I was speaking on a panel a few weeks back, which was an odd mix of folk really, so it was hard for the Chair Lady to involve everyone and maintain some kind of coherence to the discussion. But one of my fellow panelists was some kind of sales person for a tech infrastructure vendor. I won’t embarrass him (he did a great job of that himself) by naming him and his company, but he was the kind of person who couldn’t leave aside his sales pitch and either look at a bigger picture or actually answer the questions he was asked.

At one point he came up with a startlingly naive statement along the lines of:

- he certainly didn’t want advertising on his phone
- therefore no one else in the world would

I assume his little tirade would have been a different if his company had been in the ad business somehow. But even if they weren’t, it was an astonishing position to take in public against an industry that indirectly, pays his salary. I mean, how many servers and high end boxes would his company sell without online advertising, even if extending that principle into mobile advertising proved too intellectually complex for the poor chap?

The fact is that advertising is the primary commercial engine that drives the PC web and it will become as important on the mobile - indeed, it’s already going that way. If you try and imagine the web without advertising, you’re looking at a world where you pay for every time you search. There’s no free email. No Skype and IM. No media online. And no free services like Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn and many of the other, everyday things we take for granted. The web would be completely different space today and would have been unlikely to develop much beyond where we were in 1996 - an amazingly primitive and not really very interesting place to be, although Wikipedia still may have happened, so not entirely useless.

I was thinking about this Dorkface when reading about 4th Screen Advertising’s new survey about how consumers view mobile advertising when embedded in video. [Bias alert - 4th Screen are in a similar business to AdMob]. The survey was conducted among 600 consumers on O2 Active and sought to understand how they reacted to 15 second pre-roll adverts run before free video content, with age and gender targetting.

Now let’s just remind ourselves that this type of advertising is very intrusive - essentially, you are forcing the consumer to watch something, after which they get their reward of the free content. So unlike say a banner ad, you can’t possibly argue that people can ignore it if they’re not interested - they have no choice but to watch it. Therefore, it wouldn’t be very surprising if lots of people didn’t like this format, while finding other less intrusive formats acceptable.

On the other hand, the social contract is very clear - in other words, it’s very obvious that the free content is provided explicitly in exchange for the consumer’s attention for a short period of time. This is a little different to most advertising where this contract isn’t spelt out in quite the same way - a banner ad might be shown, but it’s not stated that the content or service provider can only produce this by showing ads. It’s implied, for sure, and most people understand this if asked. But I wonder how many make the direct connection with more subtle ad formats?

Anyway, back to the survey. An overwhelming 88% of respondents said that they were happy with this form of advertising of watching in return for the freebie and 59% said that it made them more interested in the brand being advertised. I reckon that even better results could be achieved given more sophisticated relevance and targeting that will come in the future.

So let’s end this idea that people don’t want advertising on their mobiles (or anywhere else for that matter) as it’s completely missing the point. Consumers are happy (actively happy) to get advertising, provided that they get something in return and the clearer we can make it what that something is, the better.

Of course, that’s just the base line of acceptance. Naturally, it’s far more effective to produce ads that engage with the recipient, but that’s an argument for another day.

In the meantime, I think we can say that people do want advertising on their mobiles.

Take note Dorkface.