Mobile Marketing and Advertising to be Worth $3 Billion by 1Q 2008, Says ABI Research

Business Wire, April 10, 2007

NEW YORK -- The world market for mobile marketing and advertising is expected to be worth about $3 billion by the end of 2007, according to a recent study from ABI Research. By 2011, the value of this market will reach $19 billion, including mobile search and video advertising. ABI Research also expects some of the highest levels of spending to come in the broadcast mobile video space. By 2011, it will surpass SMS as a source of mobile marketing spending, due in part to mobile broadcast networks' presence in all major markets. In 2011, ABI Research expects spending for broadcast mobile video advertising alone to reach $9 billion.

But for this market to reach its full potential, carriers, advertisers and marketing companies must utilize multiple technologies and business models to bring their messages to mobile consumers. "Mobile advertising and marketing is a risky, albeit enticing business," says principal analyst Judith Rosall. "Unlike the PC, a mobile device offers a uniquely personalized communications channel. Carriers worldwide have quite a bit of information about their end-users: name, sex, age, geographical location. And depending on the handset and plan their users have purchased, the carriers probably also know something about their economic status and credit record. But they don't like to release this information to third parties because they want to protect and control their customers."

Mobile marketing and advertising is also at varying levels of maturity, depending on the market or country, says Rosall. In Europe and Asia, mobile marketing is fairly well developed. However, early-adopting brands in the US are still in the process of testing the water. They don't typically allocate a set percentage of their annual budgets to mobile. In turn, major ad agencies are still relatively inexperienced with mobile marketing campaigns, and reluctant to utilize location-based services and technologies such as MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) and mobile search that are still in the early stages of deployment. Their slow pace in exploiting opportunities in mobile marketing and advertising, however, has opened the door for a number of specialized agencies, aggregators, and other enablers.

ABI Research's "Mobile Marketing and Advertising" study (http://www.abiresearch.com/products/market_research/Mobile_Marketing_ and_Advertising) identifies the market impacts of ad-supported and related marketing of mobile content. It assesses the specific services that are most effective for mobile campaigns and the underlying technologies that support them, and presents global and regional forecasts of spending. It forms part of two annual ABI Research Services, Mobile Content (http://www.abiresearch.com/products/service/Mobile_Content_Research_S ervice) and Digital Media (http://www.abiresearch.com/products/service/Digital_Media_Research_Se rvice). (Due to their length, the above URLs may need to be copied/pasted into your Internet browser's address field. Remove the extra space if one exists.)

Founded in 1990 and headquartered in New York, ABI Research maintains global operations supporting annual research programs, intelligence services and market reports in broadband and multimedia, RFID & contactless, M2M, wireless connectivity, mobile wireless, transportation and emerging technologies. For information visit www.abiresearch.com, or call 1.516.624.2500.