The early days of mobile marketing were mainly dominated by Push style advertising alerts, although more latterly the industry has evolved to Pull. As an example, many campaigns in the early part of this century involved consumers signing up to recieve special offers and alerts (usually via sms). Now, I would argue the emphasis is on banners ads served in mobile web pages and mobile applications that consumers can click on if they decide to interact.
There's probably a few people who would disagree with this analysis, especially those wedded to the old school technology and there's frequently a flurry of claims that advertising messages embedded in the sms that we send to each other as peer-to-peer messaging is "going to be huge". However, the only rationale for these ideas seem to be that there are an awful lot of them (probably 1000 Billion per annum). This is like saying that putting ads on the wings of the 17 quadrillion flies in the world is a great idea - "just look at the numbers!". In reality P2P sms doesn't offer advertisers much to create engaging marketing campaigns, being merely a small part of a text message, even if consumers would ever accept advertising highjacking their intimate or private moments.
However, where sms alerts make a great deal of sense today, and for the foreseeable future too, is in CRM types of activity. Visa Europe recently announced that they were launching a trial for this type of service for their customers where they get automated alerts about recent transactions by sms, which is the lowest common denominator for all phones, as well as via mobile email and via Android and iPhone Apps for the technorati.
While pioneers like First Direct have been doing this of years already, the huge scale that can be levereraged by Visa shows that suddenly the idea of CRM via phone has gone mainstream.
Other examples of companies using this type of medium is the airline industry for confirmation of flights and announcement of delays, recruitment companies and even our friends the mobile operators themselves, suggesting better tarriffs when we've busted through our bandwidth agreements.
The beauty of many of these ongoing initiatives are that they actually save the companies real money and improve customer service, which sounds a perfect solution in these troubled times.
