According to a recent Gartner report, global mobile advertising is expected to surpass $2.7 billion in 2008, and will exceed $12 billion by 2011. These projections provide important support that there is a unique marketing opportunity available to target customers – and this opportunity can be found in the palm of our hands.
Although not a new concept, mobile advertising is often times seen by marketers as an experimental technique. But by adding intelligence at the mobile network core, mobile operators and marketers can gain granular, transaction-level user, service and content awareness. This insight can grant operators and marketers the knowledge about where mobile users shop, how long they visited a mobile store and how much content was viewed, among other details. With this level of knowledge, marketers can better target and tailor advertisements to prospective customers; ensuring mobile users receive personalized ad campaigns and are not inundated with mobile advertising spam.
Adding intelligence technologies that can bridge the gap between advertiser and consumer will lead to new opportunities for both the marketer and mobile operator. Additionally, mobile operators gain a new revenue stream, as they can potentially interact with consumers in real time based on an understanding of the kind of information and content a user demands.
With this level of insight, mobile advertisers, operators and consumers alike must think about how best to safeguard and protect the privacy and security of individual users. Greater regulation does not necessarily mean a hindrance to the advancement of marketing technologies. If anything, expectations are that regulatory intervention will propel mobile advertising to the forefront of the marketing community – guaranteeing that the personal information of a consumer is not compromised, exposed or exploited by over-aggressive marketers.
This is an exciting inflection point in the mobile advertising industry — and, if leveraged correctly, the new technologies will advance advertising as a whole.
