The future is mobile. As Yahoo’s new CEO, Marissa Mayer puts it, the future is mobile, mobile, mobile. And to truly be effective in the mobile space, you need to be able to know your customers’ interests and locations. Entertainment Gateway Group understands this fully (naturally, because they are a subsidiary of Globe) and has developed their Location Based Service platform. The new platform allows brands to interact with their customer base in an important and meaningful way – through mobile.
EGG says that with their new platform, they can tap into their customers’ interests. They believe that tailored messages and ads to customers are more effective than a shotgun approach to the consumer. For example, a surfing ad sent to a person who actually enjoys surfing is more likely to respond, rather than one sent to someone who doesn’t even surf. Alongside personalized text messages, EGG is also extolling the virtues of in-app advertising and AR-type executions for ads – all of which requires mobile devices to work.
It makes sense. Just think about it – there are currently 90 million mobile devices in the Philippines today. While only 15% of them right now are smartphones and 50% are feature phones (with 35% being legacy devices), the massive growth of smartphones (and the low-cost devices being pushed by a number of manufacturers) will render that particular concern moot.
Of course, this kind of tailored data does have its downside. The most obvious one is the one of privacy. EGG representatives has assured us though that there will be no identifiable information – your personal information will be going through a couple of filters to ensure your privacy, and the internal database will only have a unique identifier that can never be tied in to your name or personal number. When EGG starts sometime in March or May, Globe subscribers will be getting a SMS notice for you to be able to opt out of the service if you don’t want to.