H3G — Focusing on Content
A part of Hutchinson Whampoa, one of the world’s largest 3G operators, H3G is an innovator in Italy. The first to launch UMTS services at the beginning of 2003, H3G blazed new trails in the Italian third-generation mobile market, firmly positioning the mobile operator also as a content company.
One measure of the success of H3G’s approach is its rapid growth. H3G reached 3.5 million users in May 2005 and topped the six million user mark at the beginning of 2006.
H3G’s Need: Increase User Uptake of an Outstanding Content Portfolio
H3G’s service portfolio has expanded dramatically, becoming a veritable supermarket of content: ringtones, music, news, sports, horoscope, gossip, video, full-length movies, and much more.
Such a vast portfolio of content creates new challenges:
- To make users aware of the content services, especially time-sensitive ones such as breaking news, sport headlines, etc.
- To drive content purchases beyond subscription models and reach mass-market
- To facilitate content purchasing and make it simpler and quicker
H3G’s answer to the challenges accords with the most common practice in the world of consumer goods: promotion! Because content unpromoted is usually content unused.
H3G’s problem, shared by many other operators, was how to get people to know about and use their constantly expanding cutting-edge content.
The need was to substantially increase user awareness of the outstanding content portfolio, and to facilitate user access to it.
Effective Solution: MMS as a Promotional Channel
While operators have some degree of success promoting new services with SMS promotions and bill inserts, H3G sought a better way to effectively convey the “feel” and excitement of advanced 3G content services, and give users an immediate way to respond and subscribe while interest is hot.
Targeted MMS promotions were envisioned as a way to deliver free attractive messages informing subscribers about the availability of new content. H3G’s solution was to use MMS as a promotional channel, taking advantage of “push” and multimedia capabilities.
From that vision the “Adesso 3” (Now 3) service was born.
“Our daily Adesso 3 MMS service is a unique way to promote our 3G offering to our customer base,” said Adriano Gaved from H3G Italy Editorial Marketing. “Adesso 3 is a dynamic MMS newsletter with content differentiated according to specific target group. Adesso 3 is run via the Comverse A2P Expeditor platform.”
The Adesso3 daily free service promotes three different content offerings from the mobile portal.
Each MMS slide contains an appealing image introducing the service, text describing the service and the pricing, and a WAP link for easy, one-click access to the content and to more information.
As a promotional method, Adesso3 has many advantages, including:
- It presents high-interest services in a visually striking format that gives a tantalizing taste of what the service is like.
- It is a cost-effective promotional forum unique to and controlled by the operator.
- Promotions do not get “lost” amidst a flow of many other competing advertisements and messages, as is the case with billboards, TV commercials and newspaper ads.
- MMS’s smart delivery capabilities gather and use information on user responses, interests and habits, and can direct tailored messages to specific target groups.
- It gives users “hot button” options (click here link, reply, call, etc.) to respond on-the-spot to catchy offers — before attention drifts and interest wanes.
Turning to Comverse, the A2P Experts
H3G’s idea for Adesso3 was a good one. Now they had to find an MMS vendor capable of carrying it out.
H3G turned to Comverse, the dominant A2P (Application-to-Person) market leader. Comverse’s Messaging Application Center and A2P Expeditor can work with any MMSC, even a third-party legacy MMSC like one used by H3G, which by itself was incapable of handling the demanding requirements of Adesso3.
Comverse’s solution cost-effectively leveraged H3G’s existing infrastructure to make possible delivery of time-sensitive multimedia content to large numbers of subscribers at once, handling the heavy volume, traffic bursts and event-based peaks associated with mass MMS push promotions and applications.
“Comverse was the best vendor to turn our vision into a reality,” said Gaved. “The most important criteria were the reliability of the technological solution and the ongoing support that Comverse could assure us. In addition, the MMS throughput rate was a critical factor, given our requirements to use the platform for large-scale direct marketing campaigns.”
“Comverse met our expectation for a very straightforward reason: the best technology guarantees the best results and performance. When these conditions are met, then meeting our objectives is easy!”
The Success of Adesso3
Adesso 3 was quickly hailed as a success, conclusively demonstrating that MMS is not only a great service -- it’s also a great salesman.
Adesso 3 brings H3G subscribers up-to-date with what’s current and hot: the latest content updates and services.
Adesso 3 messages look like this:
MMS is an ideal promotion channel because colorful messages with pictures, sound and video are vastly more attractive than text-only SMS. The service can be positioned as an informative infotainment service that users will want to receive.
MMS promotions allow for embedded “impulse buy” links to the relevant page in the WAP portal, and direct download of the promoted content. Relevant users are easily targeted through segmented distribution lists.
H3G notes that up to 50% of the network’s content is now sold due to direct promotion over MMS:
- Adesso 3 promotions reach over three million subscribers a day, every day.
- Adesso 3 subscribers consume about twice as much content as non-subscribers of the service.
- The average CTR (click-through rate) for Adesso3 promotions is 8%, with peaks reaching 24%.
- Subscribers like the service. Fewer than 1% have requested to opt out of the service since launch.
A Step Ahead of the Competition
The Adesso 3 campaigns are regarded as a sine qua non for H3G’s striking market success.
“A2P campaigns are playing an enormous role in the growth of content usage for us,” said H3G’s Adriano Gaved. “Simply put, we could not go ahead with our content business without a tool like this one.”
The ongoing 3 Italy-Comverse relationship is another success story. 3 Italy and Comverse have been working together since 2001, and Comverse MMSC was selected in 2003. 3 Italy has also launched instant messaging and chat products based on the Comverse Interactive Exchange Platform.
Comverse and 3 Italy enjoy “a stable relationship between two major players in the telco industry with a common objective: to be always one step ahead of the competition,” concluded Gaved at H3G.
“A2P campaigns are playing an enormous role in the growth of content usage for us,” said H3G’s Adriano Gaved. “Simply put, we could not go ahead with our content business without a tool like this one.”