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Mobile marketing has been around for a long time, but it has grown dramatically in the past five years as handsets have become powerful mini computers and mobile broadband networks have come of age. According to research firm Berg Insight, the global mobile advertising market was worth €1.75 billion in 2009; with a compound annual growth rate of 43%, Berg predicts that this will rise to €8.7 billion in 2014.
Demand for mobile commerce has been building up for decades, but when the problems of incompatibility and capacity were removed about three years ago, a boom was created, according to Paul Berney, Managing Director of the European branch of the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA). Although mobile marketing can be directed to any handset, Berney pinpoints the iPhone as the most effective catalyst for this explosion in demand, adding that Apple’s decision to use one network in each country encouraged all those networks’ competitors to raise their game, too.
What’s more, the app phenomenon and the superior user experience the iPhone
provides have driven brands to make more use of mobile in their campaigns,
benefiting the entire mobile ecosystem. Meanwhile, the decision by the leading
mobile network operators to offer flat rates for data access removed a major
source of consumer misgiving about mobile data usage. There was a change in
culture, too, which was benefi cial for the technology companies offering their
services to the marketing industry. “The mobile industry as a whole learned
to speak to marketers in their own language, rather than in technical talk,”
says Berney. But he claims that the biggest driver for mobile marketing has been
a shift in consumers’ attitudes: “The appetite for mobile is growing rapidly,
and people are suddenly seeing the possibilities for using their cellphone to
solve all kinds of problems.”
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