitis said mobile advertising currently has a market share of 10 per cent in Europe among other traditional advertising media like TV and print, but it is fast-growing in comparison to the Internet.
“We predict that mobile advertising will be the next big thing in Malaysia,” she added.
As of March 31 this year, Maxis had 12.7 million mobile subscribers.
