Upwardly Mobile: Mobile advertising at work?

Sometimes you see a new invention and you think 'great idea'. Take the Valentine's Krispy Kreme donut - so bad, it's good. After all, why say it with flowers when you can say it with donuts? Other inventions prompt more head scratching. Vodafone Netherlands is the latest to come up with such an offering.

The giant's Dutch arm is experimenting with mobile advertising. No big news there - after all, most of the operators in the UK are doing exactly the same thing. However, where Vodafone Netherlands differs from its British cousins is in its attempt to take mobile advertising to the business market, rather than consumers.

To date, operators have typically focused their efforts on the average individual consumer and not the enterprise. Virgin Mobile in the US has introduced one of the more interesting examples of this with its Sugar Mama service, where users are offered free voice minutes or texts in return for accepting advertising messages or doing market research surveys for the MVNO.

I don't know what levels of take-up Sugar Mama has had but I can definitely see a market for it - hard-up teenagers, I suspect, will be happy to whore their mobiles in return for free minutes. I also wouldn't rule out Sugar Mama setting a precedent too, with more and more mobile content given away gratis in return for a little 'after these messages... ' intrusion.

But back to Vodafone Netherlands. No cash-strapped youths for their ad men - the operator is targeting insurance agents and pharmacists. Anyone in either of those professions will be able to get free content from publishers in their respective industries in return for some advertising being involved, as well as a discounted tariff and free data usage.

While the internet content market has been built on just such logic - you get to see silicon.com for nothing because we carry advertising, for example - mobile content is a very different beast. Mobile content is typically all about now - as in right now - as in 'I have to know the match results now not when I get back to my desktop now'.

Which means the content that will be farmed out to pharmacists will have to be hugely compelling to get them to browse it on their mobiles. Perhaps my knowledge of insurance and pharmacy is lacking here but I'd imagine 'must read' industry content is better consumed at desks, not on the move. After all, who wants to pick through the intricacies of the latest drug trials or tax regulations during a two minute wait at the bus stop?

That's not to say that enterprise mobile advertising doesn't have a future - I believe it does, although perhaps not under this umbrella. With a little adaptation, the Sugar Mama model could have legs.

Of course, end users in huge corporates aren't going to want to watch ads in return for lowering their mobile bills. SMEs and one-man bands could well do though - the more the user feels their device is a personal rather than corporate device, the more likely they are to be willing to swap their eyeballs for a freebie.

But I suspect content is not the key to persuading SMEs to swallow ads. Instead, operators would be wiser to focus on services. Why not facilitate SMEs' adoption of GPS or mobile email with a little advertising-centric price trimming? SME users have precious little time to waste on ads - why not subsidise mobile services that give them some of that time back?