With More than 2 Billion Mobile Phone Users in the World Of Which 236 Million Use 3G, Can Advertisers Be Very Far Behind?

And for good reason. Take a look at just about any marketing report and it will tell you that mobile phone advertising revenues are expected to increase around 8-fold from today through 2010.

A report from Magna Global summed up the thinking going on in the advertising community:

And the year does seem be one where content providers and advertisers are experimenting to find out what works and what doesn’t.

On the advertising side eMarketer senior analyst John Gauntt said “The challenge for marketers looking at mobile TV for the next two to three years is primarily one of learning about which mobile-native broadcast experiences consumers desire and the degree to which they are willing to accept marketing messages to subsidize or enhance this experience.”

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On the content side the football World Cup in Germany will be a major test for mobile operators and users. With such a small screen size the pictures have to be as sharp as possible, and tests will be conducted using Digital Multimedia Broadcast (DMB) and Digital Video Broadcasting Handheld (DVB-H) to see which can handle making a fast moving soccer ball look like a soccer ball on such a screen size.

The Beijing Olympics are just two years away. They are seen by many as the real launch pad for mobile video services, not the least in China itself..

Visiongain, a UK-based independent media company, has issued a new report analyzing mobile advertising and marketing through 2011. It says that mobile advertising in Europe and US last year equaled about $255 million, but will be $1 billion by 2009.

If the schedule by Visiongain proves true, then by the year 2007 advertisers will have figured out what works and doesn’t so that in 2008 advertising on the mobile becomes mainstream.

But it is not just the technical systems that need testing. JupiterResearch in the US says mobile’s video success is going to depend on the industry finding the right mix of premium content and the price people are willing to pay for that content.

JupiterResearch analyst David Schatsky warned that the uptake on mobile video programming will depend more on the business models and content offerings than on the technology. He warned that while consumers are interested in mobile video, they’re not going to pay large fees for mediocre content.

Various reports out there say there is a preference for paid content over ad-supported video (Starcom) , and vice-versa. (Points North Group). Nothing is really going to get decided until the various business models are tried out.

eMarketer believes that by 2009 some 530 million 3G subscribers globally will watch video on their phones, 121 million will pay for premium video services and watch them on their phones and 100 million will watch broadcast TV on their phones.

But there is still a lot of groundwork to be done. eMarketer’s John Gaunbt warned, “Marketers shouldn’t believe for a minute that either the mobile carriers or the content providers have cracked the business model, let alone the digital rights issues that will be crucial to migrate mobile TV from one market stage to the next.”

In urging advertisers to start conducting now their own research into what works on the mobile platform, Magna Global gave a hint of the treasures ahead. “With a potential audience in the billions, as infrastructure is deployed to meet advertisers’ needs, we believe this vast untapped market will ultimately emerge as one of the most important of the early 21st century.”

With More than 2 Billion Mobile Phone Users in the World Of Which 236 Million Use 3G, Can Advertisers Be Very Far Behind?

It’s already well understood that advertising money is flowing away from traditional media to more unconventional channels, and a survey by eMarketeer points out that the two tactics that advertisers want to experiment with this year over any other are video and the mobile phone.