Using mobile, advertisers can now go beyond pure exposure and recall and expect more than brand impact, they can now deliver brand engagement. The unparalleled depth of interaction between consumers and their mobile phones, together with the ability afforded by mobile advertising to control the viewing environment provides advertisers with an opportunity to build more meaningful brand relationships than anytime in advertising history. The final catalyst of the mobile advertising opportunity will be universally accepted proof that mobile is an effective marketing and advertising medium. No large scale mobile marketing & advertising effectiveness studies have been conducted to date but several small studies suggest that the medium shows immense promise. A study by Kavassalis reports increased effectiveness of mobile marketing over traditional media, with text messaging campaign response rates in the range of 10-20% being common, as opposed to email (5%), direct mail (1 - 2%) and print advertising (0.15 - 0.60%). Kavassalis also reports that brand recall is high (46 - 64%) and redemption of in store coupons can reach 80% with mobile marketing campaigns. In reaction to the growing body of evidence illustrating mobile marketing’s effectiveness, the established advertising industry is finally waking up to the idea that mobile may become more important to brands than the Web. So when developing our mobile marketing & advertising strategy we must decide where our brand sits in its lifecycle to determine if we seek brand awareness or brand salience. Whichever route we choose mobile advertising production costs are very low compared to traditional media so developing and testing your advertising can be very efficient. Mobile therefore allows us to develop highly targeted campaigns with minimum wastage. This improves the chance that we are influencing the right target with the right message to elicit the desired attitude toward our brand.

• Generation Mobile - single style conscious 18 to 24-year-old students or young adults in their first job
• Phonetics - single 18 to 34-year-olds who see a mobile as their most important electronic possession.
• Practical Parents - cost-conscious young families under the age of 34 who choose their mobiles on price grounds
• Fingers and Thumbs - married, middle-aged or retired people with children or grandchildren
• Smart Connected - affluent families and professionals aged 25 to 44 who use mobiles to organize their work and social lives
• Silver Cynics - affluent, married parents who are approaching retirement

Mobile consumers share common characteristics that need to be considered when developing the message. The mobile context means they have short attention spans so communication must be compact and high impact to be remembered. Short message lengths however can actually be an advantage to the advertiser - they stretch media funds as they build frequency with less expenditure. The message must also be relevant (as mobile is considered to be the most personal of digital devices) and it can be made even more relevant if we can deduce, either technically or intuitively, the context that the message will be received in. Also, a continuous media schedule is required; it is because, it is not possible to predict when a consumer is ‘in the market’ for our product, so we must advertise constantly and, therefore, increase the likelihood of a direct hit.

Developing a mobile marketing strategy, therefore, is essential to help you ensure that you are delivering your message to your consumers in the most effective and efficient way.

"In a couple of years, most of the information you share, most of the advertising you read, most of the messages you send and most of the music you listen to will transit through your cell phone,"
Maurice Levy, CEO, Publicis