Mobile Phone Advertising Done Right

The problem with mobile phone advertising is that it has the potential to annoy. Traditional ads like those from radio and TV would be extremely intrusive on mobile phones. So much so that the next killer-app for mobile phones may be ad filtering (though people may wonder why they have to pay for the privilege of not being advertised to on their mobile phones).

In spite of this, many companies expect cellphone advertising to be the next big thing in advertising so it looks like we will get advertisements on our mobile phones whether we like it or not.

Some companies and individuals have been thinking about how to advertise on mobile phones without annoying us, and in some cases helping us:

• Comparison shopping provides a place to advertise helpfully.
• Rivepoint , Cellfire  and others distribute shopping coupons on mobile phones.
• Various companies have shopping list apps. Examples are OneTrip Shopping List for iPhone and Apples2Oranges for iPhone. iPhone Shopping Lists has a wish list for these types of applications.
• Idle screen advertising such as Mobile Posse and Celltick .

These companies should do well, but there is no reason to believe that other companies will give up on annoying advertising. Given the mobile phone value chain and the mobile revenue calculator (included inline at the bottom of this post), application developers should get working on advertising filters.