MOBILE PHONE ADS, THE NEXT POLITICAL ADVANTAGE?

November 15, 2006  

Last week was a very big news week. The Democrats won control of the House and Senate. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld resigned. Americans celebrated Veterans Day while U.S. forces were engaged in combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. One news story that may have gone unnoticed is the possibility that the major mobile phone companies could be offering free mobile phone service in the not-to-distant future.

On November 11, Google’s chief executive officer, Eric Schmidt, interviewed following a speech on business innovation organized by Italian students at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, opined that mobile phones should be free to consumers who accept watching targeted advertising. Things that Schmidt thinks about lately have had a way of becoming reality. Not long ago he thought about buying YouTube. Last month Google bought it for $1.65 Billion.

None of this should come as a surprise. After all, we already receive gobs of advertising on our computers. Websites are saturated with advertising and those pesky popup ads, if you’re not blocking them, can be a major nuisance. The obvious question is why has this not happened already?

The answer is that until recently you held up your mobile phone to your ear more than you held it in front of you looking at the screen. But as mobile phones have become more like computers with cameras, text messaging, and web browsing, people are spending many more hours a day on their mobile phones. Advertising now becomes a viable form of subsidy. Imagine what your newspaper would cost if it weren’t for advertising.

The key word in Schmidt’s statement, of course, is “targeted” advertising. This means that the mobile phone companies will analyze what we do with our mobile phones and send us ads targeted to our interests, much the same why we now receive targeted junk mail and ads on our computers.

On the mobile phones you buy your teenage children so you can stay in touch with them, they most likely will be getting ads for video games, music CDs, clothing, and all the other things researchers tell us young people buy with their disposable. Middle-aged people will get all those prescription drug ads. Wealthy people will get ads for things only wealthy people can afford. 

The ability of advertisers to target specific groups of individuals continues to get better year after year, so what this will eventually lead to one can only imagine. And the more we use a computer or a mobile phone, the more the people who want to target us with advertising learn about us and the better they are able to do it.

Privacy considerations aside, I suspect many, if eventually not most, people who pay their own mobile phone bills would be happy to receive these ads in exchange for free or even low cost mobile phones. We’ve learned to accept them on our personal computers. But ads for commercial products likely won’t be the only thing we’ll be receiving, and unlike junk mail, they won’t be easy to ignore.

Once mobile phone companies begin targeting us with advertising in exchange for free or low cost mobile phone service, it’s only a matter of time until that advertising includes political ads. Democrats, Republicans, and Independents will immediately compete to figure out how to take best advantage of this new opportunity. Indeed, members of congress and senators may sponsor legislation to encourage it. 

Just think, by the 2008 presidential election, political advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts could be coming directly to the American public on their mobile phones in the form of ads. People with Blackberries and other Internet-capable mobile devices already receive emails from political parties and fundraisers. Targeted ads on mobile phones would reach millions more.

Ever since the 2000 presidential campaign, both parties have used the Internet to raise significant amounts of campaign contributions, to inform voters on the issues, and to respond to their opponents. Targeting political ads to Democratic, Republican, or Independent voters to raise money and inform them on the issues via their mobile phones is the logical next step. Caller ID lets us avoid taking calls from people we don’t want to talk to, but ads in exchange for free service, like those on many websites, will be unavoidable.

Get-out-the-vote efforts also have become central to winning elections. They involve telephoning known supporters on the day of the election or a few days before, providing rides to the polls for known supporters, and direct mail campaigns. The importance of get-out-the-vote efforts increases as the total percentage of the population voting decreases. It is often easier and more cost effective to ensure that a hundred supporters show up at the polls than it is to convince a hundred voters to switch support from one party to the other. Get-out-the-vote campaigns can also be extremely important in high turn-out elections when they are extremely close.

Republicans have been credited with the best apparatus for doing this in recent elections, but Democrats obviously did well in this time around. With the two major parties on even ground for the next election both will be looking for whatever tool or technology that might give them an advantage.

Imagine it’s the morning of November 4, 2008. You pick up your mobile phone to call a friend. Before the call goes through an ad appears on the screen, “Have you voted for John Doe yet?” Ten minutes later someone calls you and another ad appears. This time it says, “If you need a ride to your polling place, call 555-123-4567.” Later that day you receive an interactive ad that asks you who you voted for and why. Up until now cell phone users have been largely beyond the reach of political pollsters. The new technology could enable them to solve this problem.

Like so many technological innovations in modern society, targeted ads in exchange for free mobile phone service is a double-edged sword. And if you’re saying to yourself, “No thanks, I’ll stick with paying for my mobile phone service so I don’t have to put up with ads,” well, the mobile phone companies have “ways of making you talk” on their terms.