Signicom cell phone advertising

Friday, May 05, 2006

We recently discussed a possible new trend in Cell Phone Advertising. It appears a company is already working on cell phone advertising solutions although the type of advertising they offer appears to be somewhat more intrusive.

Signicom is a capital venture backed company from Tel Aviv. They are offering high impact advertising that will come preinstalled on cell phones. The Signicom cell phone advertising will be interactive allowing the user to trigger contact with the advertiser. How high impact these cell phone advertisements would be depends on if they are forced on the user and how often they occur.

Cell phone advertising may allow networks to reward users with special deals on their contract or talk time in return for having an advert enabled phone, however whether customers will opt for cell phone advertising after experiencing an almost advert free environment since the birth of the cell phone is unknown. The type of interactive adverts that Signicom intend to use are as follows:

* Retrieve and display a result page that contains advertiser defined content
* Call a phone number that directly connects the subscriber to the advertiser
* Trigger the creation of a text or email message that enables the subscriber to directly contact the advertiser
* Trigger an SMS/MMS that is directly sent to some advertiser defined short code
* Launch the browser and displays a mobile formatted Web or WAP page
* Launch a media player to playback an audio/video ad stream or commercial.