The Pervasiveness of Cell Phone Ads

Most people can agree that advertising is generally annoying. People are bombarded with advertisements everywhere they go. Companies attempt to sway us into purchasing their product every time we turn on the TV, listen the radio, see a movie, drive down a freeway or walk down a street.

This is why the issue of cell phone advertising seems to be the breaking point, and maybe the straw that will break the camel's back - the back of advertising so to speak.

Although marketing companies and businesses in general, find the technique of ads through text messages or when accessing the Internet via a cell phone, to be the future of advertising, users are finding the clout to be more and more evident each day the technology is enhanced.

This is why there is an ongoing debate as to whether companies should even be allowed to advertise via our cell phones considering we pay minutes and pay up every time we send a text message or check our voicemails. Incidentally, the speed with which one can access the Internet with a mobile device is not that great, so why slow that process even more with advertising?

There are 2.2 billion cell phone users in this country. Yahoo! recently began using cell phone ads for users in 19 different countries. For those customers, specifically, they now see an ad on their way to accessing a web page with their cell phone.

The ads include some for Pepsi, Procter & Gamble and Hilton and cell phone users affected by this recent advertising addition, live in countries such as the United States, Brazil and Italy.

Industry experts are estimating that mobile advertising will be worth around $11.3 billion by 2011. The figures are astounding and now the cell phone world will be cluttered with ads just as the actual online world is filled with pop-ups and other ads.

Although companies such as Sprint, TMobile and Verizon are part of the Mobile Marketing Association and have agreed to guidelines for cell phone advertising, none of that matters in the scheme of things. Users don't have a choice in the matter. Companies say the consumers do because they can bypass the ad screen on a cell phone, but that's not the point. If it was most customers' ways, there wouldn't be ads at all.

It is annoying and an invasion of personal space, but most people have become immune to it since advertising is such a large and subversive part of our daily lives - with or without the addition of cell phone advertising.