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Big Surprise, Mobile Advertising Is Annoying

I am shocked -- shocked! -- that the results of a new study say 64% of people who've viewed mobile advertisements were annoyed by them. Tell me it isn't so! What does this say for the future of mobile advertising?

Well, it says wireless network operators might be wasting their money on advertising schemes that don't work. The study, which polled about 750 users over in the U.K., showed that the general public wasn't pleased with the promotions and offerings they have received on their mobile phones from their network operators. The survey didn't include advertisements from third parties. Either way, the results aren't all that promising.

Fully 70% said the offers sent to them were irrelevant and of no interest, and 64% were outright annoyed at the intrusion. The bad news is spread fairly evenly across age groups, too, with teenagers through the 45- to 64-year-old age brackets all agreeing that mobile ads pretty much suck. In the end, only 11% polled had gone so far as to buy an item or service that was offered to them via their mobile phones. (I am no ad man. Perhaps an 11% acceptance rate is remarkably high for such a new medium. Whether or not it falls in line with predicted adoption rates is anybody's guess.) But you have to admit that actively annoying 64% of your customer base is probably not a good thing.

For me, this begs the question: When is advertising not annoying? We can't go anywhere without being bombarded by marketing materials in one form or another. It is bad enough we have to sit through commercials before movies, or have pop-up ads get in the way of our Internet browsing, but for advertising to intrude on a device as personal as the cell phone just rubs me the wrong way.

Annoying or not, the mobile advertising machine already is steaming forward, with companies prepared to fling billions at ad firms to create teeny tiny ads that we'll see fleetingly on our handsets.

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