Mobile marketing has been going through quite a change over the past few years. Even on television, most networks are airing those obnoxious commercials imploring you to text a noun or adjective to an odd string of numbers in order to find out how compatible you are with your mate and subscribe to ads. Aside from wondering how many relationships these services make or break, advertisers should be thinking about what’s going on with mobile advertising. Clients are often asking agencies to break into the mobile market, but so many of them steer clear of this part of the digital arena because they are unsure of its logistics or fear they will not be able to quantify results. Alcatel-Lucent Market Advantage recently did some research regarding how well young consumers respond to mobile advertising and how we, as advertisers, can utilize the medium to effectively reach them.

According to surveys, young people actually respond pretty well to mobile advertising. Since 90 percent of youth and young adults subscribe to SMS services, the medium is a great way to reach this market, and more than half of those surveyed across the globe said they would respond to mobile advertisements as long as they are tailored to fit individual interests. Based on these responses, the aspects they find most important in the process are the ability to start or stop messages, asking questions to tailor ads to each person’s interests and respect for privacy.

 

With a growing trend in mobile Web browsing and ad-supported applications, it seems that advertising has already been built into the mobile experience; however, SMS advertising has retained a taboo nature among advertisers. Respondents to this research actually welcomed this type of advertising, especially if some incentive were offered along with it, the most popular being a discount on SMS, MMS or data services for subscribing to SMS ads. Building an incentive such as this into mobile service plans not only improves customer loyalty toward a given carrier, but also brings in even more revenue, allowing for less outrageous prices on the data plans we all love so much.
Since mobile advertising is still relatively new, it should be interesting to see how it grows and takes a more definite shape. With this many young people looking into these opportunities, I would venture to say that SMS marketing has a seat reserved at the mobile marketing table.