The Great Potential of Mobile Advertising

Operators choosing mobile advertising could struck gold if their methods will be efficiently implemented. Analysys, a strategy and management consultancy company, has published a new report, called The Mobile Advertising and Marketing Revolution.

The great advantage that mobile advertising brings is that of making the message feel more personal than through other environments. Still, repeatedly approaching customers like this without their consent can be seen as spamming and might have exactly the opposite effect than that intended.

"Mobile advertising could provide an additional revenue stream for operators - but it must be implemented carefully. Flooding mobile phones with advertising would destroy consumer confidence and, with it, the potential value of the mobile advertising market", said the report's author, Martin Scott, analyst at Analysys. "If they focus on delivering mobile advertisements that are unobtrusive and relevant to the target audience, operators and advertisers may be able to create a mutually beneficial cycle of revenue and rewards", he further observed.

At this point, companies are looking for innovative ways of reaching their customers, as the traditional ones are jammed with the huge amount of advertising content. Analysys Research forecasts that, in Western Europe, mobile voice revenue will grow at a CAGR of little over 2 percent until year 2012.

Because of this, network operators need new sources for reaching high profits. Mobile advertising gives one of the easiest answers to this problem, especially as companies are looking for new ways of reaching their customers. Still, it's rather risky to use it at a large scale, as this could make handset users react in a distant manner to such initiatives.

Almost half of the advertisements are found on web pages, more than a half of them on search engines, with all other environments, such as SMS, MMS, application and games reaching about three percent of all this content. Several mobile advertising campaigns have been successfully deployed until now, which shows that it is possible, although the risk of agglomeration could get even higher in time.