Out There Media, MTN Ghana launch telco-driven mobile advertising - Starts with leading agencies, brands.

Out There Media (OTM), a global leader in mobile advertising, has entered into a partnership with MTN Ghana to provide digital advertising services for its customers.

MTN Ghana will adopt OTM’s award-winning mobile engagement technology platform, Mobucks™, and leverage its network of brands and brand agencies, driving advertiser interaction and engagement with its 25 million subscribers in Ghana, three times the reach of Facebook in Ghana.

A release issued in Accra and copied the Graphic Business in Accra on July 26, said: “OTM’s proprietary mobile technology Mobucks will enable MTN Ghana to bring its customers targeted and interactive messaging campaigns from their chosen brands and agency partners.

MTN’s telco insights and wide reach combined with Mobucks’s precise targeting and personalisation capabilities will enable “micro-targeting at scale” for its future brand clients. This will yield outstanding results, including 70x better performance in terms of engagement, response, conversion and ROI compared with industry benchmarks,” it said.

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Brand partners

The release said several brand partners had signed up to be among the launch partners and innovation leaders on the Mobucks platform including Cadbury Richoco, Glitz Natural Care, Mandela Mile, Marie Stopes, Mycare Mobile, Odibets and PharmaAccess.

It said, for instance, that one project came from Cadbury Richoco which ran a mobile messaging campaign to raise awareness of its national educational support programme “My Ghana, My Pride”, by inviting schoolchildren to enter an essay competition to win scholarship funding.

“The campaign achieved an average Click Through Rate (CTR) of 5.5 per cent, beating current industry benchmarks for campaign engagement levels,” the release said.  

It added that: “Ghana has the highest mobile penetration rate in West Africa, and mobile technology plays an increasingly important role here,” quoting, the Digital Transformation Lead at MTN Ghana, Mr Dario Bianchi. “As MTN works towards becoming a digital operator by 2023, it is extremely important that we partner with the best brands to bring our customers the right content, to enhance their digital experience and enable them to enjoy modern connected life.

Out There Media is the perfect partner for this, combining its technology with our data and our reach to deliver impactful engaging, interactive and innovative mobile advertising campaigns for our subscribers. We’ve already seen the impressive outcomes of the technology and we’re excited to continue seeing similar results with campaigns in the future.”

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Humanitarian initiative

The release said the announcement built on OTM’s recent work with MTN Ghana which saw the operator join a humanitarian initiative led by Out There Impact (OTI), OTM’s impact division committed to using the power of mobile technology for the greater good.

“Together with several global mobile operators, OTM launched an educational mobile campaign on behalf of the World Health Organisation to help contain the ongoing spread of COVID-19.

To date, the campaign has reached almost 300 million global citizens via OTM’s global network of mobile operators, including MTN Ghana’s subscribers, making it the largest mobile messaging campaign in the fight against COVID-19 thus far.

“Telco-driven deterministic data is the richest form of data one can get and we’ve seen firsthand how valuable it is in increasing the impact and reach of advertising campaigns and since we will soon be in a world without cookies, the value of this data is exponential,” the CEO, OTM Africa, Mr Donald Mokgale, said.

According to him, “since this partnership means a mobile solution for a mobile-first continent, it completely enables the businesses, brands and agencies to target consumers at scale in ways that have not been possible before.

We are all mobile subscribers before we are social media users and through this partnership, MTN Ghana is providing brands with an opportunity to go beyond traditional social media advertising channels, and to instead gain access to MTN Ghana’s captive audience.”

The release said the contract win with MTN Group, first announced in March 2019, will see OTM’s Mobucks technology rolled out across the 21 countries MTN Group operates in throughout the African continent.

The launch in Ghana follows the already successful rollout of Mobucks in other MTN Opcos such as MTN South Africa and MTN Nigeria.