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Postr teams up with Skinny Mobile, trades data and minutes for ad endurance

Opt-in ad serving platform Postr has teamed up Skinny Mobile to create a new android app called Skinny Collect, which allows Skinny customers to earn free data or minutes in return for allowing ads on their lock screen. It’s taken off pretty well and in the first fifteen minutes after launching it had a download per second. We spoke to Postr CEO Milan Reinartz to find out more on the new app and Postr’s partnership with Skinny.

Postr is a Wellington tech start-up that serves ads to peoples’ androids phones if they download the Postr app. Users get paid for allowing the ads to appear on their lock-screen, and in turn Postr gets paid by the advertisers for distributing the ads to its user-base.

Users can make up to “a few bucks” per month, which will then either be transferred into a selected bank account or donated to a charity.

The company’s partnership with Skinny works in much the same way, says Reinartz with the same content being served from the likes of NZME and MetService as well as advertising from Air New Zealand, KFC, universities and others. And he says customers are responding well so far, with the app nearing 4,000 downloads.

“Every 30 days they [customers]get either 200mb of data or 200 minutes. But of course we will still curate the content and personalise it to a certain extent … So it works exactly the same,” he says.

He says users will collect the data automatically. “You just need to use your phone like you normally would. You sign up with your Skinny mobile number. We are hooking up to the Skinny back end system and then users are credited every 30 days with their choice of 200mb or 200 minutes.”

Since the app launched on Monday, the reaction from Skinny users has been very positive so far. “In the first 15 minutes we had one download every second. We are close to 2,000 active users now. It’s happening very, very quickly. And we haven’t done a lot of marketing, Skinny has just sent one txt to their android users.”

He says there will be more promotion around the app soon.

So what’s in it for Postr?

“We increase our audience. So we now have more unique users who are using the platform and therefore we have larger inventory and higher reach. We can run bigger campaigns for our clients. And with the fantastic engagement rates that we create through the optimum experience of Postr we will soon get to a stage where we become a serious contender in the mobile advertising market.”

He says in regard to partnering with other telcos in New Zealand there is an initial period of exclusivity with this partnership before it can approach others. “But long-term we are looking to be an agnostic platform and offer our service to other titles as well and we are already in conversations with [telcos in]Australia. We are quite positive we will get to a solution where we will launch a similar app with them next year.”

Reinartz wouldn’t comment on whether or not Postr had been approached by other businesses in New Zealand. “It’s very early days, we will know a lot more in a few weeks time. We are excited that we have launched this, so for now we will focus on Skinny and work towards making this a success.”

It’s also an opportunity for the telcos, he says. “ … where they can be apart of the advertising ecosystem. The value really is that Skinny gets something out of it, we do too and so it’s a win-win situation.”

He says the hope is that Skinny will get more customers switching to its network to reap the benefits of the app. “ … we think it will be a higher perceived value for the user than earning a few bucks each month and it will help us grow our audience faster and expand the reach for our customers who advertise with us.”

Skinny Mobile channel product manager Fleur Picot says the arrangement is going really well. “We’ve had a good uptake in terms of downloads … Feedback is good so far. And the customers seem to like it. It’s a good reason to stay with Skinny.”

She would not confirm how many customers Skinny currently has, due to the information being classified, and hasn’t yet had a chance to look at how many customers have switched over to Skinny since the app was launched.

She says after sending out initial communication about the app to its customers, the app had over 1,000 downloads within two hours. “It’s a unique proposition for our customers. It’s quite a novel way to advertise. The advertising itself is not intrusive and if you don’t want to look at it you just swipe it off your screen,” she says.

“So I guess it’s just another reason to stay with Skinny and we’ve got good pricing. We have awards for being the best in customer satisfaction and now an extra proposition for our customers.”

Postr has had over 25,000 downloads and is growing at more than 2,000 downloads per week after receiving more investment (from NZVIF, Angel HQ, ICE Angels as well as industry executives from Europe and APAC) recently.

To date Reinartz says Postr has paid out close to $70,000 to its users. “The biggest complaint we have is that people don’t see enough ads. We are very user focused and all our development and our timeline is influenced by user feedback and we take that very seriously because we live and die by the grace of our users.”

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