Re: Mobile Advertising

From: Luis Martins <lbravo_at_companhiapropria.pt>
Date: Thu 05 Sep 2002 19:57:47 -0500

Debbie Ducker wrote:

>I think as advertisers, we tend to think every thing is neat, so to say.
>But I have a teen age son (19) who has very strong opinions on
>advertising on the Internet. I don't know if everyone feels the same out
>there, but in his sector they think we have destroyed the Internet as
>they once knew it. And as mentioned people are already sick of the cold
>calls we get numerous times a day on our regular phones. I am convinced
>that ads on their cell phones are just going to infuriate the majority of
>people.

Let's not confine mobile marketing to sms ad bursts. OMHO, Mobile can mean
great added value to customers, but only when it truly delivers advantages
to the user - services will be available on demand, users can exercise
remote control over an amount of appliances via Bluetooth, parents will know
where their children are via GPS or GPRS. These can be opportunities for
businesses to create more income streams and, therefore, provide a better
option for us.

Advertising will obviously see a paradigm shift, as, more than ever, all
mobile operators can start pulling the internet ad promise out of their
magicians hat - let's say you're walking by a clothes store and see a nice
suit smiling at you on the shop's window. Let's say you stay more than 30
seconds watching its details, its color, its style...Your phone beeps. A
pretty image of the nice clerk that you can see inside the store appears via
UMTS, telling you that the suit you've been staring at (which was detected
via the GPS on the mall) is being sold with a 20% discount to you alone.

Targeted Marketing. Which can be a pretty good way to do your selling. Or,
as Debbie stated, a good way to annoy people. This can only be prevented by
giving people signup and unsubscribe previleges.

Again, IMHO, it will not happen at this stage of technological development
(here in POrtugal, UMTS will only be released by September 2003) and due to
the market's hangover of the late nineties .com hype, which now turned to a
do-money-or-die hysteria.

So, we're going on the right direction. But it will take some years in order
to make mobile advertising really work for the customer.

Thanks for your time and sorry for any bad english...

Luis Martins








Received on Thu Sep 05 2002 - 19:57:47 CDT