Cynicism About Mobile Advertising Is Greatly Misplaced

Every now and then, I see an article in the media that is skeptical about the future of mobile advertising – the kind of ad you see when you open an app on your smartphone and there’s either a discount coupon at the center of the screen or a display ad at the bottom.
Cynicism About Mobile Advertising Is Greatly Misplaced
There’s still lots of untapped potential with mobile advertising. Pannawat/iStock
Updated:

Every now and then, I see an article in the media that is skeptical about the future of mobile advertising – the kind of ad you see when you open an app on your smartphone and there’s either a discount coupon at the center of the screen or a display ad at the bottom.

Many critics have asserted that mobile advertising does not work, that mobile marketing is all but dead and that people worry too much about their data privacy to accept these techniques on their devices and will not do so in the future.

Facebook’s latest quarterly earnings report may show that the social media network now earns a whopping 75% of its US$12.5 billion in annual revenue from mobile advertising, but even that does not seem to calm the naysayers.

Now the skeptics may start changing their minds, however, thanks to a number of recent rigorous studies that have systematically analyzed the effectiveness of different kinds of mobile advertising and marketing over the past few years in a wide variety of countries.

Anindya Ghose
Anindya Ghose
Author
Related Topics