Can we learn to love mobile ads?

Most of us know from the experience of inboxes clogged with mobile text spam, successful models of mobile advertising are in short supply.

This was underscored by a survey this week by GfK NOP in the UK that found a massive 70% of the mobile users found the ads not relevant and 64% actually annoying. Just 11% of those surveyed actually purchased an item. Not only is this bulk spamming failing to build new revenue streams, operators are alienating their customer base says the report. My experience tells me this problem is certainly not confined to the UK.

The potential of the vast mobile audience means people will still keep trying to crack this market. An interesting company in Asia is MyClick who have developed a solution so customers can interact with brand promotions using a mobile phone and its camera function.  Users are encouraged to photograph the brand image and they will be directed to a web site for more information or promotional offers.  The trick is in the downloadable software that has photo matching technology.

Here at least customer can control the process.  Plus the advertiser will pay for any data charges which is likely to keep both the customer and mobile operator happy. So far the service is launched with all six of Hong Kong’s mobile operators and China Unicom and China Mobile and over 30 brand partners.

You still need to get customers interested, however. One recent promotion was with Lipton Tea where users get interactive “Hiremaki” pop content when they use Myclick.  For Lipton, it helps to give its brand a younger image engaging customers in relevant content. Anything that gets advertisers paying for my content gets the thumbs up. This after all is the model that works so well on the web today.

According to MyClick CEO Rupert Purser a new service is photo blogging on a portal where ads are assigned a Myclick code. For instance someone can search for beer and get happy hour promotions. That sounds more like a service that could win over mobile ad weary customers.