Yesterday, Ben Taylor of Enpresence commented

While mobile advertising has a great future, ensuring that the recipients of ads are not turned off by SPAM and irrelevant advertisements will be critical to its success. From what I have seen the market has a long way to go before it can seamlessly integrate with peoples mobile lives without driving them to want to turn their mobiles off.

From an advertiser perspective, the ability to reach the right audience through various targeting techniques will likely dominate early successes in the mobile space vs. broad spectrum spam due to the delivery costs, regulations, and mobile operator constraints. By leveraging mobile communities many of these short term hurdles may be overcome.

In the mean time, be sure to check out Enpresence as a potential platform for mobile advertising as it extends online communities to mobile devices.

Thanks for the article. I look forward to the conclusion in the March issue. I think your thoughts and observations are spot on.

Also, Forrester’s recent report on Mobile Marketing got wide coverage this week. The gist of the report was

The near ubiquity of mobile phones and accelerating consumer acceptance of applications other than voice make mobile a powerful new channel for marketers. When done right, mobile campaigns yield high response rates and increase consumer engagement. Still, 79% of consumers are annoyed by the idea of mobile marketing. To avoid consumer backlash against ads on their phones, marketers must adopt a mindset where value replaces interruption and campaigns are designed for an abbreviated and immediate mobile experience.

As I have discussed this many times (including the Sell Phone article) that consumer needs to be at the center of the mobile services esp. advertising .. with the small real estate, it is hard to ignore the advertising messages and if not done right, will start to annoy users and will hamper the growth. It is also important to distinguish between consumers who like advertising on the phone and the ones who don’t and prepare the marketing programs accordingly to move them from latter to the former.