I’ve recently just begun to spend a little bit of time thinking about marketing and advertising on mobile phones. With my background in online/e-mail direct marketing, I can easily see the potential power of direct marketing opportunities that the mobile phone platform offers. Obviously, members of groups like the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) see the promise as well. It seems to me, however, that most of the mobile marketing to date has been the utilization of white-labeled storefronts for brands to extend into images, ringtones, and games. Or MMS/SMS opt-in promotions. Will we ever see banner-ads or text-ads, akin to those online, enabled by advertising networks embedded into applications or even onto the deck itself? In five years will I open up my flip-phone and see an ad before I answer my call?

It seems to me that the difference between online and mobile marketing is that the consumers fundamentally view media consumption on these channels as different. Consumers expect everything online to be “free” phone vpn, and thus tolerate an amount of intrusiveness from advertising. On the other hand, consumers are conscious of and willing to pay for their phones’ service and the content that goes with it. An inappropriate or ill-timed advertisement could overly disgruntle a user away from either the carrier or the marketer. The hurdle promote on a mobile phone seems like a high one which deserves careful attention of those who are pursuing these avenues. But if approached correctly, it seems like quite an opportunity. Because of this working hypothesis, I’m going to continue to spend more time here; again, it’s something that I’ve just started to think about.

One Size Search Doesn't Fit All

With search becoming increasingly verticalized, I am seeing both the need and demonstration not just of searching within a specific domain, but also ranking results along multiple dimensions in that domain. For example, Indeed lets me search for positions with certain job titles, as well as identify how recently those jobs have been posted. Blinkx.tv has a great slider-bar feature that lets me shift between the importance of date and relevance in ranking my results. It even lets me toggle the sources of video content. Kayak has similar slider-bars allowing me to sort through flights easily by time-window.

But I (and mabye others?) want even more. As we become more sophisticated in what we are searching for, we should be able to toggle and sort though the dimensions of what is most important to us. For blog searches, sometimes I want to ensure that I read something with strong authority, sometimes I want to read something with the utmost timeliness, and sometimes I want to read something with highly dense mentions of a certain topic.

Google’s PageRank philosophy worked well in identifying the most relevant static pages. But as we are continuing to move towards the Incremental Web, perhaps the criteria for determining the best given search result is multidimensional rather than one-dimensional – and easily changeable by the user.