The Pontis Integrated Marketing System is a comprehensive system for the definition, execution and analysis of targeted marketing offers, and it is gaining some traction with mobile operators around the world. David Murphy caught up with Pontis Senior Marketing Director Guy Talmi to find out more

DM: So tell us about Pontis Guy

GT: We were founded three years ago. We are VC-backed, by Sequioa, Evergreen and others. We are more than 75 people, and our background is strongly telco industry. And we're growing fast. We already have 12 commercial mobile operators on board as customers.

DM: So what do you do?

GT: We automate the operators' marketing offer management process, enabling them to continually present each customer with the most appropriate marketing offer, and then deliver that offer to them. We started out promoting content, enabling operators to promote any type of content. So information, ringtones, games or any other type of content. But in the past couple of years, we have spread into other areas, and we now cover a whole variety of operator services, including messaging, embracing SMS and MMS, and voice.

DM: And which operators you are working with?

GT: For most of them, I can't name names, but we are working with operators in China, in Sweden, in Finland, in South America, and in Israel, with Orange and one other operator.

DM: So how does it work in practice?

GT: There are lots of things we can do. The first thing we do is to define the business objectives, look at what our client is trying to promote, and then we have different offers for different services. Initially, it was mainly about content; we provided the marketer with the tools to promote their content activity, and the target could be to promote specific services, such as Java games, and to increase usage of different services and other content, but the idea is always to address the business objective of the operator.
We have learned that there is value in integrating our capabilities into different services across the portfolio, so an operator might start to promote a piece of content, and then realise they can put together a bundle that packages a few different services together, like maybe a few ringtones, some Java games and 100 texts, in a package, and then price that and market it to the targeted segment of users they want to reach. With the Pontis marketing system, this is easy. Without it, it would be much more complicated.

DM: Why?

GT: It's about the automation really. To repeat the offer on an ongoing basis would be impossible without Pontis. We believe, and indeed we have evidence, that to be successful, it's not enough to send a one-off message. It can work if it's targeted, but in order to maximise the benefits and build the relationship with consumers, we believe you need to define the long-term value path and the long-term process of communicating with the customer.
To give you an example, look at a 'Buy One Get One Free' proposition for a ringtone. When you send the message out, there is a percentage that will act on it, and a percentage that won't. What we are doing is to define from the beginning, what will happen in each scenario. For those people who respond, we will send them another offer, based on their acceptance of the first offer, so that could be a cross-sell or an up-sell offer. For those who don't respond, we will give them a few days or a week or two and then give them a better incentive. But the key point is, it's all automatic.

DM: And where do the decisions on the initial targeting come from?

GT: The marketing people within the operators decide on the targeting. Sometimes they may need some support in that area from us. If so, we have a team of marketers who can assist them in their day-to-day operations.

DM: And can the Pontis platform automate offers on the fly?

GT: Yes, we can do that. We start by defining the relevant segments using the client's CRM and data warehousing tools to segment by demographic criteria such as age, sex etc. But what we are doing is adding another layer that enables them to segment their customers based on usage. So people who have sent x number of texts within one week may be the first stage of defining the marketing offer using the Pontis system. Any usage or non usage trigger may put specific people into that segment. It could be people who have visited the operator's portal, who have bought ringtones, but who have never bought a Java game. So in a case like this, it might be targeted in terms of their propensity to take up the offer.

DM: And when you work with an operator in one country, does that give you any leverage with that operator in the other countries they operate in?

GT: That's a tricky question. There have been instances where there is some consolidation in terms of buying technology. Sometimes we have found ourselves talking at a group level about the technology, based on the success that one of the group members has had with it, but in practical terms, there are different characteristics, different usage patterns, different cultures, from one country to the next, and indeed the operator's position in the market is different from one country to the next, so that makes it difficult.

DM: But the operators you talk to are sympathetic to what you're trying to do?

GT: It's easy to show the value of what we do. The challenges are around integration. This is always a challenge, but after addressing the basic need, the Pontis system reduces the IT workload massively, because before Pontis, the IT people would get numerous requests from marketing people to define a new offer, access billing information and launch a new campaign, and so they would need some dedicated work to launch each new campaign, which meant there would be a long lead time to respond to that request. So they realise they have to do some work to integrate it, but once that's done, all of a sudden the marketers have the tools to manage their own campaigns without being reliant on IT people, and once they get that on track, it can move very quickly.
From a business perspective, it's about the ability to build and execute marketing campaigns. Some campaign management systems have limited automation capabilities so the messages we try to get across are around automation and repeatability, managing the relationship on an ongoing basis, sending proposals based on user behaviour. Once the operator realises the need for targeted, contextual offers on an ongoing basis and the ability to automate the process, they realise that they don't have the capability to support that, and that's where we come in.