More than a third (38%) of U.S. mobile phone users remember seeing advertising on their cell phones in the first quarter of 2009, with smartphone owners recalling 59 percent of mobile advertising according to a new study by GfK Technology conducted on behalf of social networking service Brightkite.
For smartphone users, the top format is mobile advertising, while for regular phone users, it is SMS. The report found an increase in the types of mobile advertising formats that consumers are noticing.
Johnathon Linner
Just under a quarter (23%) of smartphone users recall seeing SMS advertising, but 20 percent saw ads on mobile social networks and 15 percent saw ads in mobile video. In just three months, the number of smartphone users seeing ads inside a location-based network has almost tripled.
The study also found mobile users are adopting a broader set of mobile services with 14 percent now using one or more location based services (38% of iPhone users) and 10 percent use a mobile social network (33% of iPhone users).
“Over the last few years, we’ve tracked the growth of mobile advertising, and this has been fueled by text messaging and mobile Internet formats. Now we are seeing consumers adopting a much broader set of mobile applications and services and this is exposing them to new ad formats,” said Jonathon Linner, Brightkite’s CEO.
“It’s fascinating to see that iPhone users are almost as likely to see ads in a mobile social network as they are in a text message. This was unthinkable 12 months ago.”
