The Effectiveness of Advertising on Mobile Devices

It is impossible to escape advertising in today's world where an average city dweller is exposed to 5,000 advertisements a day. With this barrage of marketing we experience, a small percentage of this exposure is delivered via your mobile telecommunication device. Described simply by experts in mobile marketing the practice is at its essence personal marketing, and between Blackberries, Q's, iPhones, as well as other devices, mobile advertisers have plenty of opportunities to get reach the consumer on a personal level. Mobile advertisers are using five main tactics dictated by the MMA, Mobile Marketing Association, to deliver their message:

• Drive traffic to branded mobile websites
• Click-to-call
• Campaign-specific landing page info
• Email capture
• Send text, picture, audio, or video message to user

These tactics offer a surprisingly wide array of opportunities to effectively convey an advertiser's message throughout a campaign. However, in mobile marketing's infancy, the question was not necessarily how to advertise on mobile devices, but rather, would the consumer humor the idea of being marketed to using their own phone. Issues of privacy, clutter, and irritation dominated the minds of marketers attempting to use mobile advertising. These concerns were addressed in a 2005 Austrian study conducted by Haghriigan and Madleberger, Consumer Attitudes Toward Advertising Via Mobile Devices, which sought to examine the question of the consumer's openness to mobile marketing as well as how marketers could effectively advertise through these devices. Their findings indicate that:

• The value perceived in the advertisement is key to the attitude concerning that ad.
• Entertainment quality and the level of information in the ad help determine that value.
• High credibility associated with the ad positively influencing value.
• Irritation will negatively influence perceived ad value.
• High frequency of ads will negatively influence value of the advertising.
• Persons who consider privacy very valuable will have a negative perception of the ad's value.
• And last, those with higher levels of education perceived the ads more negatively than those with those at lower levels.

These findings, if you are still awake, are representative of the practices that successful mobile marketers in the industry utilize. Ads must be targeted, provide informative and/or entertaining content with a level of effective credibility. However, one finding in this study addresses the nebulous area of mobile device marketing; those that highly value privacy will have difficulty finding value in ads delivered via their mobile device. Despite ad content, these persons comprise the group most difficult to crack for advertisers and marketers, but the progression of marketing through mobile devices indicates that they are still more than willing to try.