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Smartphones Allow for Mobile Ad Industry Diversification

3:31 pm on June 12, 2009 | Category: Business, Messaging, Mobile Devices, Web Services

The mobile advertising industry is evolving and reaching a greater number of consumers, with 38% of American cell phone users seeing some sort of advertising in the first quarter of 2009, according to a new study by GfK Technology.

Not surprisingly, smartphone users are generally the most likely to come across mobile advertising, with 59% reporting seeing at least one ad. 23% of smartphone owners report receiving ads in their SMS mailbox, while 20% saw advertising on a mobile social networking website and 15% saw at least one video-based ad.

“Over the last few years, we’ve tracked the growth of mobile advertising, and this has been fueled by text messaging and mobile internet formats. Now we are seeing consumers adopting a much broader set of mobile applications and services and this is exposing them to new ad formats,” commented Jonathon Linner, CEO of the social networking service, Brightkite, which commissioned the GfK study.

Linner noted that Apple iPhone users are now almost twice as likely to see ads on a mobile social network as they are in their SMS inbox.

“If the iPhone is an indicator of future behavior across other handsets, then we would conclude that the former ‘standards’ of mobile advertising â€“ WAP and SMS â€“ are going to be caught up to and perhaps surpassed by ads inside of other applications and services,” added GfK’s head of mobile communications research, Colin Strong.

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