Not great news for the legions of mobile ad firms and the many content companies hoping to graft their ad models onto the mobile platform: a new survey from Universal McCann found that display and video advertising on mobile TV, and the mobile Internet in general, are “irritating.” In a poll of 9,500 mobile users in 21 countries, 61 percent of people rejected ads that ran alongside mobile TV programs and mobile Internet pages. Meanwhile, paid-for branded content, opt-in Bluetooth downloads and promotional giveaways fared much better, with 71 percent of those polled accepting these formats.

-- Tom Smith, Universal McCann’s research manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, quoted in the Guardian: “People always complain about things that are interruptive—it still works in traditional media but in this environment consumers have so much choice where they source content from and if it detracts from the experience they will go elsewhere.”

-- Not sure how these results tally with the glowing projections that have been made for how much revenue mobile advertising will bring in coming years—one recent report put it at $2.1 billion by 2011 in the U.S. alone.

-- More encouraging are the number of devices being used to consume mobile entertainment. In addition to their mobiles, two out of three people surveyed also own a portable music or media player, 45 percent have a laptop, and 28 percent use portable gaming machines. The proliferation of non-mobile devices will come in particularly handy in some markets that have yet to make the transition from using handsets primarily for voice calls. In the U.S., for example, data makes up only 20 percent of the use of a mobile phone (in the U.K. it is 50 percent).

-- All content has a price. It seems like an obvious point, but the survey found that people are more willing to pay for branded products like music, movies and games, than they were for social media services like user-generated content and podcasts. Taken as a whole, the survey seems to imply that the Facebooks and MySpaces will have to think of more innovative ways, beyond advertising and charging for subscriptions, to make themselves financially sustainable long-term in mobile.

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