Musings of a Marketing Maven

From every­thing I read, the adver­tis­ing indus­try can’t wait to get its hands on the next big untapped inven­tory of screen “real estate” and con­sumer atten­tion — our mobile phones.

Google’s ratio­nale for devel­op­ing and pro­mot­ing Android, their mobile OS plat­form, has to be largely moti­vated by the bil­lions they hope to earn by enabling mobile adver­tis­ing, the next big fron­tier in dig­i­tal advertising.

Call me a lud­dite, but I, for one, am unin­ter­ested in receiv­ing ads on my mobile phone under the cur­rent usage (and pric­ing) mod­els offered to sub­scribers. Here’s why.

Why This Con­sumer Does Not Want Mobile Adver­tis­ing on Her Phone

• Time is money: as long as I have to pay for the air­time used to receive a call or go online with my mobile device, I don’t want my lim­ited air­time to be con­sumed by ads or con­tent that I did not request. Same thing goes for SMS mes­sages, espe­cially on the phones where my hus­band and I pay indi­vid­u­ally for each text mes­sage we receive.
• “Inter­rup­tion mar­ket­ing” is very annoy­ing: my cell phone does not live on my hip or in a pocket, so some­times I have to run from one end of the house to another to take a call. It’s OK when the call is from some­one I care about. It’s infu­ri­at­ing when I have to inter­rupt what I’m doing, run to another room — only to dis­cover it’s tele­mar­ket­ing or an advertiser’s unwanted SMS message.
• Don’t make me wait: if I pick up the phone to make a call, I will not want to wait 15– to 30-seconds for an ad to fin­ish before I’m can call the per­son or com­pany I want to reach.
• Don’t stalk me: you can­not infer my inten­tions or inter­est from my phys­i­cal loca­tion. Just because I’m walk­ing down Seattle’s First Avenue toward Pike Place Mar­ket and have to walk by the Lusty Lady, does not mean I have any inter­est in porno­graphic content.
• Don’t send unso­licited LBS-enabled ads: I’m all for location-based ser­vices con­tent when I ini­ti­ate a search– for mer­chants, restau­rants or other ser­vice providers in a par­tic­u­lar locale — but do not send me unwanted offers just because I hap­pen to be walk­ing or dri­ving by the advertiser’s neighborhood.

Poten­tial Ben­e­fits of Mobile Advertising

Although I have lim­ited per­sonal inter­est, as a con­sumer, in mobile adver­tis­ing, I can see some indi­rect ben­e­fits to it for the larger society:

• Ad-supported mod­els enable ser­vice for lower income peo­ple: Mobile adver­tis­ing could sub­si­dize hand­sets and monthly air­time for those who can’t afford cell phones under the cur­rent pric­ing mod­els. The real ques­tion is, how many adver­tis­ers actu­ally want to deliver mes­sages to low income peo­ple who can’t afford a mobile plan?
• Adver­tis­ers (and adver­tis­ing rev­enues) will push the car­ri­ers to accel­er­ate their deploy­ment of net­works capa­ble of deliv­er­ing video or music to the consumer’s hand­set. The improved band­width should make for bet­ter online brows­ing and search­ing expe­ri­ences for the users.
• While con­sumers have lit­tle recourse when calls are dropped in mid con­ver­sa­tion, adver­tis­ers will not want to pay the car­rier (or mobile ad net­work) for ads that are inter­rupted by a net­work glitch. If enough money is at stake, net­work reli­a­bil­ity should improve.

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