To strengthen developing market mobile marketing platform, Electra
tenthavenue, home to WPP’s ‘connected consumer’ agencies, announced today the completion of a new partnership with cloud communications telephony company, Ozonetel, to build the new version of Electra, the mobile marketing platform specifically catering for developing markets.
The new tenthavenue and Ozonetel partnership sees the development of new features and improved capabilities on top of the existing Electra platform – a single technology stack through which advertisers can deliver mobile asset formats through USSD, SMS, Interactive Voice Response and compressed video routes across 150 countries.
Combining the Electra platform capabilities with Ozonetel technology means that brands can utilise enhanced mobile marketing capabilities including:
– Measurement of consumer behaviour and engagement levels in real time for a more comprehensive understanding of what content will work
– Consolidation and delivery of value exchange mechanisms, such as mobile airtime and talk-time top-ups to consumers
– The delivery of personalised content and messaging to the consumer through an advanced logic engine
– Multiple enterprise communication models to scale the offering to across all brands and categories of a company
The deal will also allow tenthavenue to integrate new messaging pipes to work with Electra to create new media distribution products moving forward.
Sudipto Roy, tenthavenue CEO for Emerging Markets commented: ‘According to Mary Meeker’s 2015 Internet Trends report, there are still 3.12 billion feature phones globally and yet most technologies focus on an in-app advertising based eco-system for mobile. It’s for this reason, combined with the emergence of smartphone ad-blocking technologies, that there is a stronger demand for device ubiquitous mobile formats and subsequently a gap in the market for a platform that can do this at scale (with robust data, content optimisation capabilities and measurement). We are resolving that gap by improving Electra and embedding it with the ability to drive “value exchanges” with the consumer, taking them a few steps closer to actual sales and loyalty than traditional approaches do.”
Anurag Banerjee, Growth Advisor for Ozonetel added: “We are a product centric company, much like Hubspot and our solutions enable hundreds of companies to manage personalized communications with their customers. We are excited to now extend this support to WPP clients.”
Rupert Day, Global CEO for tenthavenue, noted, ‘This deal is an incredible leap forward for brands operating in developing markets who understand the value in reaching consumers with optimal personalised content. The partnership with Ozonetel aligns with tenthavenue’s investment in TMARC in January 2014, the leading USSD mobile platform in South Africa. It reflects our vision of driving personalised communications of value to the consumer, and elevates the tenthavenue proposition across Asia, Africa and very soon, LatAm’.
The Ozonetel technology platform underpins more than 1000 enterprise customers globally, providing clients with a single entry to connect with over 4 billion addressable connections through 226 Telecom Operators. Current clients include fast growth companies Zomato and BigBasket, and the world’s second biggest advertiser, Unilever. Ozonetel was recently selected by as one of the ‘World’s Top 50 Marketing Technology Startups’ by Unilever’s Foundry program at Cannes Lions Innovation 2015.
