USSD: Attractive option for mobile advertising

SMS based advertising has been bothering mobile phone users in India for quite some time. Apart from having to attend to bogus messages, people’s inbox gets flooded with these messages, preventing important messages from coming through.
This has now led to regulations being formulated for bulk SMSs as well. TRAI has made it illegal to send SMSs in bulk to people registered with what is known as the national do not call registry. Some operators have even stopped supporting bulk SMSs altogether.
But, at the end of the day, advertisers need to reach out to potential customers, and telcos are in a position to cash in on this demand to generate revenue.
To address the problem of SMS ads clogging users’ inboxes, Comviva is developing a solution to deliver mobile advertisements using USSD (unstructured supplementary services data) platforms.
USSD platforms are currently used to enable mobile subscribers to help themselves to such services as inquiring their prepaid balance etc. For example, Airtel users can key in *123# to find out their pre paid balance.
In the solution that Comviva is developing, the ad reaches a mobile phone but vanishes after a certain time period. During this time, the user can choose to ignore the message or can respond to it.
Vikram Shanbhag, vice president, mobile messaging solutions, Comviva, said, "The subscriber hears a beep from his mobile when it gets a flash ad message and it gets deleted if not retrieved for a period of a few minutes. "
He added, "This works on a USSD push technology on GSM phones, and is not bandwidth dependent. It will work on 2.5G also. Our team in Bangalore is working on this and is excited about its prospects."
Comviva’s platform will be interactive, and will allow messages to have a menu. For instance, if a user wants to activate a service, he has to press 'ok' for yes, or 'cancel' for no. This not only enables users to exercise a choice; it also gives advertisers an opportunity to know the consumer’s interest in real time.
Apart from customer services, operators are already using USSD to push their own services such as ring tones, caller ring back tunes, alert services etc. Operators also use this platform to run contests such as quizzes or polls.
Shanbhag said, "We have supplied our platform to all the top operators. We are hopeful that operators will upgrade to this new service. We expect that this will initially be used for promoting their own product, and gradually it will be used for third party advertising."
USSD is a basic service which, by default, works on GSM networks and has been around as long as SMS has. But it is only recently that the platform has seen increased usage. Even mobile banking service providers such as Oxigen are going to use the USSD platform.