Reuters has a story on mobile advertising quoting various executives attending its Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit. They’re all very bullish about the market, with the one cautious exception being Verizon Communications Chief Operating Officer Denny Strigl, who said: “I am reluctant to say that delivering ads is what our customers want. At the same time our customers have come to expect advertising as they look at the Internet.”
AOL head Randy Falco predicted that the mobile advertising market will be in the $4.5-$5 billion range in five years, adding that the money had to be coming from somewhere, and the most likely place was from other media (hence the purchase of Third Screen Media). David Erskine, head of Telefonica’s European mobile operations outside Spain said the business case for mobile advertising was not fully proven but a test the company was running looked promising. Tom Henriksson, head of Nokia’s advertising network for mobile publishers, said the personal nature of handsets gave mobile the edge: “We have good reason to believe mobile advertising will be a significant market…In mobile we see much higher click-through rates.” And so on…
There’s good reason to be excited — the mobile phone is more personal, more ubiquitous and more targeted than any other media, but the cautious approach is the best one. Customers don’t want advertising. They want free content, they want targeted information, and for that they will tolerate advertising. If it’s overdone customers won’t just get annoyed by it, they’ll do something much worse for the industry — they’ll learn to ignore it.
The Economic Times also has a good article on mobile advertising, pointing out that every new year since the millennium has been labelled as the year of mobile marketing. This year “both marketers and agencies are cautiously beginning to believe that, this year, there might just be something in it” because carriers are becoming more accepting of mobile advertising — probably due to the relatively low uptake of paid content.
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