I am, of course, talking about mobile advertising. The next big thing. Honest. Everybody is predicting a great future, with analysts quoting anything up to $17bn spend in 2011. A week doesn’t go past without yet another conference announcement in the area, all promising true-life adventure stories. Conflicting reports of consumer acceptance pop up like buds in spring.
So what’s the real situation? Before answering that, if it can be answered at all, it’s worth looking at terminology. There are no fixed definitions, and a common jargon has yet to develop.

First of all, there is a significant difference between mobile marketing and mobile advertising. The former is much wider than the latter, encompassing mobile communication campaigns between advertisers and users. Just like any other marketing campaign, in fact, and usually in conjunction with campaigns in other media. Mobile is indeed just another channel for marketing communications.

Mobile advertising is a much narrower segment, being the delivery of adverts to users via their mobile phone. Obvious perhaps, but there’s still plenty of scope for confusion, especially when it comes to delivery. There is an astounding range of different ways of delivering adverts to mobile phones. Some are deeply innovative, some are simply copied from other media. And if we’re honest, even those of us offering these services don’t know which will work best.

Unfortunately many people aren’t aware of this diversity, and it is damaging perceptions of the industry. This was evident in a recent poll of US mobile users and their acceptance of mobile advertising; the only mechanism discussed was SMS Spam. And of course the responses were negative.

There is a good reason why people associate SMS with mobile advertising: it’s the only form of mobile advertising to which most people have been exposed.

The future of mobile advertising will encompass a wide range of delivery methods, from SMS through to replicating the 30 second TV spot by way of a range of solutions exploiting mobile data services.

So what’s happening with these solutions? Most of them are limited to trials or targeted audiences. There are no mass-market deployments. Yet. However I am convinced that this market will grow, there are just too many compelling arguments for mobile as a marketing channel. It’s direct, it’s absolutely personal, it’s switched on at least 14 hours every day, and we can get in-depth profile information about the user.

What we don’t have are reliable statistics about use and uptake, the sort of statistics that advertisers will need to justify allocating a substantial portion of their budget to mobile. There are still a number of technical hurdles to be cleared. And we need to work on fully meeting the needs of consumers, publishers and advertisers before we can get true mass-market reach. I’ll talk about how we can do that in the next issue.