Madonna and content

Another article by Alex Shifrin in eXile on the subject of Russian advertising. This time it's about Madonna coming to Russia and the problems of content.

Unless you're currently dead, you probably know that Madonna is coming to Moscow. You might have seen some of BeeLine's advertising promoting this event, as well as special sales of Madonna music, video and photo content for the mobile phone. Recently, in particular this year, the Big New Thing in the advertising world is "content creation." Everyone is falling all over themselves trying to firstly understand what "content creation" is, and finally to see how they can make money from it. For the mobile operator, the latter concern is paramount to future growth and profitability.

For MTS and BeeLine, this is the equivalent of the next cola wars. Both of them are spending millions in order to be seen as THE content provider. In many markets, voice traffic has already become a commodity. At first it was about tariff reductions. Then it was about free incoming calls. Then it was a flat monthly fee. It's gotten to the point where there's simply no way left to cut fees without taking a loss. Eventually, voice traffic might well become the "lost leader" for mobile operators, meaning they'll make all their revenue from incremental content sales and re-sales. However, before this happens people need to know what to do. Hence this push for content consumption.

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