Get Compensated For Not Selecting Your Wallpaper – Mozoomi Replaces It With Ads

    Mozoomi is a Swedish mobile advertising startup, aiming to enable advertising on the wallpapers of mobile phones. The background wallpaper image is one of the most seen images to mobile phone users. Mozoomi believes that the image has limited value to many users, but it can mean a great deal to advertisers. The company has been developing technology platform for making it possible to serve targeted, interactive ads to replace the wallpaper images. Mozoomi aims for the Asias and South American markets, and plans to pilot the service by the end of the year, as mentioned in an interview by Swedish site E24.

    Mozoomi believes the ads will be well accepted by the users, as the ads are quite non-intrusive and don’t affect the user behaviour in any way, as there are no sounds or pop-ups. The ads change each time the background image is shown again, so the daily impressions can easily be 50 or more. Users can interact with the ads just by clicking them, and the ads can e.g. open a browser to specific URL. The ads could also be mobile coupons for example. Users subscribe to Mozoomi by creating an account and downloading and installing an application to their phone. Unsubscribing happens simply by uninstalling the application.

    The incentive for users to enable ads is that based on the number of ad impressions they see they earn Mozoomi credits. If the user’s operator is a Mozoomi partner, the user can get direct reductions on the phone bill or for example prepaid recharges. In case the operator is not a Mozoomi partner, the users accumulate credits into an ewallet, which can be used for purchasing applications and other mobile services from a store Mozoomi will also launch.

    There is good amount of experience behind the company, as Mozoomi was founded in 2009 by Niklas Sjöberg, former CEO of mobile technology firm Sapio, and Johan Frenckner, former CEO of mobile marketing firm PlusFourSix (our coverage). According (in Swedish) to Sjöberg the company is currently in negotiations with four operators in Asia, and the founders’ believe the the solution can be deployed into millions of phones.

    I see good potential with the service. Provided the user experience is really non-intrusive and smooth, and installing is a breeze, and it works well on different phone models. Many may be unwilling to give up their personal space for ads, but then again, as Blyk has shown, ad-funded telecom services can really succeed in Asia especially.

    Mozoomi’s advertisements are very clever in a sense that the call-to-action is much quicker and shorter; when the user sees something interesting on the home screen, she can just click to proceed. Also the accurate targeting is of course essential, as traditional mobile display advertising relies on people to use the mobile browser and see the small ads as part of the webpages, and targets all visitors blindly. A major question is whether Mozoomi will be able to entice lots of consumers to install the solution. If the company gets the operators on board and them to offer the service directly to their consumer base, then it is highly likely that something quite good comes out of this.