The Future of Mobile Advertising – 3 Strategies

Like it or not Mobile Advertising is here to stay. You will see advertisements on your phone – in increasing quantities – and in different ways.

With smartphone market penetration at over 30% the smart mobile devices have already strengthened mobile advertising and will continue to solidify mobile strategies as market penetration increases from users replace their aging handsets.

There are 3 possible directions that the future of mobile advertising might head: SMS text-based advertising, location-based advertising and application embedded advertising.

SMS Semantic Advertising

Advertisers have been sending out ads via text messages for years but the technology will be more integrated and coy in the future. What we will likely see in the future is a keyword-based hovering ads similar to those currently in use on the Internet. By scanning your text messages advertising companies will be able to place related ads within the keywords so that when you hover over it using your touchscreen you will receive ads related to that keyword. For example if you are texting a friend about going to a cinema you may see ads to purchase tickets to your local theater.

While some critics may consider this intrusive, the technology is already in place in Gmail and other web-based emails where they scan your emails and cater the ads you see to their content. Also many web pages and searches highlight keywords with advertisements. The technology is already here on the Internet and in the future we will likely see the two technologies merge and spread over into mobile advertising.

Location-Based Advertising

With a huge amount of users connecting to GPS-based apps, services and advertising daily, location-based advertising will be a large part of mobile advertising’s future.

What this signifies is a return to the hyper-local marketing strategy that ruled before TV and the Internet took over. Hyper-local advertising will not only give actionable advertising opportunities to small locally run businesses but it will also be used by large corporations with local products, for example: Groupon.

Application-Based Advertising

After Google scooped up AdMob (from under Apple’s nose), Apple retaliated with the creation of their own AdMob-like mobile advertising company – iAd.

iAd’s main focus is on integrating advertisements into the popular iPhone and iPad applications. Steve Jobs undoubtedly believes that this will be a huge market given that the average user spends 30+ minutes a day using the over 300,000 iOS apps. With a 40% Apple 60% app developers profit share system this technology will prove to be a huge stream of revenue for Apple. And even though Google’s AdMob’s strategy is based more on web-based advertising than application-based, they will undoubtedly want to cash in on a similar program for their Android smartphone platform.