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International Herald Tribune wrote an excellent summary article on what is latest with mobile operators and their mobile advertising plans, featuring Blyk as the pure play ad-funded mobile media for the 16-24 year olds.

The new uses of cellphones present vast opportunities for consumer brand companies, who are finding it difficult to reach customers through media like magazines and television. “[Mobile] advertising absolutely makes sense to extend expensive multimedia services and mobile TV to the mass market,” said Linda Barabee, an analyst at Yankee Group. “I think we will see consumers say, ‘You know what? I’m only going to spend this much money on my mobile phone.’ ”

Marko will be speaking today at DLD (Digital, Life, Design) in Munich about Blyk and the future of mobile media on a panel with Hjalmar Winbladh, Alexander Straub and Jeff Pulver. Other speakers on the strong and diverse program include Luc Besson, Linda Stone, Norman Foster, Martin Varsavsky, Marissa Mayer, Caterina Fake, Carlos Bhola, Esther Dyson, Niklas Zennström, Bruce Sterling and Nicholas Negroponte.

I had a pleasure to participate and speak at Informa mobile advertising and marketing conference this week in Paris. It was interesting to see, how things have (and have not) moved forward in mobile advertising. Topics covered a lot of ground – from Case studies (Coca-Cola and Peugeot) to panel discussions about industry value chain and from Mobile-TV to advertising via SMS.

The need to tap advertising revenue is there, but the means are missing. Overly complex industry value-chain, network and technology issues, lack of collaboration and the absence of consumer data and profiles simply dwarf the entire industry. The distribution simply does not work. That’s why everyone is doing a bit of everything, just to do something.

The thing missing is the BENEFIT. And with this I do not mean benefits for operators, platform providers or the advertisers – it’s the consumers that get nearly nothing out of mobile advertising. Commercial television has been the dominant form of broadcasting. FREE. Netscape introduced FREE internet browsing. Hotmail was the FREE email, Google organized the internet for FREE and enabled simple, spontaneous access to information. Napster created FREE peer-to-peer file sharing. Skype launched FREE internet phone calls… revolutionizing the perception of international phone calls and was the fastest application adoption in the history. Simply put…FREE is GOOD. And I believe that free is also the future of mobile communications, especially for young consumers.
There is one topic that makes the industry discuss: how much advertising can consumers TOLERATE? If you look what mobile industry currently is offering to them – the answer is easy: NONE. There is no BENEFIT for them.

If consumers get a real BENEFIT and receive ads that are relevant and entertaining for them, two things will happen: Free is good and best of all – ads are good.

Blyk is giving a keynote speech at the Informa Mobile Advertising & Marketing conference in Paris, Jan 16-17.

First, it has been a great conference with a lot of valuable insight being shared between the participants, and there is still the second day to come. Thanks to Informa for inviting us to give a keynote speech on building a mobile, ad-funded media and operator for young people.

We have had a lot of interesting discussions on Blyk as a mobile media, how we have built it, and why it is being built in this novel way – as a full scale mobile operator. In short, every media starts from understanding its audience, and providing something that is of high value to this specific group of people. In our context in mobile media, the 16-24 year old audience uses – we have done a lot of research on this topic and intend to continue our efforts – their mobiles for talking, texting and… as an alarm clock. This leads to the obvious conclusion: in order to build a mobile media one needs to provide something of great value for its audience, and in mobile it is the two ‘killer applications’ that Blyk provides: free voice and text. And in order to do that, to be able to provide what is most valuable for the 16-24 year old consumers, one technically needs to become an MVNO.

The second key question is how one builds the content into this new mobile media, considering especially that rich content is not consumed in masses via mobile, and is hard and expensive to make attractive. Well…we do in fact have the richest of all media at hand when it comes to user-generated content in everyday communication. One thing that we have observed in all our trials is that the young consumers – in our opinion not surprisingly – start to miss Blyk after the trial ends once the ad user experience is delivered in a fun, enjoyable and relevant Blyk manner.