Vodafone Holland sells cheap ad-funded phone plans

Vodafone is one of the first network providers in Europe anticipating mobile advertising: a good move in the eyes of 77 for the future even though it is probably a bit too soon to be immediately profitable. We are also not sure the public is ready yet to make the transition between paying with money and paying with their time.

In the Netherlands Vodafone is selling phone plans with low costs per minute, but the users must agree to receive marketing messages on their mobile phones when they sign the contract. A Vodafone spokesperson said in a reaction to the people at Emerce (Dutch): “We have decided on offering commercial messages to our customers in our new strategy.

“We are not sure yet when we will start sending advertisements, or how. But now we are ready. Our customers can decide the types of messages they want to receive and do not see this as a burden.”

The phone plan would include costs per minute of about 4 cents, a very competitive price for the Dutch market. We assume this is approximately cost price for Vodafone, and they might expect to make their profits from advertising on the mobiles of customers.

We doubt, however, that customers will truly only receive the commercial messages they really want to receive. We will have to wait and see what the options are of the new plan. It seems illogical if there would be an option to completely shut off all advertisement messages, so at least some people would receive unwanted advertising. Then, the only question is, will the low prices be worth having to receive these unsolicited messages?

This entry was posted on Friday, July 20th, 2007 at 7:42 pm 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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