Mobile Smart Ads

By Alice Lam:

As people use mobile more and more, will people turn to mobile advertising even more?  Web advertising seems to be where digital marketers are drawn to.  On the web, there is literally more space to be creative and lots of analytics for them to pivot.  However, in countries like South Africa and China, not everyone may have a computer but every does definitely have a phone.  That is why transferring money through mobile has been such a great business in Africa, where people use to walk miles to send money from one village to the next.
Geofencing, or location based advertising is endemic to the mobile and seems to be effective.  However, besides that, it seems really hard to personalize the advertising experience for the mobile user when you can't really penetrate that deeply to gather information about the consumer.  Ironically enough, people find their phones to be very personalized and do not want their phones to creep them out by using their information against them.
It seems that the only exception to this is when the customer is ok with this is when they know that the app is using their information to personalize their experience.  So foursquare and pandora feels naturaly to them because the consumers acknowledges that they are the ones giving them the information.
It will be interesting to see how mobile advertising is going to evolved because it doesn't seem as if they even scratched the surface yet.  This platform needs to be more innovative, engaging and clever for people to even start to respond.  Advertisers better get on it because every person will end up having a smartphone soon.


Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/technology/smartphone-ads-and-their-drawbacks-digital-domain.html