Mobile Marketing: Potential or Pain?

Mobile advertising has off late gathered lot of intellectual discussion. Some see it as a great potential and others treat it as a pain in the a***. Mobile advertising today, as I know, mainly comes in the form of SMS (Text Message/Multimedia Message). I am keeping the advts. which a user sees while browsing internet through his mobile phone separate from this.  A quick look at Wikipedia suggests that worldwide, over 90% of mobile marketing is done through SMS.

I personally feel that mobile advertising has one of the biggest nuisance value as compared to other conventional mode of advertising. I would request readers to pour in their views and correct my opinion.

Well, in case of TV advt. I switch on my TV to watch my favourite show and attached with it comes few advt. which I see during the breaks. Thus, I don't switch on my TV to watch Advertisements!

I pick up my favourite news paper to read the latest news/articles/opinions and while browsing through the pages I get to see some advertisements. Again, I didn't pick the newspapers to check the advertisements!

Let's take the case of web advertising as well, and there also I go to my favourite website to browse it and I see few ads while browsing through my favourite website. Thus, the ads come with my favourite website which has some helpful content for me. I didn't go on internet to see ads.

You can apply a similar logic for hoardings, banners, etc which you see on your way. You usually don't go somewhere to check the hoardings or banners.

Based on the above cases, I can say that advertisements seem to be accepted when they come along with something which is useful to us or asked by us. We usually "make an effort" to see/do things which we like to do or are important for us. Advertisement comes along with them in the process. Thus we don't "make an effort" particularly to see an advt.

This basic principle is not respected my mobile advertising. The very idea that advt. is being sent through SMS/text message, implies that it needs to be read/seen asap. This is what you do when you get any sms.  That is why you get a ping/alert whenever the message arrives. SMS with advt. comes as an interrupt. But usually an unwanted interrupt. Then the user "makes an effort" to pull out his mobile phone from his pocket/bag and pushes few buttons and goes on to read the advertisement! So all the effort purely to read an ad! not good... What comes along with something you wanted is still ok. But ads in this form irritates the user.

There is another advertising medium which suffers from similar problem. Ads in an e-mail. Why doesn't it work? Well, it again breaks the fundamental rule where the user makes an effort to open a mail and read it without getting what he actually created his e-mail account for. This still has a lesser effect as he at least signed into his e-mail account to check his own mails, thereby some of his effort went into something which he more legitimately wanted. Still advertising of this form has now taken a derogatory name called "SPAM". Have you ever thought why an ad in news paper or during the commercial break in TV shows are not called SPAM or any such similar word?

If the fate of e-mail ads is such then think of the effect that mobile advertising is likely to create in the user's mind. It's awful.

So I would say that if you are looking to advertise and especially through a mass media then try to embed/bundle your ads with something more legitimately asked for by the user. The challenge is to embed the ad so seamlessly that the ad should be able to attract the attention of the user if he is interested in it but if he is not, the ad should not spoil the user experience of using the medium.

Mobile media surely needs to be tapped. Today, mobile phones outnumber TV sets by over 2 to 1, internet users by nearly 3 to 1, and the total laptop and desktop PC population by over 4 to 1 (Source: Wiki). Also, the mobile media, unlike TV, Newspaper or Radio, is a two way media. It remains to be seen when marketers would be able to effectively start tapping the vast potential of mobile marketing.