Mobile offers marketers many unique advertising possibilities. Among them are the ability for location-based ads, personalized ads, and ads based on time of day.

But what type of mobile ads do consumers really want to see? An in-depth study from Upstream confirms that personalized ads are by far and away the consumer favorite.

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Upstream conducted a study of over 2,000 mobile users to see what sort of ads they preferred to receive. The results were somewhat surprising, with an overwhelming majority preferring personalized ads to any other kind. The preference was very strong for personalization, with more than 4 times as many people preferring it over, for example, location based ads.

“Comparing the importance of personalization versus location in receiving mobile ads is especially interesting, given the hype around location-based players such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, Facebook Places or even Google+ with its Latitude check-ins,” said Assaf Baciu, Senior Vice President, Product Management, Upstream. “While location remains an important factor in delivering mobile ads, tailoring interactions via mobile to consumers’ ‘tastes and interests’ clearly presents much greater potential for driving higher response and conversion rates.”

Upstream also looked at what type of campaign mechanics were most likely to lead to a followup action by the consumer. Consumers were asked to rank their “channels of influence”, and the results were a bit surprising.

Some of the more widely publicized means of mobile advertising such as mobile website ads and mobile search ads did not score very well, especially among feature phone users. However, certain very basic marketing channels such as opt-in text messages rated very highly.

Upstream previously released a study, North American Consumer Attitudes to Mobile Marketing, which you can download by clicking here.

21.08.2011    Tags: coupon, Mobile-Coupons, mobile-messaging, Mobile-Search, sms-ads