Before the advent of mobile phones, advertising was carried out on a massive manner through “TELEMARKETING”, which means advertising of various products and services through the medium of television and radio. As radio became obsolete with time, most of the telemarketing was done via television. Television reached a huge base of customers as many people glued themselves to the idiot boxes.
However, with the emergence of corporate world, people belonging to the higher strata of the society could hardly find time for television viewing .So in order to create visibility the sales persons of various companies had to visit offices to create a buzz in the corporate class and sometimes had to bear the brunt of humiliation from the officials in the light of creating disturbance at inopportune moments. To top it all, a lot of money had to be invested in carrying out promotional activities in this fashion, which most of the times did not go in line with the budget allotted for promotion of the particular product or service.
Apart from this even the advertising carried out through television made huge holes in the pockets of the company that resorted to advertising. So in my view in these turbulent and troubled times the advent of mobile phones and the subsequent emergence of “mobile marketing” turned out to be a panacea to overcome the various problems associated with advertising. Thus, we can say that the cost associated with mobile marketing is much less compared to that of telemarketing.
Technology has played its role in facilitating the popularization of mobile marketing. Location based services (LBS) that are offered by certain cell phone networks facilitate in custom advertising reach a huge base of mobile phone users who are the subscribers from a particular location. GPRS internet and the technology of QR codes facilitated the promotional campaigns of various companies through social networking and free online services.
Well, most of us could notice that the contemporary world has turned to be a repository of many individuals highly enthusiastic about games and those who are passionate regarding gaming. So, capitalizing on this mad rush for games, brands are resorting to delivering promotional messages as part of mobile games or are even going to the length of sponsoring entire games to drive consumer engagement. This is known as Ad-funded mobile game or mobile advergaming.
In a nutshell, we could elucidate many aspects in length and breadth that portray the rosy side of mobile marketing however, on the other side there are certain privacy concerns in this regard because most of the times mobile advertising is carried out without prior permission from the customers leading to privacy violations.
I personally feel that howsoever attractive and lucrative may be the features provided through mobile advertising if consumers do not have confidence about the protection of their privacy, this lack of faith from consumer’s front would prove to be a hindrance to the widespread deployment.
Therefore, at the end of the day professionals who design the implementation of mobile advertising must be capable of striking a balance be-tween consumer’s privacy and creation of buzz about their brand. The balance should be attained to such a degree that the iridescent feathers of mobile marketing must glow to such a level of radiance that they such nullify the lacunas which may arise in the wake of intrusion into customer’s privacy.