Blyk

Well I don’t know about you, but I’m totally confused. What is happening at Blyk ? For those beyond the UK’s shores, Blyk came to market in 2007 as an MVNO (mobile virtual network operation) piggy-backing on the Orange network. Nothing revolutionary so far. But they set out to convince young adults that they could get free airtime in return for opting in to adverts with ad selection based on the customer’s completion of a personal profile. It was being called permission marketing. But on comparing this claim to Seth Godin’s articulate definition of permission marketing, I posted at the time that this wasn’t the game Blyk was playing . The ads may be targetted more closely than commercial TV, but most everyone I know still wants to skip those ads. The mobile and marketing industries have been watching Blyk closely ever since and then, this week, two articles from NMA’s Alex Farber: “Blyk scraps consumer offer to concentrate on operator partnerships ” and “Blyk’s MVNO shift causes industry stir ”. Now if anyone has the inside track on this market and what the Blyk statement referred to in the second of Alex’s articles means, it’s Bena Roberts of GoMo News . Perhaps the title of her post betrays otherwise… “Is anyone else extremely confused about blyk or is it just me? ” ...

The attention economy is alive. Interruption marketing is dead. But are we getting permission marketing? Tony Fish (the Mobile 2.0 man) and I debated the impact of mobile technologies on the attention economy at last week’s Mashup Event . We are particularly intrigued, although not entirely convinced, by the Blyk business model. Having been started by the former president of Nokia, Blyk could not have much better credentials for a new UK mobile phone service, but what are its prospects beyond the initial novelty value? ...