Mobile advertising
The smart money in marketing is watching mobile advertising very closely. The main issue is that there are approaches to advertise on mobile phones, but today most mobile or smart phones are more like minicomputers which display the Internet. Consumers don’t make peer-to-peer phone calls in the same way as the devices were intended, but instead use them for communication with social media sites, text messages and e-mail. The smartphones are used for entertainment and for information gathering, and they also generate data themselves such as the geographical position of the user. So as technology develops smartphone usage and consumer behaviour will change, and hence the advertising will focus upon usage in behaviour. For now, here’s a quick summary of the sorts of technology which is available today:
• display ads from mobile websites
• messaging by the Short Message Service (SMS)
• location-based ads based upon a GPS signal
• paid search where advertisers buy links on mobile search engines
• video, providing you have the bandwidth to download them
• potentially voice advertising
• applications via iPhone and Android, and stealth technologies (which is where mobile is likely to go).
