Mobile Marketing Goes Mainstream

Marketing on mobile phones has become increasingly popular over the past few years as the technology of Short Message Service (SMS), better known as text-messaging, has become more and more refined. According to the experts, mobile marketing was born in the early 2000s in Europe when businesses started to collect mobile phone numbers and send off texts, often unwanted, that hawked various products.

Over the past few years, text messaging has become more and more legitimate as an advertising channel. Unlike email, which goes out over the public Internet, mobile marketing typically goes out over a wireless service. That gives the advertisers who have begun to utilize it have devised various ways to keep track of the sort of content that is going out over their networks. In addition various agencies involved in the business of mobile marketing, including the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Mobile Marketing Association, have set guidelines for the industry.

Mobile marketing initially received negative media coverage as being simply a new form of spam. This was because some advertisers acted like spammers - purchasing lists of mobile numbers and sending unsolicited content to thousands of mobile phones. But as the industry came up with regulatory guidelines, mobile marketing became more and more popular. And now, according to industry watchdogs, there are over 100 million text-message ads sent to welcoming mobile phones every month.

Over the past few years mobile marketing has become increasingly popular as marketers have begun to treat text messaging as a valuable investment of their advertising budget. But one key reason for providing texts in the new wave of mobile marketing is that it allows consumers to opt in to the service. And often mobile operators demand a double opt in from the consumer and the ability for the consumer to opt out of the service at any time by sending the word STOP via text. These guidelines are established in the MMA Consumer Best Practices Guidelines which are followed by all mobile marketers in the United States.

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