The India Council

On July 09, the India Council of the Mobile Marketing Association held its second council meeting since it was set up in May this year. The conference call was attended by 30 representatives from member companies including Coca-Cola, MKhoj, Mobile2Win, BuzzCity and Quasar.

Co-Chairs driving the India Council are Kunal Bajaj from BDA Connect and Rajiv Hiranandani from Mobile2Win.

India is showing immense potential when it comes to the adoption of mobile marketing. With over 450 million mobile users in the country, it is not surprising that brands and advertisers are starting to explore the possibility of communicating directly with their target audiences on the one device that you don’t leave home without.

However, as a nascent industry, there are a few issues that need to be addressed, and this is where MMA is taking the lead. The India Council has identified three key areas of focus for the current term:

1. Getting the support of brands and agencies to address the chicken-and-egg situation where brands say the agencies aren’t thinking out of the box, and agencies feel brands aren’t willing to take a risk on a new medium.
2. Building a framework for Measurement and Metrics, taking advantage of the success that MMA has had in defining industry guidelines for the measurement of mobile advertising campaigns globally and refining these to suit the Indian context.
3. Setting standards for Consumer Best Practice and policies, including double opt-ins and no-spamming rules for member companies.

Mobile advertising revenues are currently estimated at US$25 million in the Indian market alone, and are slated to increase faster than online advertising do to the sheer disparity between the penetration figures of PCs versus handsets in this vast country.

With the committees being steered by leaders in Digital Media like Vishal Maheshwari from Yahoo! India, Vidhu Sanyal from Affle and Mansur Siddiqui from Coca-Cola, we look forward to further updates from MMA as they knock up successes in each of these areas in the months ahead!