But for this market to reach its full potential, carriers, advertisers and marketing companies must utilize multiple technologies and business models to bring their messages to mobile consumers. “Mobile advertising and marketing is a risky, albeit enticing business,” says principal analyst Judith Rosall. “Unlike the PC, a mobile device offers a uniquely personalized communications channel. Carriers worldwide have quite a bit of information about their end-users: name, sex, age, geographical location. And depending on the handset and plan their users have purchased, the carriers probably also know something about their economic status and credit record. But they don’t like to release this information to third parties because they want to protect and control their customers.”
Mobile marketing and advertising is also at varying levels of maturity, depending on the market or country, says Rosall. In Europe and Asia, mobile marketing is fairly well developed. However, early-adopting brands in the US are still in the process of testing the water. They don’t typically allocate a set percentage of their annual budgets to mobile. In turn, major ad agencies are still relatively inexperienced with mobile marketing campaigns, and reluctant to utilize location-based services and technologies such as MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) and mobile search that are still in the early stages of deployment. Their slow pace in exploiting opportunities in mobile marketing and advertising, however, has opened the door for a number of specialized agencies, aggregators, and other enablers.
