Brandkey Marketing brings Eyeballs mobile advertising to Kenya.
I had planned to write a post on Eyeballs, a mobile advertising application a week ago but felt it would be best if I did so after trying it out for myself. Eyeballs is an opt-in mobile advertising application that enables advertisers to reach existing and prospective customers though their mobile phone. Brandkey Marketing is the firm that recently launched Eyeballs in Kenya just over a week ago. At this time, Eyeballs works on the Symbian 60 operating system as well as Windows Mobile.
In order to download the application, one should point their mobile web browser to ke.eyeballs.mobi. Once downloaded and installed, you are able to register your phone as well as demographic data and interests of what kind of advertising you would like to see on your phone. I managed to do this on my Nokia e75 after a couple of tries and so far its working well. The data charges for downloading advertising on eyeballs are fairly minimal from what I can tell as I have not seen any major increase in my data usage or charges.
The way the mobile advertising works on the Eyeballs mobile application is that they are triggered when a call is made or received as well as when an SMS message is sent or received. This is really kind of clever since in all of these interactions you are fully engaged on your mobile phone, ensuring that you actually see the advertising. So far, the ads that are being served on Eyeballs in Kenya include brands such East African Breweries, Coca Cola, Kenya Airways which is impressive considering that they just launched.
The advertising on Eyeballs is not just limited to display-type ads but also includes interactive content such as voting/rating, click-to-call, forward-to-a-friend as well as wallpapers. In addition, content such as music, videos and games can also be downloaded via Eyeballs advertising making it possible to execute a myriad of interesting mobile marketing campaigns with strong incentives to download content.
However, my opinion is that eyeballs needs to expand its reach of mobile handsets to include other mobile operating systems apart from Symbian and Windows Mobile. This is a comment I already got from several people when I posted a link on Twitter sometime this week. However, Symbian is more or less the dominant mobile operating system in Kenya courtesy of Nokia’s market leadership for handsets. But, nevertheless, Eyeballs is a step in the right direction for mobile marketing in Kenya where there are over 18 million mobile users.
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7 Comments
the link you gave us is not working!!
Charles. Thanks for the prompt. I corrected the wrong link. Its working now.
Wow….aren’t these exciting times…to put some perspective on this post let us think of launching our own marketing company and move to attract big name companies like Cocacola and the beer giants…Even if we are able to survive the brutal wars that form the landscape of Ad firms in EA will we really have a product that can impress the big pockets??? I say this is good stuff. It about time firms brought innovative advertising platforms to the Kenyan Massess…even pending the changes in platforms etc this sounds like a great product….I wonder if they can put SupaStrikas Comics on the network for easy reading as content?
.-= Tirus Muchiri´s last blog ..Mixtapes: The Entry Level of Hiphop =-.
Targeted mobile advertising has not been effectively tried before in Kenya so i think if executed properly, Eyeballs stands to make a huge killing in this market. There is still room for competition primarily based on how well the advertising tool filters its targeted users. Check out http://bit.ly/cNGHCD. There is also Smart Ads (http://www.smartads.co.ke/) who are also doing something similar. I will be trying it out on my E66 as well.
.-= Intervangelist Kenya´s last blog ..Web forms: Get them right and make more money =-.
Could you run that by me again?i opt in,give personal info and they ll interrupt me ever so often with sms and calls?The offers had better be really,really good,none of that boring corporate stuff,will wait and see
Hallo i hope by now they have sorted the platform issue. I was wondering whether it’s compatible with the s40 version of syimbian. Great post by the way.
80% of kenyans above 18 own and frequently use a mobile phone. So this is a great opportunity