Tag: History

Marketing has come to existence since the introduction of the metal movable type, the first printing press invented by Johannes Gutenberg in 1450. When his printing machine became popular due to the success of publishing the Gutenberg Bible, flyers and brochures have become widespread and have become the first form of marketing. Since then, promotion of products and services has been done through printed and later, digital means. Magazines, newspapers, and posters have been filled with products and services that cater to the needs and wants of people. With television sets and radios becoming available on a commercial scale, people have seen and hear commercials during break times in between shows that are aired on both media.

The introduction of the first mobile phone in 1973 has revolutionized the way organizations endorse products and services to be sold. SMS, known as text messages, sparked a new way of advertising, which became known as mobile marketing. In comparison to traditional marketing, which comes in various media and sizes from the flyers to the billboards, mobile marketing comes in small packages, although more phones have been improved with wider screens, including smartphones, causing a cultural hype within the youth, which is the most dominant cell phone-using demographic. To most people mobile marketing can be a form of guidance and annoyance depending on how companies endorse their products. And with the further innovations on mobile technology, including the introduction of smartphones and 3rd generation (3G) phones, most people like yourself find the current mobile marketing trends complex. Here are the common marketing methods used by advertisers on mobile phones.

SMS or short messaging service is the most common marketing method done by promoters on phones. Promotional messages include details of a product or service, and the numbers to call for people who want to try or purchase it. SMS gained fame after 2000, when firms and business in Europe and some countries in Asia have collected phone numbers and started sending unnecessary text messages.

MMS, known as multimedia message service, is used as a marketing method where an organized set of images, text, sounds, and clips is used to endorse a product or service. MMS uses various types of media in comparison to SMS, which is a text-only message. The former method can be used in 2 ways: application-to-person (A2P) and person-to-person (P2P). One great example is the continuous advertisements of Motorola at House of Blues, where the brand tolerates the users to send their pictures through phones to the light-emitted diode (LED) and make a web log or blog for their images in real-time.

Mobile marketing can also be performed through games, specifically on real-time 3D games, massive multi-player games, and casual games. These games have been played by millions of mobile phone users, including the youth demographic, which caused companies to send marketing messages through the games and endorse games to attract customers. The method is termed as mobile advergaming.

There are other means of cellphone-based marketing including the use of Bluetooth and Infrared, although they are less popular to SMS, MMS, and mobile advergaming. You may find all of the mobile ads as a nuisance, but they have changed the way people endorse their products forever. Whether you like it or not, mobile marketing is here to stay, so get used to it.

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