According to an article in the New York Times the prolifieration of various forms of Urban Spam causes could cause irritation with consumers.

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Still, I think marketers are playing with fire by ambushing people at every turn. The more varied the places in which their ads appear, the more diverse the human situations in which they’ll be received. A result may turn out to be anger, not a sale. Any male computer owner these days who doesn’t associate reading his morning e-mail with nagging concerns about erectile dysfunction has a better spam filter than I do. I resent being woken up this way each day. Oddly, however, the target of my resentment isn’t the folks who push Viagra and its numerous herbal substitutes, but the big online portals like AOL that let these hucksters’ e-mail through their systems. I hear that AOL is sagging now, and frankly I’m fine with it. I think it’s fitting. AOL has been letting me know for years that I may be sagging a bit myself. It’s their turn.”

Source: New York Times

In the growing, yet fiercely competitive world of local online advertising, directory and classifieds publishers are seeking new ways to deliver value to their advertisers. A recent survey by WebVisible/Nielsen found that as many as 35% of consumers will save listing information for later use, and nearly one-quarter of respondents will bookmark business listings. According to the study, “[The] availability of recall is likely to lead to repeat or latent business based on a single search experience especially when 89% [of consumers] reported contact with a vendor a second time.”

“Internet advertising is forcing marketers to rethink their online advertising goals, while complicating the task of measuring effectiveness,” said John Federman, CEO, eStara. “eStara’s Click Suite for Local Search, which power millions of advertisements around the globe — including listings for Cox Newspapers, Idearc SuperPages.com, Yahoo! Europe and Sensis — ensures that local marketers are meeting their business goals, and are maximizing value from every ad.”

With the addition of Save & Send, eStara rounds out it suite of tools for tracking and measuring local ad effectiveness. Save & Send capabilities, which are integrated into eStara’s Click Suite for Local Search, allow consumers to save or share the advertisement in whichever electronic format they desire – on their desktop, on the Web or on their mobile device – predisposing them to make repeat purchases from their preferred merchants, and giving publishers the ability to measure ROI more accurately for advertisers.

Yahoo Inc. is flirting with mobile phone service providers at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona they hope to find new partners for its new mobile search services.

“Mobile phones soon expected to push PCs aside as the most popular tool to access the Internet, the company has made mobility a top priority and is taking steps to establish its mobile search engine as the technology of choice for mobile operators”, Marco Boerries, senior vice president of Yahoo Connected Life, said Tuesday at a news conference at the mobile phone show in sunny Spain Source : IDG.net

The Java based Yahoo Go for Mobile 2.0, is now available. The application is designed to help users easily navigate a selection of personal channels to seek content in categories such as news, sports, entertainment and maps.

“Mobile search so far hasn’t worked because it’s been an adaptation of PC search,” Boerries said. “Mobile users want instant answers” that are intelligently selected for small devices. More than 400,000 users have downloaded the beta application to about 100 different types of devices.

Yahoo is particularly keen to have mobile phone operators and vendors preinstall the application they have already secured a deal with LG to ship LG cell phones with many Yahooo services such as search pre-installed. .Yahoo said Monday that it will start showing mobile display ads on its Yahoo Mobile Web service in 19 countries in Europe, Asia and the Americas. Major advertisers include Intel Corp., PepsiCo Inc. and Proctor & Gamble Co.

The use of ad-funded search tools will help mobile phone service providers generate revenue that they may want to return to customers in the way of free services, Boerries said. “You can only give something away if you make something,” he said. “Mobile advertising will enable this.”

Despite the buzz around mobile advertising, end users and eager advertisers may have to wait a while for widespread deployments as the mobile industry sorts out the requirements for it. With 3 billion mobile users world wide I would have hoped there was more promising news for advertisers.

“The problem is, today we are highly fragmented,” said Rob Conway, CEO of the GSM Association, the global trade group for Global System for Mobile Communications operators, at the group’s conference in here.

Arun Sarin, CEO of Vodafone Group PLC, agreed. Despite the interest from advertisers in using mobile phones to deliver ads, the mobile industry needs to create a consistent framework.

“If we went to Procter & Gamble and said, ‘this is how Vodafone does it, but Orange is different,’ they will find it hard to move their ads onto mobiles,” Sarin said. “If we don’t move together, we will have a fragmented medium and user base instead of a single valuable medium that reaches 2 billion people.”

