UK-based mobile operator Telefonica O2 announced recently that more than six million of its subscribers — or a full 23 percent –have opted-in to the carrier’s mobile marketing and advertising service, “O2 More.”
We’ve covered O2 More quite a bit since its inception, it’s one of the first and most successful mobile marketing services that comes directly from a mobile operator. Surprisingly, carriers have been slow to adopt mobile marketing solutions of their own, even though they control the networks and have unlimited access to a treasure-trove of valuable user-data that can be used for advanced relevance and targeting. O2 has proven that this can be very successful.
In fact, O2 claims that its targeting abilities are what makes the service so successful. Those who opt-in for the service are asked about their preferences up-front, and then these are combined with data that O2 keeps on users, such as phone usage and location. Together these are used to deliver what O2 calls “highly personalized” ads. In one particular campaign, O2 sent out nearly 300K coupons to its opted-in users for 50% of a coffee at Starbucks. A total of 14% of the those users redeemed the coupons and, when asked later, 93% of users said they recalled the ad.
