Comments on: It’s a Blyk day for the industry

By: Daniel Gibbons

Daniel Gibbons — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 05:14:13 +0000

I’m skeptical of the Blyk ad-supported model, too, but the overarching argument that advertising doesn’t really work and that the ad-supported content model has failed is pretty weak.

On a purely anecdotal level, we’re all clearly buying more useless tat than we used to, and more concerned with brands and their visibility on us than ever before. We want gastropubs not the local, lattes not instant, shiny kitchens in which we don’t cook, boutique hotel bathrooms in which we use spa as a verb, and BMWs, Audis and Mercs, not Fords. In short, we’re aspirational now, and we didn’t get there on our own. Clever marketing and advertising people subtly pushed us to be this way, and the genius in a way is that they’ve done so while tolerating with patient amusement our bold pronouncements about advertising not working.

Really that’s why Blyk is unlikely to work, because it’s just too obvious and the really clever stuff is happening at the other end of the spectrum. For example, don’t be dumb enough to serve kids ads asking them which celebrity they most resemble or aspire to; instead support the creation of actual content in which celebrity and product are so tightly bound together that it’s impossible to tell when the ad ends and the story begins.

And on a more analytical level, outside of the tiny bit of the world that is purely about technology, brands equate to value exponentially more than they used to. Again, that didn’t just happen organically, and those who are suggesting we’re close to a consumer breaking point with regard to tolerance for advertising are, I think, missing the point.

There, seems like all of a sudden I’m retreating from all this technology stuff and back to my roots as a marketing and ad guy.

By: Julian

Julian — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 19:01:23 +0000

Advertising revenue is a finite resource. To succeed Blyk must ultimately convince advertisers to divert spend from elsewhere. To fund a totally free service will require significant revenues – for which advertisers will expect a decent ROI. Sure, there can be some neat click through ads for content but are today’s (and tomorrow’s) uber-connected yoofs really going to respond more readily to their spam SMS ads than to everything else they are bombarded with.

The 16-24 age band means that advertisers have a very specific demographic band (by age and presumably some sign-on deomgraphics: sex, postcode etc) but after that its a bit amorphous. Unlike a TV ad, advertisers dont know what their targets are watching, unlike a poster campaign they dont know where they are. Will 16 year olds get text-ads during school?

Evolution is always characterised by the “point too far” and this feels like it to me.

Re. the name – I’m glad it’s not just me who couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It’s as dumb as Volkswagen’s Sharan Carat

By: Texperts - 66000 » Web cred and mobile space

Texperts - 66000 » Web cred and mobile space — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 10:15:30 +0000

[...] is valued will become far more complicated. New services like Blyk (who SMS Text News recently profiled- look for some familar faces at Blyk’s launch) and JumpTap’s mobile advertising [...]

By: Bradley Dowding Young

Bradley Dowding Young — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 10:20:40 +0000

I think this will fizzle out after the annoyance of gettin spammed quite a lot in return for not that much credit.. the after cost is also expensive!! Privacy is also another issue here , it wont even feel like ur own phone anymore imo