Mobile users face ads deluge

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Nearly 1.5 billion people worldwide will receive adverts via text messages this year, with the strongest growth in China and the Far East, according to Juniper Research.

In those markets, the market is expected to be worth over $2.1 billion (£1.1 billion) by 2012, said the report, Mobile Advertising: Delivery Channels, Strategies and Forecasts.

Mobile advertising companies are also targeting phone subscribers' "idle" screens, showing commercial content when the phone is in standby mode. Currently, spending on idle-screen advertising amounts just seven million dollars a year. Juniper expects this to reach $500 million (£254 million) by 2012.

The most dramatic increases of all, however, are expected from advertising on mobile TV services. Worth just $335 million this year, spending is expected to reach $2.5 billion in 2013. Total advertising spend on mobile services is expected to reach $7.6 billion in the same year.

Mobile advertising currently lags behind both traditional media and the Internet, according to Dr Windsor Holden, the report's author. But the unique aspects of advertising on handsets - including a high degree of personalisation and high response rates from consumers - will attract leading brands to the medium.

Businesses are likely to be less keen, however, on services that "push" advertising content to their staff during working hours.

"The vast majority of businesses will be highly sceptical about such advertising, given that most have seen their inboxes clogged up with spam at one time or another," Dr Holden told IT Pro. "They would probably view advertising, whether highly targeted or not, as an inconvenience at best and - in most cases - as an irritant."

He added that enterprises were only likely to accept advertising pushed to company mobile devices once online advertising was well established among consumers.

Mobile advertising was one of the strongest categories at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year.

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