Now-a-days most of them of us get lots and lots of ads on our mobile phone.
Telemarketers can be an annoying lot. They call you at the most inappropriate moments — like when you are in a business meeting, or while you are travelling and using roaming services. Many times you expectantly open an SMS only to find an advertisement selling loans, “attractive schemes” and other mobile spam.
Just when you thought that ads couldn’t make your life any worse, comes unsettling news. Experts say that soon a day will come when it will be considered normal to wait through a 15 to 30-second ad before getting connected to a call, sending a text message or downloading a ringtone. That’s not all. Advertisers claim (or rather hope) that the ads will not be forced on you. Instead, you would willingly want them on your phone. Sounds far fetched? Maybe. But the mobile industry believes that it will work. It’s easy to see why they think so.
There are more than 2 billion cellphone subscribers in the world — far more than the approximately 1.4 billion TVs and a billion computers worldwide. A recent report by market research firm, Informa Telecoms & Media, predicts that the mobile advertising market will be worth $11.3 billion by 2011. For marketers, such a huge market is too exciting an opportunity to ignore.
Besides which, the ubiquity and personalised nature of cellphones gives operators access to privileged customer information such as age, gender, location and their interests based on music and games downloads — data that newspaper and television advertisers can only dream of having. This also allows marketers to deliver ads that are more personalised. For example, if you are an avid gamer, an advertiser could send you a message that says: “Click on the banner to receive free game coupons redeemable at Amoeba game arcade.”
Last week, mobile phone executives converged in Spain at the annual 3GSM World Congress — a mecca for the world’s leading telecoms — to discuss, among other things, ways to make mobile advertising successful without being intrusive. All present agreed that advertising over mobile handsets can be big business, if done right.
Several companies are already experimenting with different ideas. Yahoo, for instance, has just begun displaying ads on cellphones in 18 countries, including India. The ads will run along the top part of Yahoo’s homepage when browsing the web via mobile phones. On clicking these interactive ads, users can get more information on special offers or call the advertiser for details.
Google, too, offers a similar text-based ad service for mobile web users that lets people speak with advertisers by clicking a “connect for free” button. For example, a McDonald’s ad on your cellphone may read like, “McDonald’s Happy Price Menu. Rupees Twenty Only” with a phone number mentioned below. By clicking that link, you could be directly connected to the McDonald’s outlet that’s nearest to you with whom you could either place a takeaway order or reserve a table to have dinner.
In Netherlands, HotSMS offers free, ad-sponsored text messaging, while another company, iWood, is about to start a service that will subsidise calls in return for users consenting to view ads. Sugar Mama, a US-based mobile virtual network operator, also gives its prepaid customers extra minutes for viewing internet ads, responding to SMS polls, or taking part in surveys about new products and services.
Back home, Erode-based Airvoice Infocom was in the news recently for developing a solution called HopAd that makes callers listen to an ad before a call is connected. Users can dial an ad request code such as *38 followed by the phone number to enable ad reception. They can also choose to skip the ad in case they have to place an urgent call. The caller will receive incentives in the form of discounts for choosing to receive the ads which can be in both, audio or video format, based on the phone’s capabilities.
For mobile operators, HopAd will also generate revenues out of airtime used by advertisers during “missed calls” and unreachable calls. “We are in the process of developing a prototype,” says R. Vasudevan, director (technical), Airvoice. “The company is talking to several mobile operators as well as small-scale advertisers across the country to launch HopAd within the next two to three months,” he adds.
While mobile advertising is still nascent and success cannot be guaranteed, a lot would depend on customer consent and relevancy of the ads. Mobile carriers will have to pass on some benefit to the user in return for viewing advertisements but more importantly, they will have to make the ads relevant to each user.
For instance, operators could give freebies, discounts and free airtime to those users who agree to receive ads. Something like that could appeal to price-conscious customers such as college students.

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