The Future Of Advertising On Cell Phones
Author: Danny Wirken

Conventional Advertising

Most people often ignore advertising and are actually even
irritated by it. This is because people find that the ads,
which can be found anywhere and everywhere at anytime, were
more often than not irrelevant for them. Furthermore the impact
of the ad campaigns when launched is very difficult to assess.
There is also a big possibility that with most people's
negative attitude towards ads, much of the campaign efforts go
to waste. Because of this business owners usually have second
thoughts about investing on serious campaign ads.

Advertising in the Internet

With the advent of the Internet, new advertising models have
come out that appear to be more effective when it comes to
reaching the advertisers' audience. Targeted advertising became
very popular and is still popular. Contextual advertising took
targeted advertising to the next level and made ads even more
relevant for people. These targeted ads, also called smart ads,
have allowed advertisers to not only reach a more receptive
audience but also to cut their advertising costs. Advertisers
scrambled to place ads on the Internet and the Internet
advertising industry boomed to reach $9.6 billion in revenue in
2004. The advertising industry has finally realized the power of
the Internet as a medium for advertising.

Smart Ads in Cell Phones

However, for forward thinking marketers there are even better
ways and an even better medium in which smart ads can be
implemented. To them the ultimate medium for smart ads would be
a device that would enable advertisers to target specific
individuals and send or show them their supposedly relevant ads
anytime of the day at anyplace. The device that fits this
criterion is the mobile phone or cell phones.

Cell phones are the ideal smart ad machine for marketers
because: 1) a large percent of the world's population owns cell
phones, 2) cell phone owners use their cell phone all the time
and their phone is rarely far from their side, and 3) owners
usually read their messages before deleting them and would
rarely ignore a text message. Because of these facts
advertisers who wish consumers to see their ad even for a brief
period will find that they have a large base of cell phone users
who will spend a few moments actually reading their ad before
deleting them. In other traditional media like the television
or in magazines users often just change the channel or turn the
page as soon as ads come out without paying any attention to the
ad.

Cell Phone Spam

The field of advertising in cell phones is indeed very
lucrative for advertisers but they need to think of creative
ways to deliver their ads via the cell phone or their ads will
eventually turn into spam. In Europe and Japan mobile spanning
is already banned by their law. However in United States and
other parts of the world mobile spammers in the guise of
informative messages are beginning to annoy users. Take the
case of the Acacia National Mortgage Corporation as an example.
Due to lowered interest rates they sent an advertising text
message to 90,000 cell phones. However, the unsolicited message
from them prompted Rodney Joffe, who was interrupted during a
"Riverdance" performance at Arizona State Unversity, to file a
lawsuit against them, which in turn initiated a new bill in
California that bans "wireless spam". According to Joffe, an
Internet marketing expert, he is "determined not to let cell
phone spam rise to the level of e-mail spam before doing
something about it". Governments and the wireless industry do
worry about cell phone spam too and are taking initiatives to
start banning them. However in them mean time companies are
still free to send text messages to cell phone users and they
still do. It is also very probable that even after laws has
been passed banning companies from sending unsolicited text
messages on a large scale mobile spamming will still continue.
As Jerry Youhanaie, the president of Acacia Corp. said, "This
is the wave of the future, and if you don't like it, you need
to move to a different universe".

PR in Cell Phones

Other businesses have, however, found more creative ways to
advertise their products and brands. The music industry is a
sector that benefits much from cell phones. With the new and
more technologically advanced phones capable of playing music
aside from videos, more and more people find themselves
downloading ring tones and Vcasts (videocasts). However since
the choice of ring tones and Vcasts to download are controlled
by the telecoms they are able to give extra publicity to
certain artists or labels. For example Verizon has used its
status to promote the music of its partner labels like EMI and
Universal. This type if advertising as a whole is effective
since it is the cell phone users that opt to pay for the
service and actually seek the products.

Cell Phone Downloads

However there are also problems with the download industry.
Some businesses take advantage of peoples' interest in one ring
tone or wall paper or whatever feature to send them a string of
other unsolicited features. This is usually done by sending a
text message to users in the guise of advertisements. The
advertisements appear to offer free ring tones as samplers if
they reply to the text message or to a given number. However,
after the first free download what happens is that the user is
periodically and continuously other ring tones, which are not
only unsolicited but are not free of charge as well. The free
sampler actually acts as a "subscription confirmation". This is
strategy is used by businesses not only for ring tones but for
wall papers, games, and other add-on services like jokes,
weather updates, news alerts, and horoscopes.

Despite this problem with rather unscrupulous businesses, not
all downloads are scams and add-on services are gaining
popularity. Advertisers want to ride with the wave naturally
and are looking for creative ways to insert brief ads along
with the services. Despite the fact that most users dislike the
idea of having ads along with the services in their cell phones
a recent survey revealed that 90% of advertisers are already
trying to find ways in which they can place ads in cell phones.
It seems that ads in cell phones are a sure thing. The question
is whether advertisers will be able to find ways to ensure that
the ads will be as relevant as the contextual ads in the
Internet and as non-intrusive as well.


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