1. You’ve been a tech evangelist in the mobile space, how do you see the marketing piece evolving on mobile in the coming years?
In India, with smart-phone penetration rapidly growing and all set to clock 30% in 2020 and mobile data cost on the other hand gone drasticllay low and currently, the lowest in the world, USD 0.26 / 1G (vs. USD 6.66 in UK-source: BBC), the role of mobile in marketing has caught attention of every markeeter on earth. The overpowering presence of mobile in our everydays lives has undoubtedly changed the whole landscape of marketing industry, like never before. The very common and affordable mobile access to people and into their their lives be it for entertainment, daily life’s information and other random communication and connect has silently made moible indispensable from todays living and this close connect of mobile with each individual at a very personal level has made positioned ‘Mobile’ as a huge marketing channel in India, especially. This accelerating trend has changed many of the traditional marketing concepts & the ways we get used to. With learnings from other developed countries; in the coming years, it’s clearly to understand that marketing will evolve and mobile as key channel for marketing is not only a trend that we must catch up too, but also is a critical door for marketers, leading to “Personalized & Precise Marketing” based on the booming of AI/Data Science technology.
2. “Data Agility” is becoming a buzzword in the marketing corridors. Tell us something about your products in the data management space.
Our product, TrueInsight, is an AI-based Data Science utilises data science technology to develop a Marketing & Business Intelligence Solution to tell our clients (Brands/Agencies) who their current and potential users are, what do they look like and what do they love or prefer to do – whatever online or offline behaviours, and how you can approach them with a right message and a right marketing recommendation at the right timing and right place. MoMAGIC’s data solution makes the marketing more effective and result driven because of “Personalized Marketing Insight.” With our Data Science technology, we enable our clients to talk to their target users/consumers in a very personal way instead of a generic and non-differetiated approach of marketing such as TVC. The very critical core for us to construct our data solution, TrueInsight, lies in our competence on “Big Data Collection, Data Analytics, and Intelligence Prediction”. In the current mobile world, MoMAGIC’s mobile marketing solution is all about “Precise Marketing” solution enabled by AI & Data Science technology mainly through mobile and to expedite despite our solution covering both mobile and non-mobile such as Desktop/PC base.
3. Tell us something about MoMAGIC’s R & D division and about some of the products that you are building.
Our R&D divisions have cross-regional presence in both India and Taiwan. We set up our overseas AI RD centre in Taiwan in 2017, leveraging Greater China’s premium AI/Big Data talents to speed up MoMAGIC’s global business expansion. While many RD tasks are still undergoing in India, the Taiwan RD Centre is focusing more on AI/Data Science solution development such as TrueInsight, mentioned earlier for Marketing & Business Intelligence development, which will expand beyond pure marketing domain and is going to stride into IOT AI/Data Science domain – the next step for IOT data intelligence.
On other hand, our Indian RD team is responsible for Marketing Delivery Solution, named TrueReach, a Programmatic Marketing Delivery Solution made for Advertisers and Publishers. It’s core value built to fulfil – maximizing marketing spend ROI for advertisers and to maximize the monetization efficiency for publishers’, marketing traffic (inventories such as the advertising slots in Web/App) riding on the marketing/business intelligence of TrueInsight. In addition to the above, App Tracking Solution, Social Interaction App, Gaming Apps and IOT solution development are also handled by our Indian RD team.
4. Please share some marketing successes that you have seen in the recent past
As the popularity trend of Mobile E-commerce and Mobile transport services are catching rapidly in recent years, Flipcart, Ola and Uber’s marketing activities for educating the market and for attracting users for more frequent service use are good case points of markting success- quite successfully. The branding image and direct branding impression associated with corresponding services have been well established. Even the number of actual service use keeps boosting to record high very often. Their marketing were running successfully due to their leverage over Mobile Advertising, highly credited to Data Science Application – the overall marketing effectiveness.
In fact, they have been also MoMAGIC’s clients for several years- using our Data Science Marketing solution support. We utilize our AI/Data Science technology to drive the Branding Awareness, App Download Number and User Retention Rate limited within a certain of marketing cost which our clients can accept. Our achievement on their marketing objectives actually is realized with the previously mentioned concept of “Precise Marketing” via our AI/Data Science technology to ensure their marketing budget spending to hit a pre-set KPIs. These successful marketing cases were results of our AI/Data Science technology application.
5. As programmatic marketing becomes more and more performance focused, please share some challenges that you are facing in this space
The programmatic marketing is typically used for branding marketing as an effective approach. With the adoption of programmatic, marketing keeps improving, the demand for programmatic marketing is purely driven with the fact that it’s performance based marketing and demand is increasing. However, the major challenge comes from following factors in the industry.
