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The report entitled "Mobile Advertising" looks at the history of European mobile advertising and marketing and covers drivers and inhibitors for this market.
The report focuses on advertisements and marketing through SMS, whereby consumers receive notices, special offers and vouchers via a text message. These messages are known as premium SMS messages because the telecom operators charge a premium rate to the advertisers as well as to the consumers who respond to the mobile advertising.
"Retailers can send announcements of specific special deals on offer, nightclubs can send vouchers, discount airlines can send notice of special deals," said Paolo Pescatore, Senior Analyst at IDC's European Mobile and Wireless Communications program and author of the report.
Pescatore pointed to a recent text-and-win competition organised by Cadbury as an example of a successful mobile advertising campaign. People who purchased Cadbury chocolate could send an SMS message to a number on their chocolate wrappers to win prizes. The competition allowed Cadbury to gather statistics on chocolate consumers, including the time of day at which people consume chocolate.
MMS and colour-screen technology should help to increase mobile advertising traffic as advertisers will be able to provide larger messages, video, text and audio files. But the additional cost of MMS premium content advertising may discourage consumers from participating.
"Consumers may not be happy to pay the premium rates to accept multi-media messages from advertisers," Pescatore warned.
The report also observes the importance of an opt-in and opt-out approach, to prevent the growth of spam on the mobile networks.
The Mobile Marketing Forum of the Irish Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has announced that it plans to issue a code of practice for mobile advertising over the next few weeks, in a bid to prevent the growth of spam on mobile networks.
"Mobile phones aren't equipped to deal with spam," said Mark Tarbatt, managing director of Generator, an interactive sales agency based in Dublin and board member of the IAB. "The mobile operators are very aware of the dangers of spam to their networks."
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