Whether we like it or not, the mobile marketing is here and growing. According to Telefonica O2 survey: budgets spent on mobile marketing and communications is set to increase almost 150% by 2013. 88% of marketing managers anticipate behavioral targeting using mobile device to be an important capability by 2010. The commercial-like ad model will be diminished, given that people are tuning out mass market advertising with DVRs today, and only mobile marketing can provide a more personalized advertising.
I think there are going to be five types of advertising to hit mobile phones:
1. Mass Market Advertising
Mass-market advertising is essentially what we all know and (cough) love on television today. Typically, its brand advertising that is trying to reach the mass market with little regard for demographics. Seth Godin talks about this type of marketing in an excellent blog post entitled “Reaching the Unreachable.” We can argue all day long whether or not its appropriate for mobile, much less today’s consumer, but you will find plenty of advertising in this category — especially in the early days when we see “sponsored” channels of content.
2. Subscription Advertising
Subscription advertising is when the consumer tells the service or advertiser that they are want to get certain types of advertising. Typically, the consumer will indicate that they are interested in a specific category (automobile advertisements, for example), but it can extend down to the brand level (BMW advertisements, for example). For obvious reasons, self-selection is very valuable to an advertiser.
3. Personalized later advertising
Personalized later advertising (not the best choice of terms, I admit) is when the advertiser sends down a “generic” advertisement but that advertisement is personalized after it hits the handset. An example of this would be a generic BMW video advertisement that gets sent to the phone and then the client (either in response to a user interaction or not) fetches directions to the nearby BMW dealers based on the consumer’s location.
4. Niche Advertising
Niche advertising is when advertisers target a highly specific demographic to the point that it appears to be 1:1 targeting, but in reality is not. Niche advertising is fairly common in the cable television market where there are channels very specific to a customer demographic (a jewelry channel or men’s outdoor life).
5. One on One Personalized advertising
One on One personalized advertising is the truly 1:1 targeting of an advertisement to a subscriber. Typically, a profile is built describing that subscriber and advertisers can then target profiles that meet their needs.
Conclusion
Market for the mobile advertising is wide open for any one to take advantage. Mobile user are more passionate, uses it more often than the regular computer user. On the average, 43% mobile user have their phone nearby. It pushed the concept of captive audience to a different level.