April 1, 2007

Is Mobile Advertising Premature? Yes and No.

According to Media-Screen's Netpop | Pocket survey, users utilize their desktop and laptop computers more than twice as much for ëNet activities than they use their mobile devices, showing that regular broadband use has yet to make the transition to mobile. - this was reported by Adotas.

What's interesting is that Yahoo just announced it's created a mobile advertising network.

The San Jose Mercury News writes Yahoo launched an advertising network for mobile devices, the company said today. The service, called Mobile Ad Network, will allow companies that offer games, entertainment or information on mobile phones to bring in revenue from ads.

The Sunnyvale Internet company also released several related services for mobile publishers. For example, Mobile Site Submit makes it easier for mobile site owners to give Yahoo information about their sites, so they can be found through Yahoo's mobile search engine.

What does this mean to you?

There's another layer of mobile advertising or reach that is not being talked about.

Marketing to your own customers.

Right now, I don't think the market is mature enough to spend money advertising to mobile customers. Of course if you have tons of money and can pay professionals to do mobile advertising as best as it can be done - go for it.

But if you have a small budget and need to consider between online or mobile advertising - go for online.

However, right now you should start collecting your customer and prospective customer email addresses and with their permission gently explore advertising to them through their mobile devices.

Services like Twitter make this easy to do. Or you could enable them to SMS for information using a service like 4info. Joopz has a VERY cool service for SMS messages as well.

Information Week has more on this here.

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