Amdocs Sharpens Focus on Mobile Search & Advertising;
Must Operators Drill Deep To Drive Revenues?

With Peggy Salz
Mobile Search Expert

Persistence pays off. I have had Amdocs high on my radar ever since it went on an acquisition spree in 2006 and snapped up Qpass, a digital content and commerce solutions company I covered from the start because it understood the power of (and more importantly had the capabilities to enable) personalization, recommendation, and targeting based on customer profiles and user behavior. (In fact, I was so impressed at the time that I signed on to write the Qpass online newsletter, a publication well before its time that even today still has its fans.)

I was convinced back then that the combination of Qpass and Amdocs, whose corporate DNA is inextricably linked with deep-dive data collection, data mining, and analysis, would result in a platform that would ultimately allow operators and service providers to unlock the value of their customer data to deliver the right content (and in this scenario, advertising would be another form of content) to the right user.

That was just a hunch at that point. Since then, Amdocs has quietly acquired mobile search IP through an acquisition (so quietly that I completely missed it – and to this day, Amdocs won’t disclose the name of the company).

Another little known fact: Amdocs oldest and most successful product offering is not billing or CRM; it’s supporting directory publishers. For 25 years this has been a prime focus and helped Amdocs to get 70 percent of tier-one Yellow Pages publishers worldwide on board for Amdocs systems and solutions to develop and distribute their directories via print, online – and now mobile. Connect the dots (analytics, personalization, targeting, location content and services) and Amdocs does indeed cover enough bases to have a significant impact on the mobile search & advertising marketplace, where the end-game is about content and context, and insight into both.

Fortunately for me, Amdocs rewarded my early interest in the company with an exclusive briefing with Eitan Gelbaum, Vice President, Product Marketing, Amdocs Advertising, Commerce & Entertainment Division, and a valuable view into the future roadmap. Thanks again to Garland Harwood, Account Supervisor at Weber Shandwick, for making this happen and for granting MSG exclusive access to an upcoming best practice report, which I’ll share in a post soon.

Before I focus on Amdocs’ future plans, it’s important to understand the depth and breadth of the company’s offer. In my view, Amdocs, armed with these capabilities, does not yet compete with Internet giants (such as Google) or mobile marketing companies (such as Amobee), but the potential is clearly there. It’s also important to note that Amdocs seeks to be an advocate of mobile operators and service providers. The singular focus is on enabling these companies to take on Internet companies, media brands, and handset manufacturers nibbling away at their business, diluting their brand or simply trying to turn them into dumb pipes.

What does Amdocs offer?

The heart of this new Amdocs is the Search and Digital Advertising Platform (SDA) that is designed from the ground up (harnessing the acquisitions I listed above) to let operators service relevant and personal ads to users in all media (SMS, MMS, WAP, and video), as well as manage the entire advertising lifecycle (campaign and management to reporting and billing).

Amdocs SDA Ad Flow

Take a look under the hood, and the heart of this ambitious system is an impressive ad matching engine with personalization capabilities. The combination of search algorithms and analytics can drill deep into the subscriber profile, behavior, and preferences – the works – to serve relevant and personal advertising.

Put another way, the operator/provider can be their own publisher of ad inventory (using customer data, location, network data) or they can also work with external publishers. Either way, they have the capabilities to deliver relevant advertising. Indeed, ad agencies, marketers, and even small business owners can tap into SDA (implemented via the operator/provider) to develop campaigns segmented by demographics, behavior, context, time of day, ZIP code, and location. At the other end of the spectrum, Amdocs also delivers everyone involved real-time campaign management through what the company terms “an intuitive executive dashboard.”

It’s at this point that I must put on what I will now call my Jonathan MacDonald hat, show some healthy skepticism, and question whether the end-game is targeted mobile advertising or whether at least a part of the personalized ad pitch should not focus on enabling relevant engagement. Granted, it’s beyond the scope of this article – but it is a question that nonetheless occupies my mind.

For now, let’s simply accept that there are no answers but there IS a growing body of evidence that users will accept advertising if it is targeted, useful, and offered in return for the right incentives. Against this backdrop, the pivotal importance of an offer such as Amdocs SDA becomes crystal clear. Operators/providers have always had the information (context, location, user profiles) at their disposal; now, with Amdocs SDA, they have a platform to process it.

How does search fit in?

Read the entire post on Peggy’s blog MSearchGroove HERE.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 9:00 am and is filed under Guest Authors, Verticals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.