By Adam Wakefield
Tim Fourie, CEO of
Digitata Insights, says there are three arms of the Digitata business, with Insights a spin-off from “the mother ship”, Dynamic Tariffing™ System (DTS).
“Dynamic Tariffing has been running since 2008. We’re across the continent on Dynamic Tariffing with 89 million subscribers across 25 networks, and it’s quite easy for us to realise that we’ve got one strong advantage on that side, and that’s direct communication with the customer through services like Dynamic Tariffing,” says Fourie.
“Insights has been running for close on two years now from the initial concept to actually having deployments in the market, and now gearing up for a fairly large take up in Africa. We’ve got traction in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. It’s pretty much bubbling everywhere right now in terms of the opportunity.”
To the man on the street, Fourie says you can think of Dynamic Tariffing as a dynamic price plan varying by location, time of day, networking load, with a key principal being the ability to communicate the rate direct to the subscriber’s phone, so we have eyes on the screen.
“That underlying technology and touch points is really what’s given birth to iInsights. If I’m communicating a tariff or service to the phone, by means of cell broadcast, flash message at start or end of call or USSD query that you look up, what other targeted messaging can I put behind that?” Fourie asks.
“We quickly realised that when you looked at the subscriber, we know your location, demographics, a whole lot of information in terms of what’s happening on the network and there’s probably a lot of value-add you can add on top of just the tariff information and that’s really given birth to what we can do on the Insights platform.”
Within the Insights portfolio, there are two products, being the MeMe platform, which is what Fourie had described regarding communicating with the subscriber. The second product is the mobile gaming platform, which itself has two branches.
These are the conventional subscription games, such as trivia games, and then "brand gamifications”.
“We take the gaming concept, like battle trivia, sports trivia, code breaker, fun types of games you can run over USSD and we embed the brand products and services into the game,” Fourie says. “If brands want to offer rewards or points for subscribers engaging with their products and services, they can effectively take all that information and incorporate it into our game mechanics.”
At the end, subscribers may be rewarded or incentivised for playing. It’s also an educational process for the subscriber. This is beneficial for brands as they are able to reach out and engage with subscribers in a novel way
Such a campaign was developed for Nedbank in the form of the Quest game, where subscribers are incentivised to learn about financial literature through USSD.
Through this campaign concept, Nedbank were able to reach approximately 728 000 subscribers, all based on the mechanics of USSD.
“Users might well be sitting with smartphones, yet a vast number still use the device like a feature phone so they are still drawn to the USSD environment because of those novel aspects and in some respects the brand incentives to come and play,” Fourie says.
“By integrating the MeMe and Gaming components together, we are able to reach and engage with targeted subscribers through a single platform."
While Digitata have a wide range of skills within it, Fourie believes the strong technical background on the nuts and bolts of how cellphone networks function allowed them to develop these opportunities
“We were largely a group of engineers that came out of the mobile network arena so we knew how a mobile network functioned but needed to develop other expertise to grow the business," he says.
"We went to market and found the right people to fill those gaps. But again, if I reflect now, I would still say our fundamental success as a technology company is understanding how the wheels turn.”