MEF at the TM Forum, Management World, Orlando

In December 2009, MEF sponsored the Mobile Ad Revenue and Management Catalyst at the TM Forum Management World event in Orlando. MEF, as part of its Content Sales Reporting Initiative determined that up to 10% of gross revenues were lost because of a lack of consistent and timely CSR.

The content sales initiative addressed the need to establish best practices in reporting content sales regardless of region and types of mobile content (music, video, games, personalisation, information, etc).

The goal of the MEF initiative was to produce a generic template drafted based on all the various feedback we had from members – particularly from meetings at MWC/MEFCON/CTIA/MEM plus the conference calls. The MEF template and survey results were used as part of the Mobile Ad Revenue Management Catalyst to develop a working model for CSR as part of its catalyst project. The work is being led by cVydia, Netezza, SAS and Swisscom for TM Forum. Each company provides vital functionalities across the value chain to resolve the prevalent issues:

"We were very happy with the event in Orlando. For the first time we saw demonstrated an end to end solution for produced by SAS, cVidya and Netezza which not only deals with the loss of revenues but also shows how industry can generate additional revenues from intelligent and targeted marketing.”

- Suhail Bhat, Policy and Initiatives Director for MEF

Amir Gefen, Director of Business Development, cVidya Networks commented that, "The realization of the MEF's Content Sales Reporting Initiative enabled cVidya to expand our revenue assurance offering from telecom service providers to the media and entertainment industry. cVidya takes a leadership role in helping service providers and content providers to improve their revenue and profits."

Mike Gandolfo, Principal, Communications Product Management, SAS stated that, “MEF is generating a lot of awareness within the TMF community and is making an impact on the need to improve the current business processes in the mobile entertainment space, particularly as it relates to collecting accurate data to provide the intelligence for managing the customer experience and to create the proper reporting to ensure the revenue streams. SAS Institute, a worldwide leader in business analytics, currently has over 300 operators in the industry using SAS solutions for managing customer insight. We are very supportive of these MEF sponsored initiatives within the TMF and are encouraged by the prospects of the benefits this could bring to all parties."

Andrew Colby, Telecommunications Solution Architect at Netezza said, “Mobile content management, advertising and revenue assurance requires the ability to process large volumes of data easily and quickly. The Netezza Analytic Appliance provides a scalable solution for processing terabytes and petabytes of data for customer preference prediction and target marketing, revenue assurance, event correlation, content sales reporting and business analytics.”

The slide demonstration of the Mobile Content and Advertising Revenue Management Catalyst presented in Orlando can be found on our Content Sales Reporting page of the Mobile Entertainment Forum website.

MEF and the TM Forum intend to follow up the success at Orlando with a webinar in Q1 2010 followed by the publication of a guide showing how the issues of mobile content and advertising revenue management can be resolved in Q2 of 2010.

For more details and to get involved, please contact Suhail@m-e-f.org.