Blyk, Blyk Blyk, what makes it tick? Answer me quick, is it really that slick?

Yes it is..

I am very impressed with the way Blyk is emerging into our consciousness. Age limits of who can't have the service? Yes, its not like previous operators, MVNO's and operator sub-brands, with target ages. Blyk actually will not let you sign up if you're only 15 years old, and it will not accept any "old fogies" who are 25 or above..

This is certainly the total opposite of just about everyone in mobile telecoms, who tend to try to be everything to everybody.

So then there is the exclusivity of being invitation-only? What? You cannot call them up and sign up? No, this mobile operator actually says you can't get it, unless you get invited into the club. Good thinking, very much different from the status quo.

I think these have very good beginnings to help to try to differentiate Blyk customers from the Vodafones and O2s and T-Mobiles of their parents. Blyk is not at all like your parents' phone service. Its like the recent trends in ringing tones, now young people are running away from consuming ringing tones. And clearly one of the reasons is, that their parents consume ringing tones. If the parents do it, then for a 17 year old, its not at all a cool thing for the teenager to do..

Can it work? 217 messages per month (ie exactly 7 per day on a 31 day month) and 42 minutes of voice calls (4 minutes every 3 days). That is not much. But Blyk is a SIM card based MVNO service. No Blyk branded phones. So every 16-24 year old who wants to use the Blyk SIM card, has to have some existing phone to use. And in most cases that person thus also has an active SIM card on another network.

Who cares if the 217 messages run out 3 weeks into the month (or even much earlier). Yes, after that the youth will stick in the old SIM card of one of the big incumbents, and pay normal rates as they did up to now. But for a week or two or three out of every month, the youth can get free messages and calls by using the Blyk SIM cards.

I think this will work from being cool and desirable for the youth target group.

Can it work as a business, will the advertisers come? Here the impressive line-up of 40 global brands starting with Coca Cola is very convincing.

What we need to find out is the extent of the data mining and customer profiling that Blyk can do for its advertisers. They do talk, a bit, about the profiling in some of the launch stories. I'd love to hear more. But this certainly has the potential to be VERY powerful, and leapfrog the mobile operator level targeting and segmentation accuracy.

For example in March of 2007 Vodafone UK spoke at the Mobile Youth conference, and revealed that Vodafone's current segmentation model has 14 segments (for contrast, at the same event we learned that Tesco's the UK supermarket chain has over 10,000 segments). Vodafone has under 16 million subscribers today, so it means that the average segment size is a bit over a million. That is also the level of granularity and customer insights that the Vodafone UK segmentation model could hope to deliver for any advertiser hoping to target and profile customers.

Consider these extremes. If Blyk was so weak as Vodafone UK in its segmentation, and able only to analyze its customer base to 14 segments, then out of its much tighter target customer base of 4.5 million customers, Blyk would have target segment sizes on average of 320,000 customers (already considerably more precisely targeted than Vodafone this year.

But what if Blyk has a totally modern segmentation system like Tesco's and manages say 10,000 segments? Then the granularity brings us to segment size averages of 450 customers !!!  WOW. How tightly could you make customization and personalization if the customer insight allows splitting into such precise groupings. Not "youth fans of rock music" vs "youth fans of rap music" and not EVEN of splitting customers by their fave bands - but actually splitting customer groups based on the TYPES of songs played by a given band or artist..

And yes, the boys who like skateboarding, the girls who are into mountain biking, the boys who like not only videogames, but specififically CounterStrike, versus those kids who play in World of Warcraft and so forth.

I honestly don't know exactly how precise Blyk's customer insights engine is, but if you analyze their profiling interests, clearly they are several orders of magnitude more accurate than Vodafone UK.

The Blyk website has a great example of sample Loreal interactive ad exchange. If we get customer granularity down to hundreds (or even only down to thousands rather than a million subscribers) then we can certainly filter for existing users of the Loreal brand of cosmetics !!  Not just teenager girls as our target (as we might have with a major operator today) but rather actual users of Loreal. And then - the Blyk website example - can have interactive fun with that brand, like selecting which picture of a female celebrity that girl likes. Now we combine the celebrity fun with the Loreal lipstick and before you know it, the adveritising has totally transformed into content to the teenager.

This is what Alan and I have been talking about for years. Make it engagement marketing, not only digital or interactive. One we get engagement with our target audience - THEY don't think it is advertising, they think it has become content.

So are Blyk on the right track, very clearly so, yes. Will they make it? Time will tell, but honestly, now reading the press releases from Monday and visiting their website, this company really is doing radical things to the telecoms and advertising industries. They well might end up revolutionizing both..

Great start, Blyk !!  Keep up the good work !!

Comments

[Raimo van der Klein]

Taste based marketing

The longtail of segmentation

[alishia stovold]

can i have a blyk sim card please i wanted one for ever

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi Raimo and alishia

Raimo - yeah, long tail, but moving up the thickness of the tail, they doubled their target and hit 200K subscribers in the first year (target was 100K).

alishia - I hope you're the right age and in one of their markets ha-ha, I'd want one too, but I'm literally twice as old as the top end of who is accepted ha-ha..

Thank you both for writing

Tomi Ahonen :-)