Today’s New York Times reports on the growing use of ads on cellphones.
Marketers said they were particularly excited about the prospect of eventually using cellphones, many of which are equipped with global positioning systems, to send ads to consumers based on their location. With that information, marketers could, in theory, send pitches from retailers to cellphone users who might be in the vicinity of a store.
Cellphone-based marketing could be “the silver bullet we’ve been looking for in advertising for a long time,” said Laura Marriott, executive director of the Mobile Marketing Association, a consortium of wireless carriers, ad agencies, technology companies and advertisers.
Jon Raj, vice president of advertising and emerging media with Visa USA, said he expected to see many new ad formats that could combine the text, video and the location-based nature of the phone.
“Unlike the computer, or a magazine or television,” he said, “the phone is a piece of you.”
That quality, which makes mobile marketing so powerful, could also make phone ads widely disliked and force carriers to use them very cautiously, said Edward Snyder, a financial analyst and co-founder of Charter Equity Research, where he covers the cellular phone industry.
