Mobile Advertising: Friend or Foe?

Mobile Advertising: Friend or Foe?

Billboards are long gone. TV’s are as well. Newspapers, sayonara! The next form of advertising is upon us and is exploding onto the market. Mobile Advertising is the term coined to represent not moving persuasion grabbers, but advertisements coming through cell phones. The newest trend is here and is becoming a fad worldwide but there are concerns. Is this new form of advertising right or wrong; and does it take infiltrating our privacy to the next extreme?

There are essentially two sides to this new fad. One being that it is a great thing and could provide relative advertising of local restaurants when searching online from a mobile phone.

“Tying ads to online searches from mobile phones is another potential goldmine. A subscriber typing in “pizza” for instance, could receive ads for nearby pizza parlours along with his generic search results. Such a customer, mobile operators hope, is likely to be more grateful than annoyed by the intrusion” (Business)

This would be in a way helpful because it could spark ideas on where to eat if in a large group. The opposition however thinks this is a bad idea in that you are allowing not just the wireless carriers to know your location but also the advertisers (Haskin). Both point out the fact that the carriers should offer something back or a discounted rate if you allow them to send you advertisements. The main way that advertisers are doing this is through the use of text messages and now, as phones and the services that come with them grow to be more advanced, the advertising tactics do as well.

Both articles present one side of the story. One presents it as a business opportunity, The Economist, and the other presents it as a rant against companies for doing this, ComputerWorld Magazine. The Economist views the industry side about how this is good for the wireless companies and how it is also good for consumers by allowing the customer to get free rewards for allowing the advertising on their phones. It also relates it to something positive for the customer when searching and relative items come up with your search. I find these points better explained because they come with the facts and figures that make sense for the most part. The Economist finds a few faults that are shared between the articles, one being that we are used to advertising in other places, such as radio and television, but we consider our phones to be more sacred and more personal to our being. The second common ground that these two articles strike together is that if the phone companies share the valuable information that they have at their beckon call with the advertisers than this would break some sort of privacy law, and would therefore most like end up in a lawsuit. For that reason then, as of right now, if you receive