By Beryl Graham
Everyone salutes the concept that long-term revenue growth for Communications Service Providers (CSPs) requires successful delivery of new offerings, such as content, advertising and third-party services. However like most things in the real world, the devil is in the details. It is easy to create a plan to deliver content or develop a delivery platform that will enable seamless deployment of third-party services, but how do you actually do it? What are the steps in developing a successful implementation? What are the primary risk areas, and how can you avoid them? Examples would be helpful.
Well, you are in luck! TM Forum has pulled together a group of sessions Wednesday morning that take a practical look at these topics.
Selling Content:
In Deploying a World-Class eCommerce Infrastructure as the Foundation for Monetizing Digital Content, Cengage Learning, a leader in selling e-content to the academic community, shares its experience with marketing, pricing, selling, ordering and digital delivery strategies as well as tactics to successfully monetize digital content products.
Enabling 3rd Party Services:
Creating an Enterprise B2B App Store to Offer New Revenue Generating Products delves into one of the technical aspects of offering third-party services separately or as components of a larger service. The session includes examples from the TM Forum Defense Catalyst project, which can be seen in Forumville.
Mobile Personalization: What Users Like and Will Pay For provides a provocative look at the other end of the third-party services topic (i.e. What do customers want?). The session explores the various facets of the user experience: technological, contextual, social and ethical, and how to balance them against selling ad inventory, paid content, etc.
Realizing Advertising Monetization:
A Model for Optimizing Advertising Revenue in the New Digital Media Value Chain exposes the fundamentals of how the advertising revenue model is approached within a prominent media and entertainment company where there is a solid history of advertising revenue performance. These leanings are then applied to communications service provider’s business model today.
Drive Value Added Services Adoption by Making Mobile a Superior Advertising Delivery Channel jumps into the hot topic of mobile advertising. The analysts have been chewing on this for several years. Intuitively, the mobile CSP’s personalized, location–aware, micro-targeted delivery channel seems to be perfectly suited to put CSPs in a strong position to reap mobile advertising revenue, but making it happen has been challenging. Will CSPs make this a viable revenue stream, or will the ad aggregators make advertising simply another over-the-top application leaving the CSPs with the pipe? This session takes a hard look at how CSPs can use their position to grab a piece of the advertising revenue pie.
Charging for the Pipe:
Escaping the Flat Rate Trap explores a path forward from the current trend of Flat Rate “all-you-can-eat” services that while very effective for stimulating usage, can overstretch network resources without generating commensurate new revenue. The current uptake of smartphones is a case in point. CSPs are fighting aggressively to win the most smartphone subscribers, but some of the ”winners’ are finding a gap between what subscribers are willing to pay for data and generating enough revenue to cover the spiraling network infrastructure requirements and costs that are arising from the bandwidth consumption. This session looks at alternative pricing strategies.
Identifying and launching new revenue streams has always been complex and today’s situation is no exception. CSPs must identify value-added functionality that consumers and businesses value enough to pay for. In most cases the functionality most desired by consumers and businesses is divergent – certainly the priorities are different. Many CSPs may find that the common element to addressing both markets will be the internal inbound and outbound marketing processes and technical infrastructure elements that enable third-party services, content and advertising.
Management World Americas attendees who include these sessions in their conference agenda will come away with new insights into realizing revenue growth.