With a daily active user base of 76.5 percent in the MENA, Matthew Talbot, CEO, BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), is unsurprisingly confident about what the service has to offer users – and, of course, advertisers. Since its licensing deal with Indonesian media corporation Emtek, BBM has set up independent offices in Canada, Jakarta and Singapore, and a representation company in Dubai.

In its glory days, BBM existed to cater to an exclusive club of BlackBerry users and BBM pins were more important than phone numbers – so much so that it wasn’t uncommon for youth in more conservative countries like Saudi Arabia to plaster their BBM pins on their Hummers. With the slow death of BlackBerry phones, however, BBM managed to find a way to survive by expanding to Android and iOS, and offering paid services for free.

We caught up with Talbot to see what’s keeping BBM alive and what it can offer advertisers.

Social intimacy

“Messaging apps have overtaken social apps,” he says, citing a Google report, which reveals that social apps don’t feature in the top three – instead, the top ones deal with messaging, gaming and news. Because users have their most personal and intimate conversations on messaging apps, they don’t want to leave the apps, whether it is to consume news or videos – something BBM has taken into account with its new updates. However, some ads do lead users to external pages, depending on the technology of the ad provider, since BBM also sells through AdX, Facebook Audience Network, Yahoo Gemini, InMobi and Ad Falcon.

Additionally, bots are the future, says Talbot, who plans to release a bot API this quarter, which will enable users to activate other services and features through chat.

Up close and personal…with brands

Naturally, brands want to be where users are. Because messaging is so personal, Talbot says: “If I [as a brand] am sharing something with you, the chances of you taking that up are tenfold compared to sharing on social media.” Currently, BBM generates 110 million ad requests per day, “but obviously, we are not filling that 100 percent, because the last thing you want to do is continuously show ads that are not relevant to users,” he adds.

Moreover, mobile advertisers no longer want to simply bombard users with ads. “Mobile marketers are getting savvier than traditional – even online – marketers,” he notes. The quantity of data available is far more valuable to form taste graphs and such, which indicate if, for example, a user has downloaded a certain app (in the case of e- and m-commerce brands), their propensity to purchase, their past purchase behavior, and so on.

Automating personalization

Programmatic direct stands at roughly 15 percent of total ad sales, compared to 30 to 40 percent in more advanced markets. “[This] is a funny thing because, in the past 12 months, I’ve heard that the mandate from the agencies here was to build programmatic up,” says Talbot. BBM does have arrangements with AdX and even trading desks, in addition to allowing programmatic buys directly, but the challenges are two-fold, he notes: there continues to be a conflict between programmatic and direct media planners in agencies, and Facebook and Google take up a massive chunk of the programmatic spend, especially since agencies have minimum commitments with the tech giants.

No matter where agencies buy from, “I don’t really care, apart from the fact that if they are buying from Google or Yahoo, they are obviously not getting the best inventory,” Talbot says – more so since certain inventory, such as stickers and video, can only be bought directly.

Next steps

Talbot says the biggest challenge right now is educating people. “Ninety-five percent of the population would not know about BBM”, he says – and yet: “We are growing not only in the UAE, but [also] KSA, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar.” Despite the strong presence of local messaging apps, “our competition – rightly or wrongly – is still the WhatsApps and Messengers of this world, because messaging is about scale,” he says.

Talbot is realistic in his ambitions: he admits everyone has a different app for a different purpose. “We do not expect everyone to be on one messaging app,” he says. “We expect people to have us as part of their messaging apps.”

BBM’s USP lies in content and services that go beyond messaging, which means users spend more time on the app – and the more time they spend, “the more we know about them and the more value [there is] to advertisers, so it is a very different model,” Talbot concludes.