These days conventional advertising and marketing methods are starting to diminish in their effectiveness. The reasons for this are many, but chief among them are simply time, and saturation. There was a time in America when people read two newspapers in a day — a morning paper and an evening paper. Those days are long gone and will never return as most people today simply do not have the time to read one paper, let alone two. The saturation issue speaks for itself, but for those with a need to delve further please understand this: Each year the business universities churn out thousands of marketing graduates who have been taught that they need to “rise above the clutter”. You can expect that their combined efforts will be as unrelenting as jungle’s drive to cover a patch of clear land, and you can expect to see more of what we already have a surplus of.
Mobile marketing succeeds because it overcomes the problematic issues of time and oversaturation. People bring their mobile devices with them wherever they go. Sooner or later, there will be downtime, and users program themselves to use these gaps in their busy schedules to “catch up” with life by interacting with their mobile devices. As an advertiser or marketer, this is the space you want to occupy. New mobile marketing trends will be driven by the expansion in the growth and use of mobile connected devices. At the present time more than five billion people in the world use mobile phones. This is a far higher figure than the number of personal computers connected to the Internet today. Only recently has the number of “smartphones” in use outpaced the number of so-called “feature phones”. Clearly, the time to enter the mobile marketing arena could never be more advantageous.
Many industry analysts believe that smartphones and other Internet connected mobile devices will soon supplant the personal computer as the dominant computing platform for all of humanity. Because of this the people who have a stake in the changing trends within the advertising industry cannot afford to ignore these important facts:
The United Nations administered International Telecommunications Union has disclosed that more than six trillion text messages were sent in the year 2010, and that by the end of 2012 more than 10 trillion text messages will likely be sent.
Mobile marketing is very simply an accepted marketing strategy in many parts of the world including those nations whose populations just happen to be the most affluent, such as Japan.
In the United States roughly 22% of all households are “mobile only”, which means that there are no phone company lines coming into the home. If you consider that there is no truly effective means to employ traditional telephone company phone lines for marketing purposes, this circumstance is a boon to early adopters.
The 7th Mass Media Takes Its Rightful Place
Mobile communications is now being considered by industry insiders as the world’s 7th “Mass Media” — the other six being: Print, Sound Recording, Film/Cinema, Radio, Television, and the Internet. Mass media is that form of expression which has the capacity to reach a mass audience, and most importantly, an audience that is comprised of people from all classes, and not just a certain elite class of user, and this more than anything else is why mobile marketing matters right now.
