about.blyk.com

London, England
17 June 2008

Blyk, the new mobile network for 16-24 year olds funded by advertising, today announced its sponsorship of the D&AD New Blood 2008 Awards and an 18-month relationship with the D&AD 2009 Student Award programme.

Simon Waterfall, President of D&AD said: “D&AD is proud to have Blyk as a main sponsor at this year’s New Blood event. The collaboration embodies our shared value of supporting a new generation of creatives to enhance business performance now and in the future.”

Shaun Gregory, CEO Blyk UK said: “Blyk is committed to educating the industry and ensuring that any brand communications work well when they are executed through mobile. As such, we are delighted to be sponsoring the D&AD New Blood 2008 Awards and the D&AD Student Award programmes 2009.”

If you are attending D&AD New Blood 2008 Awards, Blyk would like to invite you to join the team at the Blyk stand where they will be showcasing the Blyk experience and the unique engagement they have with their members. Visitors will get the opportunity to view Blyk’s creative campaigns, learn more about Blyk’s connection with 16-24 year olds and pick up some goodies in their “chill-out” area.

WHO: Marko Ahtisaari, Blyk Brand and Design
Tom Gutteridge, Blyk UK Head of Creative

WHEN: Monday, 23rd June 2008 from 2 p.m.

WHERE: Earls Court

Blyk’s Marko Ahtisaari will also be participating in a debate entitled “Mobile advertising – A Fad or The Future?” on Tuesday 24th June 2008 at 2 p.m.

I was chairing a day at the Informa MVNO Industry Summit 2008 in Barcelona this week. The discussion focused on how operators and MVNOs can best work together.

Being Blyk - a youth media – puts us in an interesting position. Through connection to preferred brands, Blyk provides more value to youths compared traditional mobile offerings. In fact, Blyk is in a league of its own with the ad funded business model. As a result, most analysts have difficulty fitting Blyk into their MVNO positioning frameworks. Why is that? Because Blyk Media is not an MVNO, although it happens to have operator capabilities in order to serve young people.

Also, many people in the telecommunications industry see mobile advertising similar to the advertising model in Internet – the place to create a high number of impressions and eyeballs for a campaign. On the contrary, mobiles are used to interact and communicate, therefore being a place to engage and build relationships between brands and consumers. It is the most personal media for people, and thus not a natural place for broadcasting.

Another major question discussed during the summit asked “how are MVNOs doing today?” Informa’s Mark Newman shared some statistics that would suggest that MVNO’s are doing quite well: Western European MVNOs have grown subscribers between December 2006 and February 2008 from 40 million to 55 million, which is over 35% in 15 months. In the UK, Spain, Germany and France, MVNOs averaged to 30-40% of net adds (a term that mobile industry uses for new customers) every quarter in 2007.

From an industry point of view, specifically interesting is the wave of MVNOs starting from Northern Europe in early 2000, moving first towards Central Europe a few years later, and now reaching to the south and east. William Barrar from Ovum presented an interesting model. A market becomes ready for MVNOs when: mobile penetration is high; cost to acquire one new customer for operators passes a certain threshold cost; and when revenue generated by one customer is high enough and stops growing.

And what makes an MVNO successful and the relationship with operators work? This was the topic at the Crystal Ball Panel – where champagne was served – at the end of the conference. The panel included Keith Greenfield (Orange UK), Markus Freikamp (T-Mobile International), Dan Armstrong who has been involved in 22 MVNOs (Rabo Mobile), and the undersigned. The panel summarised the two days well: in order to succeed, one needs to create a special relationship between mobile service and the consumer, on top of the economically attractive offer that is the entry ticket for creating the relationship.

All in all, it was two days well spent. Thank you to Informa, all presenters and the active audience.

You will find Blyk speaking at the following venues.

Monday, February 11th

At 2:30pm, Blyk’s CEO and co-founder, Pekka Ala-Pietilä will be delivering a keynote speech at the Mobile Monday Peer Awards Event and Ceremonies held at the Espacio Movistar.

At 4:30pm, you will find Pekka Ala-Pietilä speaking at the CMO Forum, a GSMA event in partnership with OgilvyOne Worldwide. This event will bring together the leaders of the mobile marketing/advertising industry and it focuses on the challenges of increasing the use of the mobile channel for advertising and marketing purposes. The location is Hall 5 of the Fira de Barcelona.
Topics for the event include:

• The role of mobile marketing in the advertising space
• How to make mobile advertising and marketing grow
• Relationship marketing and the mobile space
• Business models and market opportunities

On Tuesday, February 12th

At 4:15pm, Timo Ahopelto, Head of Strategy and Business Development will be presenting ‘Blyk’ at the Mobile Innovation Marketplace. Blyk has been recognised as one of the ‘most innovative’ in the category of Consumer Application or Service.

Finally, I came across an article on Friday related to ‘What’s hot at Mobile World Congress 2008.’ Nice Blyk mention.

We have been meeting with the leading telecom and media analysts in Europe on our recent release related to Goldman Sachs and IFIC joining as new investors, and our country expansion starting with the Netherlands using the Vodafone network.

