Business Week has an interesting article about the mobile advertising business in China. Although the current spending for mobile advertising is quite small (BW estimates US$17million in 2006), the shear number of mobile subscribers - almost half a billion - makes the market attractive.The current market in China is predominantly SMS messages, which can be a particularly intrusive form of push advertising. The article also looks at some of the new “pull” advertising that is based on 2D barcodes. A number of companies such as Gmedia and MyClick are actively running trials in some locations such as Starbucks.
One of the key factor is the slow deployment of 3G networks in China. There is still on-going debate about which 3G technology will eventually be rolled out: the Chinese 3G standard or one of the international 3G standards such as W-CDMA. This lack of high speed networks is undoubtedly one of the reasons that mobile advertising has made limited progress in China. For example, after a subscriber has clicked on a banner ad, if it takes too long for the resulting WAP page to load, the subscriber will lose interest and the advertisement will not have generated any benefit to the advertiser.
Read the full Business Week article HERE.
1 comment:
Starbuck's was running a mobile campaign that had to do with connecting to the mobile web from the logo and get a gift card sent to you.
Mobot was doing the Summer Pursuit game. At the time Neomedia owned them.
Look for this to take off not only in China but here in the United States also.
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