Mobile Advertising

A bit on Mobile Advertising this post by Atanu Dey, set my grey cells to work. They have been pretty dormant over the last few days. Before I go ahead with what is it about this post that set my grey cells racing, I will tell you something I did.

"Mobile Advertising", what image does it conjure up in your mind? I don't know about you, but to me I started seeing Google ads in my mobile. I started seeing the ads change on the screen becoming more and more relevant to what I speak. And I saw a lot which is censored here for reasons not known to me. Then I said to myself wait a minute, do you something else? Doesn't mobile advertising refer to advertising on the vans, buses, trains, auto rickshaws and innumerable moving objects both living and non living. Do a flickr search and you will see some amusing shots. The shots you see here are flickr results.

Enough of digressing, coming back to the topic on hand, I was planning to write on it for some time. The trigger was a discussion where we were wondering how advertising on the net works. I thought hard, read a few things about advertising in general. Then I came to the conclusion that advertising on net is in no way different from the fundamentals of advertising. What an amazing coincidence, no sooner do I plan to write, I see the genesis for this post (referring to Atanu's post) in my feed reader. He has done a great job in explaining the basics before embarking on his idea of Mobile Advertising. I could never think of putting it in so succulent a manner. It gave me the confidence that my own conclusions on advertising are not far off and also gave a peek into the economics without miring me into technical mambo jumbo.

Now the question arises, what is that set my grey cells active? I am coming to that, in the last section of his post, Atanu talks about possible ways for advertisers to reach customer. This was what triggered me. How can advertisers reach the user? How can they be effective? How can someone make money out of it? What is the technical feasibility? Where can I contribute? And ultimately what can I do here?

Each one of the above questions have given some answers and threw some challenges. I will address them in a later post. But, one thing that struck me is there is a gold mine here. There will be a company which will do a Google in the world the world of Advertising on Mobiles. What will I do? Will I wait and watch, or will I be part of this game. I can tell now, you can tell over time.