Cell Phone Advertising I Could Live With

Initially, the idea of receiving any form of advertising on my personal cell phone does not sound grand at all. But, what if this advertising could be controlled. And what if it would reduce the price of your cell phone’s service plan.

The current approach to cell phone advertisements sounds like more of annoyance to cell phone carriers than anything. The aim is to do target advertising via text messaging. For example, the advertiser could send out a text message to all known female cell phone users between the ages of 21-30 and inform them about a designer purse sale at some local store.

Being bombarded with text messages would drive me nuts and I would ignore 98% of them. My solution for a more effective, less intrusive alternative would be on-cell-phone-event advertising, and would most likely require an agreement between a cell phone service provider and manufacturer. An example of its use is as follows: the cell phone rings; the user picks up the phone and immediately looks at the caller id, but instead of just having some blank background, it will now have an image of a product’s logo. Another example could be a screen saver that shuffles through various ads. Or a breakfast ad that pops if your alarm goes off in the morning.

This form of cell phone advertising seems to be very unintrusive. Moreover, the ads could be controlled. Users would be allowed to turn them on or off, with an incentive of a lower service fee for leaving the ads on.