The next big thing
Marketers hail the mobile phone as
advertising's promised land
Oct 4th 2007 | From the print edition
ADVERTISING on mobile phones is a tiny
business. Last year spending on mobile ads was $871m worldwide according to
Informa Telecoms & Media, a research firm, compared with $24 billion spent
on internet advertising and $450 billion spent on all advertising. But
marketing wizards are beginning to talk about it with the sort of hyperbole
they normally reserve for products they are paid to sell. It is destined, some
say, to supplant not only internet advertising, the latest fad, but also
television, radio, print and billboards, the four traditional pillars of the
business.
At the moment, most mobile advertising
takes the form of text messages. But telecoms firms are also beginning to
deliver ads to handsets alongside video clips, web pages, and music and game
downloads, through mobiles that are nifty enough to permit such things. Informa
forecasts that annual expenditure will reach $11.4 billion by 2011. Other
analysts predict the market will be as big as $20 billion by then.
The 2.5 billion mobile phones around the
world can potentially reach a much bigger audience than the planet's billion or
so personal computers. The number of mobile phones in use is also growing much
faster than the number of computers, especially in poorer countries. Better
yet, most people carry their mobile with them everywhere—something that cannot
be said of television or computers.
Source: economist
http://www.economist.com/node/9912455
