Mobile Radio Simplified. Accessible. Relevant.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

The convenient way to quickly send and receive messages while otherwise not free (or not willing) to make a call, has finally overtaken voice calls per month in sheer volume, in every age category. Emarketer cites the latest data from Nielsen.

My own usage certainly rings true with the numbers; my mobile plan reveals that texts sent and received are at least double that of my voice calls. While mocked by the 18-and-under set for my lack of speed at the keypad, I still find texting to be my new favorite form of brief, practical communication.

But nothing beats picking up the phone and calling when it’s not mere information you want, but an emotional connection with a loved one. Or perhaps, more information than can be conveyed in 160 characters.

It’s important to note the trend, but also to note that it in no way signals any danger to the future of mobile voice calls. The phone after all, is still an audio device and will always be. We just get more sophisticated in the additional ways we use it as more options emerge.

The best way to responsibly understand and share with others what mobile advertising is, read the wikipedia article now.

This post will be just restating the obvious for the new media readers among us, but even then, you have to keep up daily to maintain a clear head about what is relevant vs what is mere intrigue.

The bottom line in case anyone asks you, mobile advertising, the little $600 million step-child to internet advertising altogether, consists of two main things:
1) Little banner on on little screens on phone browsers.
2) Sponsored text messages, or some other way to use text messaging without crossing the line into spam.

Although mobile marketers only talk openly about a steady increase in this existing paradigm, as no one apart from visionary entrepreneurs wants to be pinned to specific predictions, the real gut about the exciting future of mobile advertising lies in emerging disruptive mobile media ideas and innovations. We’ll see quite a few things fail, and a few things rise to redefine the mobile landscape. Of course as an self-promoting entrepreneur myself I believe our audio advertising model will be one of the disruptors.

Take a look at this chart I found from a post last summer…

I bet if we got a focus group of 20 mobile executives together now, most would say this revenue breakdown is already outdated. I would be one of them, and would argue purely from changes in pricing and consumer trends since last year, that the pie will be cut in a whole different way.

$273 Million Premium SMS Revenue is a Third of Mobile Content Revenue

According to the new Telephia Premium SMS Report, Premium SMS revenues totaled more than $273 million, making up 32 percent of mobile content revenue in Q1 2007. This report includes content purchased via premium SMS from off-portal storefronts as well as premium text messaging services, like voting/sweepstakes and chat.

Download purchases paid for via premium SMS (at off-portal storefronts) totaled nearly $215 million, accounting for 79 percent of premium SMS revenue. These off-portal storefront purchases include content such as ringtones and horoscopes. Voting/sweepstakes entries generated more than $35 million. While voting/sweepstakes entries generated only 13 percent of total revenues for premium SMS transactions, they represented 47 percent of premium SMS volume, equaling more than 34 million transactions.

Kanishka Agarwal, vice president of mobile media, Telephia, said “Premium text messaging continues to be an additional way to reach consumers directly… (with) a healthy slice of the mobile content market, accounting for an off-portal share of 32 percent… marketers are experimenting beyond the standard rate SMS voting pioneered by American Idol and tapping into premium SMS with voting/sweepstakes campaigns. NBC’s Deal or No Deal has translated into a premium SMS hit, generating nearly half of the volume and revenue of voting/sweepstakes entries in the first quarter of 2007.”

*Represents unclassified premium SMS short codes

How does SMS fit in with the development of the celecast USP?