• Reuters, Thursday, May 22, 2008 11:15 AM

Mobile phone advertising is still years away from any breakthroughs, though its eventual adoption is inevitable, ad executives said Tuesday. Speaking at the Reuters Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit, Publicis Groupe Chairman and CEO Maurice Levy told the audience "It will be slow, it will take time but it will be there," he said, because mobile phone advertising is "in the interest of the phone companies, consumers and advertisers. So it will be very difficult to resist."

Indeed, as mobile operators deal with falling traditional voice revenue, and consumers watch the price of just about everything food and gas related rise, free, ad-supported mobile content will start looking real good to everyone involved-especially the brands who will be able to target consumers based on time and location. Some forecasts suggest that the mobile ad market could generate up to $24 billion in revenue in the next four years.

"If you look at the long horizon, I think that advertising on mobile phones is going to be very, very significant, simply because there are going to be 5 billion mobile phones and they are always with you," Hamid Akhavan, the head of Germany's T-Mobile, said. He added that one of the major stumbling blocks to mobile ad growth is having too many carriers and too many phones with different capabilities, which results in a fragmented marketplace.

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