iVdopia Brings Rich Ads To WAP Sites With InWAP and PreWAP

India is predominantly a feature phone market, but smartphones are steadily gaining acceptance as they become more affordable. A large number of India’s mobile web users rely on WAP sites – 9% of VAS revenues are attributed to the WAP platform. The bread, butter and jam of the mobile internet is advertising, estimated to be a Rs.150 crore market. One of the greatest limitations of these sites is that advertisers were limited to static display and text ads. Not for much longer, iVdopia has launched InWAP™ and PreWAP™ads.

iVdopia enables advertisers to serve dynamic and rich interactive media ads. iVdopia has expertise in mobile video advertising and HTML5, which it is leveraging to serve InWAP and PreWAP ads. InWAP ads play within the webpage and PreWAP ads play while a webpage is being loaded.

Debadutta Upadhyaya, Vice President, India at Vdopia said “We’re extremely excited to launch the first InWAP and PreWAP video and rich media ads for the mobile web in the Indian and US markets. We gauged a huge potential in the India with the growing number of users present on the mobile web, primarily in Tier I & II cities. So far, advertising on the mobile web has been more direct response than user engagement focused. Advertisers have been unable to effectively bring users to interact, and text links and static banners averaged 0.1 – 0.2% CTR. Video on the other hand, brings animation, visuals and sound with interaction rates as high as 0.7-0.9%, enhancing user experience.  The post-video landing pages go beyond call-to-action and provide a deeper level of brand engagement.”

Saurabh Bhatia, Chief Business Officer at iVdopia expects InWAP and PreWAP ads to revolutionize advertising on the mobile web thanks to the vast reach of WAP coupled with the rich mobile web experience. iVdopia’s ML5 video ad platform, V5 and HTML5 authoring tool, Future5 will be used to serve these ads. The ad campaign will also be able to leverage iVdopia’s social media sharing product- Talk2Me so that ads can be shared virally over social media sites, email. It can also communicate with other websites and design customized engagement for each ad, so that the advertisers can control/optimize their social media sharing strategy.

Most users consider advertising intrusive but what a large number do not understand is that advertising is the reason we are able to enjoy gigabytes and gigabytes of high quality content without paying. Ads are a necessary evil, only as much as paying for something we buy in the physical world. My only concern here is, how much these ads will impact user experience at GPRS speeds!