Mobile Advertising - where next?

The analysts, Gartner recently predicted that worlwide mobile advertising would account for revenues of nearly $3 billion in 2008. But is this just the tip of the iceberg? Can be more be made out of mobile advertising?

So far, much of the mobile advertising has been focussed along traditional web models. Yahoo and Googles applications have largely ensured that they have produced mobile version of exsiting web products.
However this fails to recognise that mobile is a very different medium indeed. It differs in the following ways:

Most people have their phone with them most of the time
For many, their phone is also about their indentity - it's a statement
It is used for relatively brief periods of time - snacking
It's location can be known
Screen sizes and lack of keyboards limits some of the fucntionality

The mobile is, arguably, far more suited to tracking individual behaivour than traditional interent - the devices are rarely shared and the mobile number can be used as a form of ID.
If this is matched with information the operator holds then a significant amount of information can be known about the user and their habbits.

That is the upside for advertisers. On the downside, surely users will feel intruded if marketeers use this information to create a form of highly targetted mobile marketing?
To a large extent, this is very much the case. In western Europe, at least, users shy away from anything that appears to be too 'big brother.'
However, there is also a case to be made that we are subject to highly targetted advertising already ... just not on mobile.
Loyalty cards allow retailers to collect detailed information about buying habits and direct mail is tailored to those habbits.
Gmail looks at the content of emails and delivers adwords accordingly.

In both cases however there is a clear trade-ohttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifff - reduced costs or other benefits from the retailer, or in the case of Gmail, a specific service.

So highly targetted mobile marketing can work if the users gain a clear benefit from it and they do not feel that it is unecessarily instrusive.

The advantage of targetting, is that users will not receive ads for irrelevant products and services - just those that are likely to be of benefit to them.