Mobile Advertising – Current and Future Trends

Which one of the following
sentence makes sense?

1.
Bollywood
Industry is going to be shutdown in 2008

2.
3G Network is not
going to come to India

3.
Mobile
Advertising is an emerging potential revenue market in India

I would say #3, anybody
disagrees with me? If you are, write to me with your comments. For now, I’m
going to take a stand on #3.

Mobile Advertising, as many
of you know giants like Microsoft, Google launched into this market as this
platform is the way to go for huge advertising revenue in the current era. Mobile
phones have become part of every Indian’s life. The most popular and indeed
annoying for the subscribers in India
is SMS advertising. The advertisers can run different campaigns and ads of different
types like text, fullscreen or banner ads to target different age groups,
gender and location based on their profile information through WAP, SMS, MMS
and also through Email client applications such as Consilient Push, etc.

WAP advertising is one of the
emerging advertising medium since lot of subscribers use their mobile phones
for internet access as the data plan offered by different mobile carriers are
competitive and affordable. The traffic generated on each carrier’s WAP portal
is much higher than any other medium which leads to a high revenue generating
source.

Technology involved in WAP
advertising – When the subscriber hit the carrier’s WAP portal page, the WAP
gateway talk to the ad server and gets the ad image source and sends it to the
mobile device for the device browser to make a request to fetch the image
source or the ad. The advertisements are served with different types of user
actions such as Click To Call, Click To Email, Click To SMS, Click To Browse,
Click To Download, Click To Chat, etc. Also the ads will be served based on the
priority ranking and the advertiser’s budget capping for impressions and clicks
set by the advertiser for each of their advertisement.

There are other ways of
presenting the advertisements such as eCoupons, live streaming of video etc.
Recently, many mobile carriers launched into this market and offer some of
their services for free to attract the subscribers to build a huge subscriber
database to let publishers publish their campaigns and associated advertiser’s
advertisements and their revenue model lies on advertising.

From subscriber’s point of
view, they get to enjoy the free services provided by the carriers at the cost
of receiving some advertisements on their phone which I bet they wouldn’t mind.
WAP advertising is preferable these days as they don’t choke their mobile
message Inbox unlike SMS advertising.

In my next article, we can
discuss in detail about the technology involved in the advertising concept
followed by some of the popular advertising solutions and their technology.

- Anu Manian