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The mobile marketing revolution is about to begin but…

on August 4, 2005 by Martina Comments

Brand Republic writes about the future of mobile marketing now that smartphones are becoming more and more popular. Pasi Leino, managing director at BrandHand, for example, declares:

“The sector is ready to take off. The smartphone handset market has previously been a hindrance to the mobile industry, but penetration levels are now rising”.

The article goes on explaining mobile marketing is a cost-effective solution for marketers. The problem is, it is not cost-effective for users. UMTS prices are just crazy right now in Europe, excluding large part of the population from accessing “heavy” mobile content like, for example, videos. Operators are just too powerful at the moment, acting as gate-keepers, and preventing the mobile marketing industry to growth and evolve in its own third generation.

File under: 3g mobile marketing, gatekeepers, mobile marketing, operators, smartphones

Smartphones and mobile advertising

on July 21, 2005 by Martina Comments

According to the numbers recently released by Gartner, smartphones will represent one fifth of all mobile handset sales by 2008. 3G eventually appears to be around the corner, and we need to start thinking about the real opportunities on a mass market scale the new technology will provide us with. After the failures in the early stages of the mobile market, mobile advertising is about to come back but, of course, we need to take into account the lesson learned from past mistakes. Basically the marketing approach to mobile phones should be “push” not “pull” but, with the growth of WAP 2.0 portals and mobile HTML browsers, this concept will evolve. I see a near future of “light” contextual advertising, while I believe we still have to wait a couple of years for mobile rich media. Of course the technology is already there to support streaming media ads and now even Flash animations, but marketers need to remember the “pricing” issue. Given the current prices of 3G connections in Europe (recently I spent 15 Euros with Vodafone to download 300 Kb!!!) making the user pay to watch your ads is a crazy idea that could absolutely damage a brand. So while we wait for 3G to reach the mass market with carriers applying fair prices, SMS and partly MMS will still remain the best mobile marketing option.

File under: 3g, mobile advertising, pricing, rich media, smartphones, sms

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