By Georges Maurel, Prim'Vision

For a couple of years, we have all expected mobile advertising to become a fast growing market. But, each year, we are making the same conclusion: mobile advertising is still in its infancy and has a huge growth potential, not yet exploited.

We all agree to say that mobile advertising has unique capabilities in term of targeting, relevancy and content customization. Nevertheless, barriers for rapid growth still exist and must be addressed to get user acceptance:

• Opt-in issue: legislation in many countries requires the user opt-in, meaning the user must give his agreement to receive advertising on his phone. The opt-in is difficult to exploit because not freely transferable between operator and advertiser.

• Respect of Privacy: consumers view their phone as their private space and feel today’s form of advertising as intrusive.

• Return on Investment: random ads sent at random time has limited efficiency. The potential of the mobile phone for highly targeted advertising is not exploited, leading to low return on investment and low efficiency of campaign.

Until now, nobody raised these challenges at the same time to create a dynamic business opportunity!

In 2008, the investment in mobile advertising reach $2.7 bn (source: Gartner) with more than 90% dedicated to SMS & MMS. With such amount of unwanted and intrusive ad messages, mobile advertising is considered as spam, people are afraid to receive too much ads and will never dare to subscribe. To achieve objectives in term of quality of contact, mobile advertisers must focus on user experience and deeply modify their approach: do not focus on what will be sent, center your attention on what the consumers will receive; imagine a solution in which AD-ready phones are working like anti-spam filter, analyzing all the content and accepting only content matching the user’s interests.

When we ask consumers about their key factors of acceptance for mobile advertising, they argue on privacy, control, customization and reward. AD-ready means a phone embedded solution based on user experience to answer these four factors:

• Privacy: the solution is to propose an interface in which the user is feeling confident and open his mind the ad-world. He can be able to create his interests profile, dynamically updated, securely stored in his mobile – not on a server, keeping him anonymous and only requesting for relevant advertising.

• Control: the user must keep control on when and where he receives advertising. When means time but also specific actions such as play mp3 file or start web browsing. Where means home, office and also shopping or recreation centers, thank to geo-localization capacities for contextual advertisings. To define this mission profile, a trusted dialogue is needed between the user and his interface. Trusted means respect of user’s privacy and prime time delivery preference.

• Customization: the user should be able to filter the message received. Even if on-mobile solution for AD-ready phones allows to maximize relevancy and to block undesired advertisings, the ability to play or skip each ad is mandatory. A trusted approach, being law compliant, is a phone built-in opt-in process before each advertisement. This also ensures the advertisers to have the user in front of his mobile at the start of the advertising. After, it is their work to keep him attracted for a few seconds more…

• Reward: the user is hard to please and when he accepts ads on his phone, he also wants to get something back. Advertisers have to work widely to find new personalized reward scheme which can be distributed on several devices and centralized as a currency to obtain gifts or to distribute around.

SMS have built the basis of mobile advertising with an internet approach: mass delivery and intrusiveness. Considered as a poor user experience, mobile advertising is slowly changing and is now taking the right way to be part of multi channel advertising strategy through rich media format, user profiling and targeting. Moreover, people are on the way to accept to receive ads on mobile thanks to video capacities, large screen, new data based services or app store proliferation, which deeply modify how we use our mobile in our daily life.

In addition, here is good news for the market: we are designing the solution to make mobile AD-ready.

Our approach of mobile advertising is to provide an on-mobile personal advertising browser rewarding the user. It has a ‘get more of what you like’ engine and keeps spam out. It’s like a laser dot guiding smart advertising campaigns, sitting in everybody’s most personal digital space, it directs content straight to the best targets and it allows immediate interaction.

Mobile advertising is not an intrusion; it proposes an exciting new challenge! Think AD-ready on-mobile solution and let’s take mobile advertising to a new level.