Amdocs Enters Digital Advertising for Mobile market

The advertising revolution in mobile communications is getting underway with market projections ranging from $12 million to $20 million annually over the next four years. Amdocs got into the game this week with a new Search and Digital Advertising solution.

The solutions will leverage subscriber data and network infrastructure to allow service providers and advertisers to target customers with personalized advertising. It also is part of Amdocs’ strategy to help service providers deliver digital lifestyle services and part of Amdocs’ new portfolio of customer experience systems. The CES portfolio, including the Search and Digital Advertising solution, combines software and professional services designed to help with the transition from voice and data provider to provider of digital lifestyle services.

“It is no small task for service providers to make this transition,” said Scott Kolman, managing director of product marketing at Amdocs. “The digital lifestyle market holds great opportunity, but it is fraught with challenges and new players like Google and Apple shaking things up.”

Kolman also said service providers will only get one shot at this because neither customers nor shareholders are very forgiving of mistakes. “And the competition isn’t sitting on their hands,” he said.

Amdocs said the product is the only one currently that runs both search and digital advertising on one platform. The solution incorporates capabilities for campaign management, inventory management, yield management, optimization and an executive dashboard for metrics and supports advertising campaigns across multiple channels and formats, including search-based advertising, display, Short Message Service, Multimedia Messaging Service and video.

The search tool can be self-branded for service providers. It also leverages knowledge about customer behavior over time and location information to refine its search criteria. Digital advertising does the same and theoretically improves click throughs on ads as well as actual purchases. Sharon Ballard, senior analyst with the Yankee Group, said in a statement that when leveraged effectively, this data will enable advertisers to better target their ads at their mobile customer while at the same time provide these customers with more relevant ads that correlate to their interests.

Amdocs introduced its CES Blueprint portfolio in November at the TM Forum in Dallas. In addition to helping service providers transition to being new-age providers, the Blueprint could help them understand the complete disconnect between the quality of experience they think they provide and the one customers say they are getting.

Besides Search and Digital Advertising, other solutions in the portfolio include: Digital commerce, a storefront capability that works with Amdocs’ Qpass digital commerce platform that provides personalized merchandising and service delivery, and partner management; Unified user interface technology, which is based on Amdocs’ new Smart Client Framework for improving service calls; and professional services.

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