Mobile Ads — The Next Internet Gold Rush?

InfoWorld has an article on mobile advertising, and does a pretty good job of pulling in all the different forms and some of the players. Some success is cited, as is the prediction from Informa Telecoms & Media that mobile phone ad spending in 2007 will double year-on-year to $1.5 billion. There’s also an example of a failed attempt, Spotcast Communications, which launched an advertising-supported service in Hong Kong in 1999 but shut it down a year later. “Harris speculates that the service was canned because only the most strapped-for-cash users were really adopting it with any eagerness. Not necessarily advertisers’ favorite people, these consumers were happy to “play the game” and receive the ads but not willing to go out and spend money.”

In a similar vein and from an e-mailed press release, Coca-Cola’s campaign to send a Coke-branded Xmas greeting to mobiles was claimed a success. “With just 12 hours exposure on the front page of the (3UK) portal the campaign generated over 1,000,000 page impressions. There were 579,000 page impressions of the ad on Today on 3, with 55,000 users clicking through — an impressive conversion rate of 9.5%. In total 114,000 cards were sent by 69,000 unique users, representing an average of 1.7 cards per user.”

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