“Change we can believe in”. The famous words that were spoken by Barack Obama during many of his speeches while he campaigned across the United States on route to becoming the 44th US President.  And with that change, cell phones have become an integral part of the marketing world.  We see advertisements on TVs, magazines and newspapers on a daily basis, so it only makes sense that marketers push mobile announcements on our most personal piece of technology.

Mobile marketing is changing the face of media; it offers a sense of intimacy and loyalty that other media outlets struggle to achieve.  There are over 200 million cell phone users that live in the United States (that’s 1 out of 4 Americans) and we’re now beginning to see this exploited, from Time Magazine to Barack Obama.  Over 2.9 million cell phone users downloaded Obama’s phone application and received frequent updates about his campaign and whereabouts his next event.  Each cell phone user was specifically geo-targeted, so a Californian didn’t get the invite for the Florida rally, etc…   So yes, even Obama’s optimizing his messages.

Obama optimizes messages, do you?

With 2009’s economic downturn in full effect, businesses struggle to remain relevant in budget friendly ways, while cutting through all other clutter.   Companies have begun to use mobile marketing as a means to do that, distributing coupons, surveys, reminders, links and landing pages to stay connected and boost conversion rates.  Marketers have to create an engaging message to a specific audience if they hope to be successful.  They need to optimize, target and execute properly.

Newspapers and magazine readers are declining and people want a faster way of getting to information.  A mobile marketing campaign can be cheap and inexpensive from the other types of advertising; a company could boost its marketing strategies and send messages more frequently while spending less money.

But do we as cell phone customers have a choice of receiving these advertised messages, optimized or not?  Why should we have to pay for advertisements once they are streamed across our screens?  Marketers have to constantly be out there and in our personal lives to be effective.  Since mobile messaging is so new, is this something we should be concerned with in the long term?  And what might be the ramifications to one’s brand, sales and marketing campaigns?  Only time will tell…