The creation of mobile advertising and the issues surrounding it today
Mobile advertising all began with an American telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois. Motorola is a manufacturer of wireless telephone handsets that are used all over the world today. This company has a long history of manufacturing various electronic devices from radios in the 1940’s to the invention of the first ever prototype of a digital cellular system in the 1990’s. Soon the prototype was perfected and this lead to the debut of the first generation of cellular phones in the world market. Though functionality was limited at that time, this didn’t do anything to deter its rising popularity among people.
Due to the rising popularity of their cellular phones, Motorola opted to popularize another invention, one that could allow users to receive text messages and e-mail, better known as the two way pager. However, the two-way pager only enjoyed a short time of success because the Finland based company of Radiolinja soon released their own second generation of mobile telecom. The second generation had more functionality built into them because now, users can enjoy services like SMS text messaging. This gained more popularity over the two-way pager and truly marked the beginning of mobile advertising.
In 1994, the year when the first person to person text message was used, its popularity soon overshadowed even that of the first generation cellular phones. Seeing the new window of opportunity presented by this new media channel advertising companies soon began to make their move. In Finland, these companies started their move by providing people with free news headlines via SMS. These free headlines that the advertising companies provided allowed them to generate more income through advertising. This move by the advertising soon lead to the first ever experimentation of mobile advertising and mobile marketing.
The experiments regarding the two soon culminated in the world’s first conference to discuss both mobile advertising and mobile marketing. This conference was held in London in the United Kingdom on February 2001. The Wireless Advertising Association, an international non-profit trade group that aims to establish an international guideline for mobile marketing, sponsored the conference. The association itself has made a lot of success. They were able to formulate different guidelines for mobile marketing like: The code of conduct for mobile marketing, the consumer best practices guidelines.
Nowadays mobile advertising is such a huge phenomenon and the Wireless Advertising Association better known today, as the Mobile Marketing Association is needed to keep consumers satisfied and protected. There are over 2.4 billion users of SMS as of the year 2007. This means that over 3 billion cell phones of the same year because not all cell phone users are active users of SMS. There is such a huge number of information going through the system and privacy has always been an issue regarding this new media channel but with the Mobile Marketing Association, privacy is protected. Other issues tend to revolve around the viral marketing strategy wherein there is a message that is sent to a single person with a cell phone, the message then replicates itself and is sent to all people in that person’s phonebook.
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