BANGALORE, INDIA: There is a new charter for mobile marketing, and it is, quite fancily, called mobile conversations!

Speaking today at ‘Mobile Conversations’, a conference on the role of mobile in a marketing campaign, Sreekanth Khandekar, director, Afaqs, said: “Mobile has become an extension of human body today. It is used for e-mail, web browsing and lots more. Everybody is excited by the personalised communication that the mobile offers and we have to look at the ways in which that potential can be realized.”

The conference dealt with three topics:
* Innovations in mobile marketing
* Integrating mobile in the media plan and
* The creative aspects of mobile advertising

Abhay Singhal, vice president-business development, mKhoj, pointed out: “India has the second largest base in mobile Internet consumption. However, only 5-10 percent of the total mobile subscribers use the Internet. Mobile provides one of the best interactive platforms and it is up to us to figure out how to make the maximum of it.”

Debasis Chatterji, director operations, Netxcell Ltd, added: “Mobile is not a competitor, but a facilitator for other mediums. It is emerging as the ‘seventh’ mass media. Mobile marketing, is a nascent market in India, but is the best mode to cerate internal and external branding.

“Unlike text, voice has the potential to reach a mass audience. Text is a very huge market but voice marketing is picking up. Moreover, India, with 26 languages, is opening up a vast space for the latter segment.”

Debraj Tripathy, head, mobile marketing, OnMobile, said: “There are three modes: text, voice, and video or images, of mobile marketing. Voice is the best medium to reach out as this doesn’t have a language barrier unlike the other two, and marketing can be done according to the user’s profile.”

Abhijit Saxena, CEO, Netcore Solutions, said: “The biggest selling point of mobile ads is what marketers call ‘relevance’. Mobile advertising through text messages is extremely focused and optimized.”