Yahoo! Mobile unveils regional plans

• Yahoo! Mobile grows in SEA
• Plans to attract account users
• Educating brands and agencies on mobile

Regional - With a new head at the helm and a continued growth of subscribers in the region, Yahoo! Mobile has big plans to shift mobile marketing up a gear in Southeast Asia in 2010 as well as drive its own business across the various markets.

Tommaso del Re was recently appointed as the new head of Yahoo! Mobile, Southeast Asia and he told Marketing that there are clear plans in place both for the mobile marketing industry and the company itself.

One big promotion Yahoo! Mobile will be looking to push out next year is signing up new Yahoo! email or Yahoo! search accounts through the mobile phone.

"Southeast Asia is very unique as there are more mobile subscribers as opposed to internet subscribers," del Re said.

‘So it's very important for us in the next year to empower and make it as easy as possible for all those people who have a handset, and use it to use the internet, to be able to create an account without having to go to the computer."

While Yahoo! would usually promote something like this in the digital space, the customers they're after are not necessarily online. Therefore they will be looking at different ways of promoting it - potentially partnering with telcos.

"Yahoo! has a very strong history of partnering with Telcos in this market for different promotions," del Re said.

"At the end of the day, it's in the telco's interests to allow their customers to no longer be just voice users but also data users. For them to partner with Yahoo! and to launch these kinds of features is something they'd be interested in also."

Having recently arrived from Sydney, del Re said he sees the same challenges facing mobile marketing in Southeast Asia as he has in other markets like the US, UK and Australia.

"That's in terms of adoption by agencies and brands to really embrace mobile advertising as a way to catch an audience.

"Next year, one of the big focuses will be to really make it as easy as possible for these brands to understand the value of mobile advertising - similar to what we've done in other markets - and that will be achieved by doing trials, as well as working with prospective clients and partners on case studies.

"I think an important aspect is demystifying mobile. The reality is that a lot of the top brands have only recently begun to understand online so to position mobile as something again different and sophisticated, the risk is and the reality is that a lot of the agencies see it as being too complicated.

"In most cases it's a very similar audience - so it's about making it as easy as possible for the agencies to understand and to make sure we're all talking the same language."

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