A much larger and more variety of data collection sources required: to effectively deliver a good performance marketing driven mobile advertising campaogn, and this definitely needs large data. However, for most of the companies (brands or advertisers), the larger scale data collection could be a very tough headache. Unless your business itself has the opportunity to collect much more proper and legal data, it’s challenging in reality.
A Strong Data Team Required But Not Easy to Recruit and to Sustain: Other than having a large pool of data which is relevant and a per the laws, you also ned a strong data team to manage the data analytics for the reliable data algorithm development to achieve high results via performance campaign. However, the recruitment for Data Talents in the world is not easy since such kind of talents are in hige shortage. Also, to sustain a capable data team will need to pay a more competitive salary compensation. Hence, to recruit and to sustain professional data team is not an easy job for most of companies especially not in AI/Data industry. MoMAGIC also spent much effort to build a competitive AI/Data team in Taiwan (n India) in order to enhance our competence on performance marketing.
A Competitive Bidding Engine & Targeting Functions on DSP: Besides data issues, if your programmatic demand side platform, DSP, is not competitive on Bidding Engine & Targeting functions, your media purchase cost will be too high to achieve performance marketing KPI. This normally needs very intense development investment also requiring severe polishing through tremendous campaign running experiences to fine tune. While many companies claiming to have their own DSP technology, franking speaking, most of their bidding and targeting functions might not be that ready for performance marketing. For MoMAGIC DSP, TrueReach, we still keep constant enhancement for this key function. This is an endless journey for improvement
Time Given for Performance Improvement: Normally, advertisers have less patience for performance improvement. Under short time period (normally less than 2 weeks), the performance enhancement is very challenging to achieve. MoMAGIC is also facing the challenge of time with our AI/Data Science technology for performance marketing
Traditional Online Data Not Effective Enough: User/consumer’s online behaviour or action might not be valid to figure out their whole picture of their lifestyle and purchase manners. While trying to reach a good performance marketing, it’s robust if we can see through user’s online and offline manners. However, it’s not too easy to collect user’s offline data such as their actual presence during the weekend even to the “shop-level” (often visiting Starbucks) and it’s also difficult to know what the user’s actual dressing preference and their weekday and weekend’s activities in the real world. You can imagine if you can know this, it will be very helpful for performance marketing delivery. For this direction, despite being quite challenging, MoMAGIC keeps equipping itself on the offline data collection and online & offline data analytics integration. Our TrueInsight solution has such a O2O data analytics capability to improve the performance marketing.
6. The gaming sector is catching up in India, and you have also launched a ‘cricket’ based game. Please share your thoughts on how the gaming segment is evolving and the opportunities that it brings for brands.
Gaming industry in India will transition to look for a quality game rather than a free but low quality game. Although the paid game in India is still not popular, the major monetization for game publisher is still advertising. However, as the gaming industry will be getting more mature in the following years, user’s expectation for quality and experience must be lifted accordingly. We expect before paid model can be accepted in India, game publishers will emphasize their game design to be more Localized (instead of a minor adjustment on original standard game and launched in India) whatever the game story theme and UI/UX. Also, to increase user’s playing time on the game, the game design will provide more free but useful virtual treasures for users to pass through the challenges in the game. The basic logic is to exchange much more time from users to exchange with those free virtual treasures for generating much more advertising inventories to monetize. To assure the balance between monetization and experience is made properly, the advertising experience will be also significantly improved for leading performance games. The friendly advertising format such as native ads will be more widely adopted despite some high value intrusive advertising format still existing but the frequency and the way to show will be controlled at a certain of still friendly level.
We expect in the short term, competitive gaming industry will still be unable to rely on paid game model but will improve the gaming experience and enhance the attractiveness of gaming design to bring in more users for their monetization and to sustain the survival and profit-making. This could drive out many less quality games since their user base will be fading out and their monetization space will be further limited. With this market evolving, Brand (advertisers) will have more incentives to spend the investment via tailor-made branding in the games coz this will create the win-win outcome for publishers and brands- advertisers to catch more and longer attentions from users.
MoMAGIC is committing to quality and localized popular games. Our main goal is to offer a nice experience for gamers to keep staying with us. We believe our cricket game embedded with Cricket Star design is to pave a good branding resource for branding advertiser to do an effective and meaningful marketing delivery via our help. Let branding advertising integrated into part of game design is a key and a worthy trial for the monetization trial in gaming industry as well. We will contribute our value on helping Indian gaming industry to move into the next phase via our many years’ mobile internet and mobile advertising experiences.
