A UK survey of 752 mobile users has shown good news and bad news for the mobile advertising industry. The good news is that people are interested in targeted ads that are relevant and unobtrusive...the bad news is that most people think the mobile ads they get are intrusive and irrelevant. “70 percent of mobile phone users consider the marketing offers they receive not to be relevant to them and 64 percent of these confess to being annoyed by them. Just 11 percent of those surveyed had ever purchased an item, or signed up for a special promotion or bundle as a result of an online promotion or offer from their mobile service provider” writes Cellular News. There’s a break-up by age group, with 75 percent of 45-54 year olds and 78 percent of 55-64 year olds viewing the marketing offers they receive as irrelevant to them—the 25-34 age group which illustrates the pitfalls and potential: “72 percent of 25-34 year olds who do not find offers relevant claiming to be annoyed by this practice. However, within this same age group 47 percent of all mobile users are also willing to change operators to one that can provide them with marketing offers and services more tailored to their lifestyles”.

MacWorld has a piece on mobile pop-up ads, although a more accurate description would be mobile screensaver ads. For example: “Mobile Posse offers what it calls idle screen ad insertion. After downloading a small application onto a phone, users start getting advertisements that often include discount coupons on their phones...Mobile Posse’s system learns from the type of ads that users click on so that it can avoid annoying phone users, said Jon Jackson, CEO of Mobile Posse. “The last thing we want to do is advertise to someone who is not interested,” he said. If, for example, a user receives five ads about fast food establishments and doesn’t click on any, Mobile Posse won’t send any more similar ads to that user.” Still, carriers are concerned the advertising style will annoy its customers and the big ad companies are leaning away from it, so it will be the province of start-ups until it proves itself, if ever. The banner ads, although described as boring, still have the benefit of scale—Admob claims it has served 5 billion mobile ads worldwide since it launched, and 1 billion of those were in July this year. The biggest market for Admob is the US, which produces 45 percent of impressions.