CTIA: Mobile Advertising The New Black
One of the unofficial themes of the spring CTIA show was mobile TV. as anybody and everybody has some sort of mobile TV product to push. This time around, about half a year later, the hot topic (beyond the buyouts) is mobile advertising. While in April, mobile advertising had appeared on the radar, the idea of ad-supported mobile content is now the hot business model. Content providers are talking about how they plan to use ads to support their content, while operators are making their own moves to capitalize on mobile ads, and Google last week announced the mobile version of AdSense. Ad-supported mobile content makes a lot of sense, as it allows users to receive a clear benefit — free content — in exchange for being exposed to advertisements. The problem now isn’t with technical solutions to delivering ads to mobile devices, but rather with their implementation. Thus far, too many would-be mobile advertisers focus either on transplanting ads from other media like TV or the web to mobile devices, but this doesn’t take into account how intrusive, annoying and ill-suited these ads are to mobile users. The most effective TV ads aren’t repurposed print ads, and the best web ads aren’t reformatted TV spots, so in the same vein, the most effective or useful mobile ads won’t just be ads from existing media reformatted for a tiny screen.