A common framework would include specifications for the appropriate size of banner ads and length of video ads, as well as a reporting mechanism to help advertisers measure the success of their campaigns. I still believe that it is possible for advertsing creatives to work around the non-exsitence of this framework perhaps with certain sponsered mobile applications delivered via SMS.

Some end users are interested in the concept of mobile advertising because it can enable free or low-cost services in exchange for viewing ads such as Blyk.com. In addition, the mobile industry promises that it can offer ads that users may be interested in based on their location which is imortant if you are looking at efficient ways to truly engage your audience. Not all phone users, however, would be able to receive mobile ads. They must subscribe to a data service that enables the delivery of such content and a capable phone too.
Being an operator and as they put it the ‘ethos’ of a media provider themselves Blyk truly has defined the future model for mobile providers simplifing the user experience for both young people and advertisers.

Mobile TV

Concerns about price, reliability and quality may dampen demand for mobile TV. That’s the conclusion of a survey of 22,000 European mobile service users commissioned by Tellabs Inc. Naperville, Ill.-based Tellabs sells equipment to provide backhaul services for mobile TV networks. A study conducted by M:Metrics in the UK, Germany, France and Spain cited price, reliability and quality issues as the main reasons why users don’t come back for more.
Forty-five percent of European mobile video and TV users cited price as a factor causing them to switch off the services. And 24% of the respondents who had tried mobile video and TV said they stopped using it because of concerns about service quality and reliability.

Mobile TV

In the U.S., Verizon Wireless last month announced plans to launch a mobile TV service this quarter. Mobile TV is making healines at this week’s 3GSM conference in Barcelona. However opinions on mobile TV are about as mixed as the quality of broadcast itself. Most people are more interested in the taking Internet to mobile phones. For advertisers this will be more important as campaigns can be truly dual play.

Digital Music downloads to Moble

“Buying digital music from a mobile phone is too difficult and the music and mobile phone industries need to improve the process to meet demand, the chairman and CEO of Warner Music Group said on Wednesday.

“A study last year found that only 8.5% of people who own a phone that can be used to download and purchase music actually did so, said Warner Chairman Edgar Bronfman Jr., speaking at the opening session of the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona on Wednesday. “Why? It’s expensive, it’s complicated and it’s slow,” he said. “It’s amazing that we’ve generated as much revenue as we have given how cumbersome the experience can be.”

Buying a ringtone is an example of the complexity people can face. On average, users must click 20 times in a process that takes around two minutes to buy a ringtone, Bronfman said. Buying digital music on a phone is similarly complicated, he said. ”

Apple’s iPhone, the combined MP3 player and mobile phone expected to hit the U.S. market later this year, is a step in the right direction, Bronfman said. Source : ComputerWorld.com

Sending money through your mobile phone connection has always been a sticky point for payment service providers not to mention most people I know. Transaction costs and security have been the main beak breakers. The aim is to reduce the transaction costs of sending small amounts of cash, which currently are as much as 24% for amounts as small as $50.

In fact the focus of development for mobile payments providers is emerging markets such as India and Africa, why? Because its still easy enough for us to make our transactions through our bank accounts, in the developing world maybe one in every ten people have a bank account but 5 in ten own a mobile phone.

Mobile operators are partnering with banks at a local or regional level. Payment card company Master Card Inc., which has a 25,000 member-bank network, will pilot a global hub that will link national markets and the local payment systems run by mobile operators in partnership with those local banks.

The idea is that people can load cash through their mobile phones, and then or order it to be sent to a mobile phone number in another country, where the recipient receives a message that money has arrived, making it as easy as sending a text message. This idea would also give philanthropy web sites such as Kiva and Modest Needs the opportunity to allow regular people like you and me to send cash directly to the people we think really need it, it can be more of a personal statement.

Developing nations such as India hope that this money transfer system will revolutionize the money transfer industry with its advantages, such as reach, ease of use, and lower transaction costs and provide immense benefits to people in developing nations. Mobile transfers may be useful to emerging markets Vodaphone and Citigroup are using examples of an affiliate (Safaricom) in Kenya to launch a similar service right here in Europe.

“It is anticipated that Vodafone customers in the United Kingdom will have the first opportunity to use the service to send money to Kenya on a trial basis and both parties plan to launch commercially, with a focus on Eastern European and Asian markets, such as Poland and India, in the near future,” they said.

Bank of America Corp.’s online customers will also soon be able to use their cell phones and smart phones to check account balances, pay bills and transfer funds.The bank has said today that it will be launching a secure mobile banking module for 21 million banking customers.. The service will be launched in Tennessee in March 2007.