Orange UK announced in early February it would launch a mobile advertising service using the Blyk platform. Orange had been testing the platform but launched the full services, called Shots, on February 1.
He said it will soon announce fresh partnerships with Vodafone Netherlands, and an unnamed Asian carrier. Unlike the Orange partnership, the new deals will be branded Blyk and be more consumer facing.
Öhrling said the reason for the change was a scale issue.
Just add ad engine
"The scale of this operation is crucial. If you look at the operator world today, every operator in every country already has the needed infrastructure in place. There's no need for us to come and rebuild that. So rather than rebuilding it as an MVNO, we go in there as a partner to an operator utilizing their existing infrastructure, just adding our ad engine to the end of that and start to operate this messaging-based model, which has proven to be highly sucessful."
While operators could of course build this on their own, the question is, which one is the better route? "Using our experience over three or four years as we've learned how to use it, or operators facing all the errors by themselves," he explained.
He says the advertiser-pays model has had a shaky start because people are thinking of advertising on its own.
"It always has to be linked - there has to be something else, it's about communication. It's about content within a context. It's not just 'I'll deliver some ads and banners to you phone. Are you happy now?'"
He says the model has changed and has evolved over the years. Advertisers are now seeing that mobile could at its best offer them response rates and interaction with customers they cannot achieve anywhere else.
"Before this has been proven, there have been many different start-ups, many different approaches. Advertisers haven't really known where to go and what to look for."