We have also been discussing our recent advertising results. The average 29% response rate across 498 campaigns ran until January 24th is a result that gets many people asking: how?

In summary: relevance of all ad communications, delivery based on the simple and familiar user experience, and Blyk’s unique media environment in combination make the Blyk Media effective. In fact, most young people don’t see these conversations as advertising but as information they would like to have.

To put the 29% response rate into a perspective: typically media delivers 2% at its best, and cold mobile campaigns 3-6% growing to 13-20% if in-depth profiling data is used, as referred by the DMA Chair Nick Fuller last year.

Marek Pawlowski from MEX recently summarized this quite well: “Much of the success can be attributed to Blyk’s approach to the mobile advertising experience. They use a medium with which the users are already very familiar - messaging - thereby avoiding much of the confusion and pricing uncertainty around clicking through to mobile web-sites. The advertisements are sent as a text or picture message, and are designed to be two-way conversations. Users are invited to respond with a simple reply, e.g. Would you like to receive more information about our discounts on summer holidays? ^Y/N”

The ad format – SMS and MMS messaging used for conversations between brands and members – is currently active in Blyk with 55 advertisers across 14 industries. The simple but rich building blocks are used to create variety and breadth of campaigns to create awareness, build relationships and drive sales. The applied formats are text, picture and video with sound and animation when required. And most importantly, not only rich in pixels, but more so to be rich in interaction and context: highest response rates are generated when relevance and flow of interaction come together in the unique Blyk Media environment - that is difficult or impossible replicate anywhere else.

Finally, and most importantly, young Blyk members are excited and want to join one of the fastest growing youth media in the UK. Blyk is well on track to reach 100,000 members and to become a significant youth media in the UK in its first year of operations. The best feedback we have received so far – unprompted and via our research lab shift6.net - is that the Blyk form of media really works for young people.

Nokia World/Amsterdam, NL - 4th - 5th December
If you’re going to be at Nokia World in Amsterdam, please stop by Hall 2/Stream 3 on the 5th at 14.15 where Pekka Ala-Pietilä, co-founder and CEO of Blyk will be delivering a presentation ‘Breaking the mold: adopting an advertising based business model’. Pekka will also be participating in a panel discussion during the previous day (4 Dec) in the Main Auditorium at 16.30. The topic ‘Where is the value?’ will be moderated by Barry French, Head of Communications, Nokia Siemens Networks and will include panelists Simon Beresford-Wylie, CEO, Nokia Siemens Networks; Wolfgang Weber, CTO, Swisscom Mobile; and Pekka Ala-Pietilä.

Red Herring Global 100 Event/Seattle, WA - 3rd - 5th December
If you happen to be on the other side of the pond, you’ll find Blyk co-founder, Antti Öhrling, speaking on the Digital Media panel on Tuesday, the 4th between 12:00-12:45pm - Room C. The panel will be moderated by Joel Dreyfuss, Editor-in-chief, Red Herring. Antti will also be giving a Blyk company presentation at the same event at 11:45am.

Geoff Morley from Blyk UK will present at IIR Mobile Advertising Conference on advertising-sponsored mobile services and the Blyk Media: the model that is today present in every other media than mobile, from newspapers to television. Geoff will also discuss messaging: the most simple dominant pattern in mobile, and the pattern that forms the most effective format for mobile advertising. For young people, it is natural to get a message and respond to it, just like they communicate with their friends many times every day.

Blyk has teamed up with Vice to run a FREE live music tour, the Unitaur. It’s launching on Monday 29th October 2007 with 10 dates across the UK featuring brilliant acts including: The Teenagers, Crystal Castles (a favourite at Blyk UK HQ), These New Puritans and more.

What’s more, you can play “spot the logo” on the Unitaur site.

Here is the full video of the Blyk launch event on September 24th at the Vinyl Factory in London:

Blyk representatives will be speaking at the following events in June. We hope to see you there.

June 5-6, MEM 2007 in Monte Carlo: Antti Öhrling will be delivering an “Endnote” presentation as a special guest speaker during Day two/Track one. His presentation “The Ultimate Customer Ownership: Launching an MVNO” will begin at 16.00. For details visit: www.mem07.com

June 26-27, NMA and Marketing Week’s “Online Marketing 07″ at the Business Design Centre in London: Pekka Ala-Pietilä will be part of panel discussing “Mobile Myths - How is the user experience of mobile going to change this year? What new challenges are going to emerge for marketers and their agencies?”. The session will take place on the 27th from 2.30-3.15. For details visit: www.onlinemarketingshow.co.uk

Pekka will be speaking on Wednesday, May 16th (day two) of the Financial Times Mobile Media Conference held at The Dorchester in London. The theme of the two day event is “Mobile Media - The business of change. How will mobile media transform the mobile and digital media markets?” Other speakers include representatives from Motorola, Microsoft, Yahoo, Bebo, Reuters Media, AKQA, Cake, Walt Disney and BBC. For details visit www.ftconferences.co.uk/mobilemedia

On the following day, May 17th, Jonathan will be speaking at Visiongain’s Mobile Marketing and Advertising event that will be held at the BSG conference centre in London. For details visit www.visiongain.com/mm