The mobile industry is hoping that mobile advertising is going to be hella-big in the coming years. Analyst Juniper Research has just released a report claiming that this year alone, nearly 1.5 billion people will receive text-message ads, while predicting that by 2013, spending on mobile advertising will reach a whopping $7.6 billion.
But hang on a minute. What will us mobile users make of this explosion in mobile ads? Rival analyst Forrester has its own report surveying consumer attitudes towards mobile advertising, and the results aren’t pretty for the industry. 65% of us are annoyed when an advert appears when a web page is loading, 57% are annoyed when they appear alongside maps, 56% think banner ads are annoying, and 48% find paid-search ads… yes, annoying.
Oh, and only 7% trust adverts on their phones. So it’s hard not to wonder, out of that $7.6 billion that’ll supposedly be spent on mobile ads in 2013, how much will be wasted on people who simply don’t want to see, watch or interact with it?
The two companies have signed a strategic partnership to, as they say, “seize the mobile advertising opportunity”.
To us that means T-Mobile Web’n’walk users will be getting graphic adverts when using its mobile internet service. It will carry adverts exclusively sold and served by Yahoo!
The first adverts, which will be targeted to specific users based on already gathered information about them, will arrive in a matter of months.
Of course, both companies have been singing from the rooftops about what a great opportunity this is. It will be interesting to see consumers’ reactions when they’re suddenly bombarded with adverts when using Web’n’walk this summer. They’ll either silently accept it or maybe they’ll stop using it in droves.
We’ll be watching this with interest…
Less than two months since it launched, Blyk, the ad-funded MVNO for young mobile users, has been crowing about its usage figures.
Blyk offers free calls and texts in return for the user receiving targeted ads to their phone. Now sales director Jonathan MacDonald has told MocoNews that users are clicking through from the ads they receive.
The idea of mobile advertising hasn’t really convinced the industry so far, but Blyk’s performance, although modest so far does hint that it might just work after all.
Apparently click-through rates are running at 12-43 percent, depending on the format the ads are received in (SMS, MMS, photos, animations and videos).
Blyk targets 16-24 year olds, although most of its users are 17-20, with a roughly even split between boys and girls. Unsurprisingly, considering its offering ‘free minutes and texts’, university students make up most of the users.
Blyk’s one-year subscriber target is a modest 100,000, but even so, MacDonald didn’t say how many had signed up so far. No doubt he’ll tell us if Blyk hits its target.
Some adverts like Ronseal’s will tell you exactly what a product is. But sometimes ad peoples’ artistic impulses get the better of them and they come up with off-the-wall ads that are all about branding and tell you nothing about the product.
If you don’t just think “meh!”, at arty adverts and actually want to find out more about the product, help is now at hand. SnapTell has launched a mobile marketing service called Snap.Send.
All it requires is a camera phone picture of a billboard sent from your mobile and SnapTell’s image recognition servers will analyse it and send you information about the product being advertised.
There’s no need to opt into the service or download special software, you simply have to email the picture to SnapTell. It seems simple because it is. If only more adverts were like that!
Zumobi is a new mobile browsing app that offers an unusual interface and uses cached data to speed up online usage and give the option of offline browsing as well.
Rather than a traditional browser, Zumobi offers a set of sixteen ‘Tiles’, each containing a link to some specially-formatted web content. The user can ‘zoom in’ on a set of four tiles, then zoom further to bring up the relevant page.
There is a Flash demo here that should give a flavour of what that it looks like in practice.
Zumobi’s servers cache the data for your preselected tiles and the mobile app caches it onto your phone so you should be able to keep up to date even if you are in a blackspot or on board a plane.
It all sounds like good fun, but any walled-garden approach to the web lives or dies on its range of content and although Zumobi claim partnerships with big players like Flickr and Amazon, the ability to add your own content could prove crucial to this service taking off.
Targeted advertising is also presented as a feature and while it is admittedly better than spam it’s hard to picture many people walking around thinking “Ooh, do you know what? I could just go for some targeted advertising right about now.”
The beta version launches on the 14th of December and you can sign up here.
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