Ok, I will admit I have never worked for a carrier and I don’t know their future plans for mobile commerce, but I do know one thing:  carriers love money and they do a good job at taking way too much of it. Yes, premium SMS is a multi-billion dollar industry and it’s made a lot of carriers good money, but could it have been even bigger? Premium never really took off for SMBs and, let’s face it, there are millions more smaller businesses than bigger ones. You had to be a big player like Disney or Universal to really make money with content like ringtones and wallpaper. The carriers typically take 50% of the revenue generated from premium content; as a result, it didn’t allow many people to jump in the game. Overall , I don’t think we have seen the mass adoption that premium could have made if it was less expensive to get in. Of course, the premium SMS scandals that took place didn’t help either. There were a number of unscrupulous companies that would get consumers locked into premium monthly subscriptions with no way out.  As a result, there were quite a few lawsuits and consumer confidence was damaged.

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This does not have to be a long post, I just wanted to set the record straight once and for all. There is a difference between “Mobile Marketing” and “Mobile Advertising”. A lot of times you will read an article about a successful mobile marketing campaign and it has to do with mobile advertising, I suggest you try and set the author straight. Its important we are all talking the same language. Both play an important role in the mobile eco system.

If you spend money on mobile advertising you would be buying a banner on a mobile site/iphone app, or an ad on an SMS message. You would probably use a company like Admob for display or 4info for SMS. With mobile advertising you are trying to reach an audience that are most likely not yet customers or leads. Mobile marketing however is more about building a database of customer or potential customers and then marketing to them. The key difference is that one of them is database marketing and the other is advertising.

There are many different providers in the U.S. for mobile marketing and advertising. Almost all major brands right now have  a strategy to not only advertise themselves on the billions of impressions mobile is capturing but also to build a database of people they can engage and market to.

In this article blogger and CEO of VeraSprite Mark Jaffe discusses why he feels mobile advertising has not reached it’s full potential.  His blog can be found at, http://mobilemandala.com

Quick blurb:

“Group M released some statistics last month that projected mobile to comprise one half of 1% of total global advertising expenditures in 2009.  It is projected to be about .8% in 2010.”

He goes on to say,

“Aren’t you just amazed by what a small percentage mobile advertising is of total worldwide advertising expenditures and what a large percentage of time we spend on mobile devices when compared to time spent on other media.  Why the difference?

I suspect that one reason is because we as marketers spend a disproportionately large amount of time thinking about what we want to tell consumers and how we want to tell it, and a disproportionately small amount of time focusing on how they want to receive that information and the unique characteristics of the medium upon which it is received.  I also suspect that it is because we are afraid to try something new with this new medium of mobile.”

Overall this is a good article that has sparked a lot of debate. Feel free to weigh in on the matter: http://mobilemandala.com/2009/10/18/ten-reasons-why-mobile-advertising-has-not-reached-its-potential-9/