As technology continues to advance marketers continue to find ways to reach you with advertisements. Mobile Marketing has become pretty popular and was often praised as the new medium for marketers in 2007. Many think that 2008 is the year for Mobile to really take off. The ability to interact with consumers on a 1 to 1 level at any given time becomes an extremely powerful medium for which advertisers drool over. I mean, think about it. With mobile handsets becoming capable of more and more they just become more and more personal. You rarely find individuals that are not carrying a phone with them a majority of the time. Although I love the mobile world and would like to see it continue to be adopted I just don’t believe its all its hyped up to be.

If you follow technology at all you most likely heard or read somewhere the excitement behind the mobile industry and the value it brings to advertisers. I could probably provide tons of links where mobile was described as gods gift to advertising but i’ll just leave you with one. After working for a mobile promotions company developing mobile marketing campaigns for brands like AT&T, EA Games, Sony Pictures I was often caught up in the excitement and looking forward to the success of mobile and how we will interact with our phones in the future.

Well, even though I think there is still endless amounts of potential in the industry I really don’t believe it’s going to be “the big thing” in 2008. There are still many barriers to allowing mobile to take off and soar. I read an article recently that I couldn’t agree with more that supported my beliefs. You can find the article here. Jim Meskauskas discussed the 3 trends that will NOT happen in 2008. The first of which is about mobile and how it won’t be what many think it will be. This article raises a great analogy which I think hits the state of the mobile industry spot on:

“…mobile is like soccer in the U.S. (or “futbol” if you prefer), it is always just this side of becoming the next biggest thing”.

As I was just stating, there are many barriers often discussed in this topic. Whether it’s the capabilities of the devices themselves, the carriers or the metrics that which success is measured. Although these are valid and true for the most part the real key barrier is the application itself! Like Jim states, just because texting is really popular it doesn’t necessarily mean it will be successful for delivering advertising messages. From my experience, mobile has been a great medium when incorporated into the mix of a campaign. Each medium delivers the brand message in a way that fits that medium. So what would that be for mobile? Well, text-to win campaigns have been pretty popular. I created and managed a number of them in my day. Text trivia while at a sporting event etc. There needs to be some sort of call to action for consumers to interact with the phone at a given time.

What I learned from this article yet never really thought about is what has been the most effective form of mobile advertising to date. Simply it’s that of 1800Free411. Here advertising messages are delivered to those calling to locate a phone number or address of a specific location. These advertisements are all based on the category of business/service requested by the caller. If you want to learn more about why more and more people are using 1800Free411 check them out here.

Services like this truly capture the essence of mobile marketing as you’re engaging the consumer when they’re using the phone on the go. An ad placed on a mobile web page is great and fancy looking but when the masses are not visiting that page the conversion will never be right for the advertiser.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 12:11 pm and is filed under Mobile, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.