Nimbuzz: Getting personal with marketing

Despite the hype around location-based advertising, new research seems to suggest that mobile users want to see ads that reflect who they are not where they are at a given point in time. In other words, personalisation trumps things like timing or location. Keeping this insight in mind, Nimbuzz, a leading player in instant messaging and mobile communication, has turned its focus on tailoring interactions via mobile to consumers’ tastes and interests.

Vikas Saxena, CEO, Nimbuzz, says: “Nimbuzz has decided to go for personalised advertising, which will help advertisers invest in a cost-effective manner. We have introduced hyper-local targeted ads for the first time on mobile platform globally. We have run a pilot project with Perfetti recently.”

This is in line with Nimbuzz’s new strategy to focus on the B2B segment while not taking its eyes off its traditional client base on the B2C side. While India remains its home market, the biggest markets for Nimbuzz are the US, West Asia and South-East Asia.

Alongside, Nimbuzz has collaborated with publishers to increase their catalogue of Chat Buddies in NWorld, the Nimbuzz app store. Some of these are IBNLive for news update, Cricbuzz for live cricket update, Twitter for tweeting from within Nimbuzz, VantageTrade for stock updates, Wikipedia for ready information, YouTube for searching and viewing videos, IMDB for movies reviews, Car Dekho for car prices and reviews, to name a few. Apart from Chat Buddies, Nimbuzz expects to be live with 25 other chat buddies developed by its partners over the next one month. NWorld is also a store front for social games, virtual gifts and avatars. Most location-based campaigns on Nimbuzz have received high click throughs.

Nimbuzz Messenger, that combines the power of the internet and the smart phone messenger into one, and lets the user make free video calls, voice calls, send chat messages, share files, is now available on iOS, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, Java, Windows and Mac.

Nimbuzz has opened up its Messenger API with the launch of the Chat Buddy Developer Programme (CBDP) recently. This initiative is expected to help brands, publishers, and independent developers get access to more than 95 million Nimbuzz users across 200 plus countries. The CBDP allows developers to build chat buddies across various verticals such as cricket, astrology, shopping, games and news besides utilities such as ticketing, movie reviews, classifieds etc.

Nimbuzz’s aggression is understandable. Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets have been readily adopted by consumers in India. The telecom subscriber base in India now clocks 926.53 million and has opened up new opportunities for personalised advertising by brands. Interestingly, mobile advertising is a space a whole host of players are eyeing. According to the Internet and Mobile Association of India and IMRB, the mobile advertising market in India will touch Rs 144 crore by 2013. At present, the mobile marketing industry in India is estimated at $62million.