Interview: Jigal Schrijver of HotSMS Netherlands

Jigal Schrijver is Marketing and Operations Director at HotSMS BV, a Dutch mobile advertising and marketing specialist. HotSMS uses their database of 1.2 million subscribers to offer mobile marketing services to over 500 companies in the Netherlands. 77Lab had a talk about the use of mobile advertising and its possibilities in the future.

‘We can provide all of the services described in this cascade. Further, we advise our clients on the use of media that we do not produce ourselves.’<


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Enough about you. How about mobile advertising as a whole? Where do you see the industry going in the future?


‘The Netherlands are adopting rather quickly to this relatively new medium, but we are still a little behind on the early movers, which are in my opinion England, Spain and Italy. The results of recent mobile advertising campaigns with mobile banners were very promising (see this article). Click through rates were high as compared to traditional online click through rates. This can be explained by two factors. First, banners stand out more on a cell phone than on a “normal” website, since a mobile site is less graphic. Second, the attention level of a user of the mobile Internet is generally higher per item on the site because there is less content.

‘When it comes to the distribution of advertising on mobile sites, I don’t think the mobile Internet will turn out the same way as normal Internet. The smaller screens and telephone buttons will prevent it from sporting many banners.’


‘In a few years time, mobile Internet has probably become much more interactive. That’s where new possibilities lie for marketers. The challenge will be to convince customers and potential customers to get involved with a brand. This can be achieved in many ways, but will be much easier in the future. In fact, the technology already exists. But the customer will have to get used to it, and phone network providers will have to start offering more flat fees for the use of mobile Internet. In that way, everyone can be online all the time. You always have your phone with you.’<



What about mobile search advertising?

‘That is definitely something to look out for. Where we sometimes use Bluetooth now to announce the presence of a store or service, this technique depends on the use of Bluetooth by the customer. Potential customers will search on the mobile Internet when they are shopping. This provides marketers with the possibility to offer the demanded product or service right on the spot.’

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 1st, 2007 at 1:59 am and is filed under Mobile Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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