Mobile Ads Still Years Away from Breakthrough: Report

Executives from advertising and telecoms groups told the Reuters Technology, Media and Telecoms summit that advertising on mobile phones has enormous potential to become a significant platform for marketers—but that any breakthrough is years away, and major operators must work together to succeed, executives said at the summit.

“It will be slow, it will take time but it will be there,” Maurice Levy, chairman and chief executive of advertising group Publicis, told the summit in Paris, according to the article. “Why? Because it will be in the interest of the phone companies, consumers and advertisers. So it will be very difficult to resist.” There’s still too much fragmentation, both technically (with all the hundreds of handsets, operating systems, cell phone screens, and so on), and vertically across carriers, media studios, content providers, and advertisers.

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