A key to the advance of mobile video advertising will be the availability of entertaining mobile content that reaches a large audience. mywaves, a two-year-old company, plays a wealth of free ad-supported content that is popular with young people, with video advertising playing in pre-roll and click to video formats. mywaves just announced a partnership with MTV Networks, and recently began playing Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue content. Rajeev Raman, mywaves CEO, explains how these partnerships are representative of the mywaves model, which is to play popular ad-supported content to millions of mobile users.
iSPOT: Please provide some background information about mywaves.
Raman: The company was founded in 2005, just a little over two years ago. The idea the company was started with was very straightforward. Mobile phones have larger screens and the networks are getting better and if you’re in a certain age group, young men and women, you say this can be an entertainment device. But my experience has been there’s really nothing to watch. With the offerings from the carriers, VCast or Cingular video, I still walked away with the feeling there’s nothing to it and the bigger turn off was I had to pay $15 a month for it. The idea behind mywaves is I’m going to find something that young adults will feel compelled to watch on their mobile phones and it’s going to be free.
iSPOT: If the content is free, how do you monetize it?
Raman: The answer is advertising, specifically video advertising. This is a departure and we were trying to do many things that made people say it’s an uphill battle. We’re going to go up against operators that are charging subscription fees for video and on top of that we’re going to try to get advertisers to embrace a new medium for brand centric advertising. We launched the service in January, 2006. In the first full year of operation which was 2007, we closed the year with 18 million people having downloaded the mywaves application to their phones. In December we had five million unique users to the service. Not only are people using the service, but they’re using it seven times a month and spending an average of 19 and a half minutes each visit. That’s the backdrop with which we started talking with MTV. The lion’s share of our audience is young adults and we pride ourselves on bringing the kind of content they want on their mobile phone, whether it’s music centric or celebrity centric. Who better than MTV to have a wide array of brands for that demographic? We’re bringing a lot of the content they have to our audience.
iSPOT: Can you be specific about the content.
Raman: There’s VH1 content, Gamekillers content, Spike content, Jackass and more and we’ll be increasing it as the partnership folds out.
iSPOT: With that much MTV content, how do you make it available to the users, is there an MTV channel?
Raman: There are several MTV channels. The way our system works is you can have a channel like a traditional channel on TV and take sub brands within that channel and make them their own channels, like Jackass and VH1. VH1 is comprised of videos from celebrities so you could have channels for individual artists. We make the individual channels, based on how they’re looking for content.
iSPOT: How is the advertising integrated into the content?
Raman: It’s traditional pre-rolls that are 15 seconds long and play before the clips or the channels are accessed. There’s a second ad unit we have called click-to video. On the navigation screen leading up to the watching experience you may see a banner or text ad inviting you to watch a piece of content. Paramount Studios advertises a movie, you may be navigating on the music or celebrity section and you encounter a banner ad for the movie, you click it and it will play a video ad. They’re both priced on a CPM basis and both companies are selling the advertising.
iSPOT: Can you mention any advertisers?
Raman: We’ve had advertising running on our service for some time. BMW, Paramount Studios, Microsoft, Puma, adidas and many automotive advertisers are running video ads.
iSPOT: Can you discuss the Sports Illustrated partnership?
Raman: It’s SI, Time Warner and the Swimsuit edition. We know it’s very popular with high quality content, so we said we’d like to bring your content to our users with our ad-supported model. It’s been up for a few months, with video shoots of various models from the magazine. It’s not exclusive for mobile but it’s exclusive broadband content. The videos are about three minutes long.
iSPOT: MTV and SI are two examples of mywaves content. Can you give us a broader sense of what you offer?
Raman: We have relationships with The New York Times About.com group, CBS, Fox, Ripe digital, animation groups, National Banana for short form content and Sony BMG for music. We have a lot of content distribution deals.
iSPOT: Is all the content ad supported?
Raman: Yes.
iSPOT: All your advertising is video, but traditionally mobile advertising hasn’t been video. What is your role in advancing mobile video advertising and how will it grow?
Raman: Our role is educating the brand and agency community to what is possible. There’s been a lot of talk about brand advertising on mobile, but they’ve been disappointed that there are no outlets with reach. Your only choices are carriers and you sit down and say you want to reach a couple of million folks over a three or four week flight but they can’t come back with the numbers or say why don’t we start with 30,000. It’s not something they’ll jump into with numbers that small. But when we have the same discussion, it sounds exciting and they say great let’s reach a couple of million over a three week period.
iSPOT: Can you guarantee the numbers?
Raman: Yes, we’re doing it now.
iSPOT: Your audience isn’t primarily American, it’s international.
Raman: We run campaigns by country. We’ve done a couple of global campaigns, but campaigns are rarely set up that way, they’re regional. The second part of what is unique about mobile is it’s a personal device that is atypical. The TV in your living room is watched by the whole family and even the laptop isn’t that personal because in a home setting it’s shared by many. But mobile phones are personal so if you can glean some information about the mobile user and what they like to watch, you have a powerful targeting environment. Our reach and targeting capabilities can be broken down by age, gender, city, and content type. If you want to reach a young male watching sports in New York with a message on the mobile phone at seven in the evening or run a promo for a movie that’s coming out at 6 p.m. on Friday in a big metro area, you can do it. The advertisers specify the campaign parameters.
iSPOT: Do you also provide metrics?
Raman: Yes, we provide metrics such as how many views it got and how it is broken down by geography. We give them a detailed report.
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