• by Angie McCloskey , April 11, 2008

We all know that mobile advertising is the current buzz topic around the water cooler, but what is it really -- and how can it improve lead generation efforts? These are the questions I would be asking if I were an advertiser. How can I widen the pool of quality leads for my products and services? How can I get beyond the traditional co-registration networks? I've heard it time and time again; advertisers want quality versus quantity. If that is really the driving need, then advertisers should look no further than mobile advertising.

What would you think about the opportunity to reach 32 million plus potential customers at almost any time, day or night, through a highly personal, engaging device like their cell phone? It's almost too intimate.

Let's start with defining mobile advertising. According to the MMA glossary:

Mobile advertising is a form of advertising that is communicated to the consumer via a handset. This type of advertising is most commonly seen as a Mobile Web Banner (top of page), Mobile Web Poster (bottom of page banner) and full screen interstitial, which appears while a requested mobile web page is "loading." Other forms of this type of advertising are SMS and MMS ads (text messaging), mobile gaming ads and mobile video ads (pre, mid and post roll).

Sales from mobile advertising are expected to grow from today's $421 million to $5 billion by 2011.

Here are two primary ways that advertisers can use mobile advertising to support their lead-generation efforts:

1) Click to call: User clicks the green phone icon next to the 800 number and is routed to the advertiser's call center.

2) Traditional form lead generation: User completes required fields and the data is posted via real time to the advertiser.

Think about the thought process of consumers responding to a banner ad while surfing the mobile Web on their cell phone at home or work -- versus the consumer thought process of going through twenty-five offers in a co-registration path to get a free plasma wide-screen TV or some other incentive. It's clear there are real benefits in improved lead quality that mobile advertising can bring to the table. Sure, it's new. Sure, the leads cost more. They should. While consumers have to use a more tedious method to enter personal data than with typical keyboard entries, they are actually responding directly to the ad on the mobile device.

So I say wake up, direct marketers! Today, most of the mobile Web advertising is being leveraged by traditional brand marketers (including Mazda and Bud Light) to drive traffic to their branded mobile Web sites and increase brand reach/engagement via all touch points. I suggest anyone looking for incremental quality leads take a look at the obvious: a new and highly engaging channel called mobile advertising. It seems to me that this buzz topic could be just the thing we direct marketers need to eventually supplant the co-registration networks that we've all grown so reliant on. Only time will tell, and the prices are steep right now, but I believe this is a channel with enormous potential for quality lead generation.