The Guardian has an interesting article about Blyk, the new company which plans to offer free calls & texts to mobile owners aged 16 to 24; in return the lucky young things will have to provide demographic information & agree to receive targeted ads.

I saw Pekka Ala-Pietila, the chief executive of Blyk (who used to be the president of Nokia) speak at the Online Marketing Show earlier this year and was quite impressed with what I saw. We’ve been thinking a lotabout Blyk recently, and in particualr how it would fit in to our business.

Normally anything that is aimed at 16-24 year olds seems like an obvious choice for branding & engagement; winning over the early adopters of the play-grounds & campuses to give a brand or product a particular image. But in this case we’re not sure that’s the best use of this service. And then it occurred to us; it’s kind of like paid search, but on mobiles (bear with me on this one).

When we run paid search campaigns, we place targeted ads for our clients on a channel (search engine results); we control creative (ad text) & track results. With Blyk we would be placing very targeted ads on a channel (the mobile); we would control the creative (the ads) and we would track results. Some people might think that this is very different - that it’s media planning. We just think it’s another great way of getting our clients in front of the right audience.

So, you heard it here first - Blyk is just Google for mobiles. And Blyk can use that on their marketing if they want!

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