The Banner isn't dead... YET

CURRENT RELEASE: February 14, 2001

Cape Town, South Africa

The banner isn't dead... Yet!

The past few months have seen a drastic change in the way Internet businesses are valuated. Quite a number of these businesses have taken significant financial dives, ranging from the larger sites to thousands of smaller sites. One of the reasons that have been sited is the reliance on classic web advertising and revenue models - mostly those that were reliant on banner views. There is quite a debate on whether banners are indeed dead, or at least dying.

Amidst this uncertainty the advertising network created by Clickatell.com in a few short months seems to be taking a stride in the right direction. Clickatell boasts an average Click-through-Rate of between 1 and 3% on its banners, depending on the nature of the campaign. This is phenomenally high with the industry average that is way below that. Clickatell has reached CTR's of as high as 8% with some of their campaigns. Just recently, in a test-run to prove themselves, they attained a validated CTR of 4.51% for a banner campaign for a large South African based financial services group. "This was in fact a pleasant surprise for us," marketing director Danie du Toit says. "We expected about 2% to 2.5%, especially because the campaign was more aimed at a local market (South Africa). The largest contingent of click-throughs was from Turkey, who is historically one of our larger client bases."

There are, according to Du Toit, a good number of reasons for their success rate. "We know who our clients are," he says. "They are classically extremely hard to target, but our product fits their profile like a glove - plus we have the advantage of owning 100% of the space." Another reason he names for the high CTR is the fact that the page-depth for their product (Free SMS and Speedmail on more than 10 000 global sites), does not allow for navigation away from the banner. It is meant to be positioned in the face of the end-user, and stand out against the backdrop of their free services. Furthermore, the market they reach consists of 87% male, A and B income groups, young, educated ready-to-spend technology-enabled individuals. All of them are also proficient in mobile technology by definition, which leads to a number of logical inferences.

Clickatell entered the global arena in November last year, and has shaken the SMS market by providing their current core service, Clickatell-Button, free to all sites who want to be SMS-enabled. That way they have created a vehicle which is ideally suited for delivering marketing messages to their end-users. What makes their product stand out even more is the launch of their Hi-Impact campaigns, which also includes mobile text marketing. This product is in line with the current movement globally towards mobile data marketing. "Mobile data marketing is a vast concept," Pieter de Villiers, Managing Director says. Clickatell simplifies it through integrating simple technologies such as SMS into powerful communication tools."

Clickatell positions themselves as a marketing solution for web and corporate businesses. Their product range is currently fulfilling the first phase of what they term Communitizing, and although it is already generating revenues much earlier than expected, phase one is more of a fun branding exercise for them than anything else. The next three phases of their business are still under wraps, but according to the Clickatell team these are set to create a sixth marketing channel on the Internet. This claim seems big for a startup that is barely three months old, but taking into account the success they have had so far, it does not seem that far off!

See it for yourself at www.clickatell.com