The 2008 Ypulse Mashup in San Francisco is just a few months away (only a couple of weeks before the "early adopter" deadline) so I wanted to give readers another sneak preview by interviewing one of our keynote speakers, Antti Ohrling, the co-founder of Blyk. Blyk is the first free ad supported mobile service for 16-24 year-olds in the world, but I'll let Antti tell you more...

Ypulse: What inspired the concept for Blyk, i.e. "free" ad supported mobile for youth?

Antti Ohrling: I became active in mobile marketing back in 1999 (when many ad execs were just starting to take the internet more seriously) and my advertising agency was a founding member of the Wireless Advertising Association in the US. Some years later I was sitting in a conference where mobile marketing was being discussed and having been involved in mobile in its infancy I started contemplating, "Why is this industry not moving...and what would it take to move the media forward?" My conclusion -- you must create a service that people will want, and you must give advertisers a simple and effective way to access to these people. Ultimately, to attract users to a service you have to give them something good in return, and the people to provide this good stuff, it seemed natural, should be the advertisers. The ideal solution then would be one that made this transaction as simple as possible: advertiser gives value to user. Other media already did this, TV channels, even some newspapers. Why couldn't mobile do the same thing? "It needed a completely new kind of mobile operator, one that had the ethos of a media.'' I knew the media and advertising element. To make this groundbreaking new idea into reality, it also needed someone who knew networks and the entire mobile industry.

It was at this point that I approached Pekka Ala-Pietilä, a lifetime friend and the former President of the Nokia Corporation and together we came to the conclusion that we'd have to build a completely new service from the ground up -- one where advertisers gave users value directly -- in other words, a complete mobile operator that was funded by advertising.

In January 2006, we gathered a group of experts in Helsinki from the worlds of mobile technology, design, media strategy, advertising, corporate consultancy and finance, and they were briefed to kill the idea. The only problem was that they could not find a reason why it wouldn't work. In fact, they got pretty excited about it. They all agreed that, with the massive proliferation of mobile devices, the potential market was right there.

It was at this point that the seed of an idea took roots and the concept of Blyk was born (the name popped up somewhere between a smoke sauna in Helsinki and a dip in the ocean...)

YP: What has the feedback been like so far from users? What do they LOVE? What have they been critical of? What do they want?

AO: They absolutely love the Blyk concept. They're telling us that free is good and ads are good. The more they can interact with the ads the more they prefer them. After all, mobile is a communication channel by its nature.

What have they been critical of...well actually, they want more communications from brands (ads). Non-targeted ads with no response opportunity (as in traditional media advertising) score the lowest. Overall I'd say that's a lot more of a positive for us vs. a criticism.

YP: What can U.S. mobile carriers learn from what you're doing?

AO: Going after mobile advertising and young people requires sole focus on the topic. There is no half-way house. It is a wrong assumption to think that mobile is an extension of internet. That model does not work in such a private environment as mobile. Mobile is all about relevance and engagement not frequency and reach.

YP: Is there an ad campaign that has been particularly successful so far? Which one and why?

AO: There have been over 600 campaigns on Blyk to date and while the average response rate to advertising campaigns is 29%, many are significantly higher.

Penguin Books for example ran a campaign on Blyk to promote the launch of Nick Hornby's latest novel "Slam" and achieved an unprecedented 67% response rate. Blyk created a two-part messaging dialogue whereby positive respondents received a 90 second audio preview of the opening chapter read by Nicholas Hoult, the star of "Skins" the most highly rate youth oriented TV program in the UK. This was a media first for using audio clips sent via mobile to promote a book.

YP: What can Ypulse Mashup attendees expect to learn from your keynote in July?

AO: I will share mind-boggling insights and statistics behind our success in response rates, relevance and interaction. World of mobile is all about communication, openness and listening. And we are continuously improving our services by listening our members. I will to give some answers to how can we get 29% response rates and comments as below (just after we reached 100,000 UK members in April) in the world of commoditized wireless industry.

From a blogger: "My final point to leave you with is basically I am LOVING BLYK! Ok there are elements that annoy me but BLYK is exciting, you are thinking how can a mobile network be exciting? and in all honesty I have no idea but I will leave you with this how many people do you know tell you they LOVE their network? Not many I'd bet, so surely BLYK is doing something right and I would think the other 99,999 members of this service would agree with me!"

Ok, now go register!

Posted by anastasia