The Rush to Mobile Advertising

BusinessWeek: At a hip singles bar in Las Vegas earlier this year, attractive urbanites were busy typing messages into their cell phones. But messages like, “Who’s the hottie at the end of the bar?” weren’t just going to friends — they were being posted on a giant video screen as part of a promotion at several events organized by Anheuser-Busch (BUD) and Maxim magazine.
These kinds of promotions have become rampant at sporting events, concerts, and ultra-trendy bars in the latter part of 2004, and they’re poised to explode next year, say marketers like Alex Campbell, CEO of Vibes Media, a small interactive marketing firm that put on the Vegas event. Idle cell-phone users are being encouraged via big-screen TV, or video scoreboard, to text messages to one another, answer trivia questions, or enter sweepstakes. Sometimes, participation is as high as 30%, Campbell and others say.
It may seem like just a gimmick for restless audience members and barflies. But it’s the beginnings of the much-hyped, much-anticipated rush to mobile advertising, in which marketers connect to consumers in a variety of ways via their cell phones. And industry watchers say 2005 is set to be the year a lot of big brands finally give it a shot — despite the difficulties that still loom. At this early stage, it’s still hard to predict a how much will be spent on mobile advertising since the cost of these campaigns can range from thousands to millions. But like spending on video ads online in 2004, this new category looks poised to go from virtually nothing to millions in pilot investments in 2005, agencies say.
Cell Phones Ring for Marketers [BusinessWeek]