• WSJ (paid subscription required), Thursday, February 2, 2006 11:45 AM

Marketers of everything from automobiles to credit cards are using the cell phone to deliver sophisticated marketing messages, especially to the hard-to-reach under-25 market. Advertisers have used cell phones in marketing campaigns before, but mostly just for text messaging. Now that wireless networks have broadband-like speed and cell phones are equipped with faster processing chips, marketers are running ads similar to those run on the Internet and TV. Practitioners include General Motors, Levi Strauss, Nike, and Visa, all of which have delivered some kind of product message or announced a contest via cell phones. However, the jury is still out on whether such ads translate into actual sales or merely create a bit of buzz. Carl Fremont, an executive at ad agency Digitas LLC, says it will take time for marketers to understand U.S. consumer behavior with the new medium. "Until we understand that," he says, cell phone ads will be mainly "an engagement, customer-relations-management vehicle."

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