Its Time to Jump on the Mobile Phone Advertising Bandwagon

Written on the 25th of September 2009 by Julian Lee - The Age

Time to jump on the mobile phone ad bandwagon

September 25, 2009

MOBILE phone users can be targeted by network, handset, browsing history or even location.

The iPhone has reinvigorated the medium as consumers discover the joys of being able to download applications, surf the web, hoover up information, watch videos and hail a taxi without even having to make a call.

No other device can claim to get as close to a user as a mobile phone. And yet marketers have largely kept their distance from it as an advertising medium.

On the eve of the iPhone's arrival last July, the market for advertising on mobile phones was tipped to be $10 million in the most recent financial year, but the reality is that it fell some way short, ending up at $7.5 million, according to Frost & Sullivan's latest report due out this week.

Clearly the worst advertising recession in living memory had something to do with it. Risk-averse marketers stuck to what they knew.

''I thought this was going to be the year but this isn't a market for high risk,'' says Rob Marston, director of search at media agency Starcom. ''There's such huge potential there, but no one is leveraging it particularly well.''

Frost & Sullivan forecasts the market will grow to $140 million by 2014 which, frankly, is optimistic. ''Slow take-up of mobile advertising in Australia can be partly attributable to the lack of standardisation at an industry level and a lack of sophistication in terms of leveraging mobile users' targetable data via personalisation,'' it says. In other words, yet again the industry has failed to get its act together.

In the past that might have been explained by a lack of audience or an unwillingness to intrude into what is a very private space. Based on current estimates there are more than 760,000 iPhones in circulation in Australia and by the end of the year that figure is likely to surpass 1 million.

Judging by some of the data emerging, far from pushing back, many consumers appear to be embracing marketing on their handsets, which can be anything from an application or a special promotional site to an SMS or just branded information.

Consumers are six to 10 times more likely to click through to a website from a link served to them on their phone than on a computer. If marketers continue to lag consumers, then next year will prove to be yet another false dawn for mobile phone ads.