Feb

14

Advertising to Come to Your Cellphone

February 14, 2007 |

If you read this blog regularly, you know I have been railing against the constant barrage of advertising that the Web 2.0 revolution is brining with it. The New York Times today reports that some marketers are trying to get ads on cellphones now, to play “before watching a video, sending a message or listening to a downloaded song between conversations.” The argument for why it is possible now is that there are the right phones and good enough networks.

Give me a break here please. Cellphones are a marketers dream of course. Not only do the companies get to gather lots of info about us (who, when we call, our age etc.), but they can also be location aware. Great stuff for marketers, but do consumers really want this? We can play our music without ads now, so why would we go to a system where we have to listen to ads?

There is some talk about lowering the costs to consumers, but given that I have never paid a cent for any phone I owned and have never even managed to get close to using the minutes and SMSs I get with my most basic plan, I personally don’t care. Even if they gave me the minutes for free if I listened to ads, I would probably not do it. Think of the implications for your privacy. And do I really want to start every call with being told that I should buy some Dunkin Donuts coffee?

IPDemocracy also adds that:

But, unlike PCs or TVs, the cell phone is a highly personal device. We
carry it with us wherever we go and advertisers know where we are, and
perhaps, even what we’re doing (talking, watching, listening, etc.) So
privacy issues loom larger with mobile phones than any other platform.

Very true - and because of that, I want to keep marketers away from it. It is my space - get out of it.

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