Four distinct categories of mobile marketing, from Tommi Holmgren

Finnish blogger and mobile marketing expert Tommi Holmgren, whose day job is with Mediaedge in Finland, has been thinking about the 7 unique benefits of mobile. He has then applied the 7 benefits to the specific area of mobile marketing, and has come up with a good categorization of mobile marketing activities, fitting it into four groups. He has just now blogged about it, and is developing the thinking, and his blog is in Finnish, so I need to translate a bit to get most of our readers to be able to follow. But here is his categorization (he places these in a 2 by 2 box, so from the top left they are:

1 - Mobile direct advertising. This is direct and personal. It can transform from an interruption into content for the recepient. Uses the long term relationship and can use context, and can be used to make the customer visit a physical store, etc.

2 - Mobile "display" advertising (Tommi has the word display in quotation marks. I might call this mobile interruptive advertising). This is advertising shown in correlation with other activities on the phone, such as WAP banner ads, advertising inserted to the tail of an SMS text message, advertising related to search etc

3 - Mobile services (and where Tommi looks at mobile marketing, I could revise this for a more general use, and call it mobile sponsored services). This needs tight focusing and understanding the customer behavior. This would include advergaming, the various how-to services like mobile cookbooks, etc.

 4 - Mobile web pages. This is a cousin of internet web pages, and the marketing is done in the context of visitors to a page. Here the experience is more passive and can be done as a part of a more broad campaign using other mobile and non-mobile elements. Here it is important to note that mobile web surfing is quite different from internet surfing and the urgency and relevancy of what is on the mobile web pages.

Very good thinking by Tommi. If you can read Finnish, stop by at this page on his blog: Tommilla On Asiaa, but if you can't read Finnish, I'll return to this topic later as we see Tommi's thinking evolve. And if mobile marketing and advertising is part of your day job, then remember my 50 case studies of mobile marketing excellence in my new eBook, Tomi Ahonen's Pearls Vol 1: Mobile Advertising.