February was filled with events of the mobile phone industry – the Mobile World Congress at Barcelona, which at the same time was the frame for the presentation of the International Mobile Gaming Awards. At the Independent Games Festival at San Francisco a lot of awards were handed out, too.

Not only Mobile Gaming, also Mobile Advertising remains an exciting subject. The opinions concerning the current development still differ. Accross the board, the mood is positive. It seems that slowly the understanding is creeping in that we have to exercise patience – and comparisons with the development of web advertising increasingly are popping up. Some quotations of this month:

“The model for mobile advertising is all about targeting customers on a very individual and personal basis. It’s similar to online advertising in that companies can target marketing campaigns based on which sites consumers access. However, the click through rate for mobile advertising is between 3% and 7%, which is well above that for web advertising which sits at just 1%.”
Kursten Shalfoon, Vodafone New Zealand

„The whole mobile industry is going through the same transition the online industry went through when people were putting advertising on a 19-inch screen.“
Michael Bayer, RPM Communications

“Social networking is still new, and advertisers are still trying to decide how to effectively use it, you bring in the mobile aspect, and it’s ‘new plus new.’ ”
Elgin Kim, Nokia

“Down the road, mobile banner ads will be a thing of the past. If an ad doesn’t have some kind of interactivity to it, it will be irrelevant.”
Dan Gilmartin, uLocate

Many of the discussions about success and failure, about progress and stagnation probably are the result of our time’s impatience. We want everything immediately and quickly. We wish to jump over the time everything on this world needs to maturation. The globalized economy demands for perfection in the speed of light.
But perfection needs a lot of time. The medium mobile phone won’t disappear from the market – that’s why we can be relaxedly excited.