Will People Accept Ads In Exchange For Free Content? at MobHappy

by Carlo Longino on January 19th, 2006 in Marketing.

Following Oliver’s post earlier in the week about advertising and my own about mobile TV has got me wondering about a few things.

The ideas that some people have about mobile advertising are simply asinine (as Oliver pointed out). If I hear one more person say how great it will be for somebody to walk past a store and have an ad for it sent to their phone, I’ll scream. That example’s been trotted out in just about every mainstream article about mobile advertising, and it’s simply a bunch of bull. Forget about the technical feasibility, which remains a major issue, and simply think about, as a consumer, how supremely annoying it would be to get pelted with an SMS for 25 cents off a latte every time you passed a coffee shop.

It’s all a question of value — will people feel like what they’re getting in return for being subjected to a barrage of advertising makes it worthwhile? Given what’s being tossed around, that’s not likely. Operators say they’ll offer people reduced fees if they agree to get ads; as Oliver says, people have shown they’re willing to spend money to avoid ads, so that’s a questionable proposition. And the problem with sending people location-based ads with discounts and coupons is that location is but one element of context. Just because somebody’s in the vicinity of a shop or restaurant doesn’t mean that they’ve got any interest at that time in buying something. You could argue on some level that the idea, then, is to create an interest, but that doesn’t seem to be a plan that will be successful in the long term.

But thinking about mobile TV this week has made me wonder if people would be more willing to accept advertising if it means they can access content for free. For instance, I’ve been playing with an EV-DO phone from Sprint lately than can access all sorts of live TV and video on demand. I remain skeptical that people will have sustained interest in a lot of this stuff, and the subscription-based or one-off pricing of the content reinforces this feeling. For instance, there’s a “channel” on the service from Adult Swim that has a bunch of short video clips, and Sprint charges $4 per month to access it. $4 isn’t necessarily a high price, particularly if you’re an Adult Swim fan, but $4 here, $3 there, $8 over here adds up pretty quickly. What about offsetting these prices, or eliminating them by showing a brief targeted ad before the clip? Sprint wouldn’t have to sell much advertising to make back that $3 per month.

The key to mobile marketing is getting permission from users to advertise to them. The key to getting permission is to offer the user something valuable in exchange. They won’t accept being hit with ads for the sake of being hit with ads, nor will they accept something minimal — like that 25 cents off a latte coupon — in return. But, given that people already accept some advertising in exchange for content on other platforms like TV, radio and the Web, they may similarly trade off being subjected to (some) ads in exchange for access to premium content on their mobile phones.
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