Here comes the mobile phone ad disaster

I recently visited the Greek island of Santorini. The island is best known as a sunny destination for jet-setting holiday makers who lounge in idyllic hotel rooms perched on the sides of steep and majestic cliffs. But historians, geologists and archaeologists know Santorini as the site of one of the most horrible disasters in human history.

In 1967, archaeologists began excavating a site on the island, a small town called Akrotiri which had been buried in volcanic ash long ago. The site revealed an advanced Minoan civilization that had flourished on the island between 3,000 BC and around 1600 BC.

Scientists found frescoes showing life on Santorini - happy people lounging in the bay on shaded pleasure boats, fisherman, boxers and, most famously, barefoot maidens gathering saffron in the fields. Homes in the town uncovered had, incredibly, hot and cold running water, indoor bathrooms and frescoes showing a magnificent city on the island, now lost.

Santorini, it appears, was a kind of paradise, until something utterly catastrophic happened. The island was shaped at that time like the letter "C," with a little island in the middle. That little island was formed by a "hole" in the Earth's crust, which served as something of a relief valve for the tectonic pressures that build up between the African and Eurasian plates.

Sometime around 1600 BC, a very strong earthquake rocked the island, wrecking homes. Then the volcano blew rocks the size of cars into the air, some of which came crashing down on the island's towns and villages. Most or all of the survivors, at least in Akrotiri, fled in boats.

After they left, the volcano erupted in one of the most catastrophic events of the past 5,000 years. The eruptions, and the toxic layers of ash that fell, dozens of meters deep, killed all life on the island. Silt and ash unloaded into the atmosphere, creating a global "nuclear winter," which caused massive crop failure and famine as far away as China. Scientists can still see the effects of the eruptions in polar ice cores and 4,000 year-old bristle cone pine trees in California.

The residents probably headed for either Crete, the other major Minoan island, or Egypt, with which the Santorinians had extensive ties. Regardless, they probably didn't make it. Tidal waves and earthquakes wiped out most of the buildings on nearby Crete, and destroyed most or all of the boats there, ushering in the beginning of the end of the Minoan civilization. Any boats in the water would have been washed away by tidal waves. Santorini was destroyed and forgotten for 3,600 years. Crete quickly slipped into a permanent dark age. The great Minoan civilization was gone forever.

Which reminds me of mobile phone advertising.

Coming to a phone near you

Life is good in the mobile phone universe, with plentiful choice, data access getting faster and cheaper, and great new technologies like GPS and better cameras being built in all the time.

Unfortunately, the "paradise" of using a mobile phone may soon be destroyed by a tidal wave of advertising. You may be shocked by what the advertising, handset, search, software and other industries are planning for your phone.

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Here are just some of the conduits through which advertising will enter into your mobile phone:

• Unwanted calls

• Recorded advertising voice-mails

• SMS ads that ring your phone

• MMS ads that ring your phone

• E-mail ads

• Advertiser-supported software and services

• Web pages that force you to view an ad before you can see the page

• Location-based advertising -- you'll walk by a store, and it will ring your phone to tell you about a sale

• Viral videos

• Text, e-mail or Web-based ads that encourage you to "click to call"

• Search ads tailored for phones

The blog, "A Media Circus" calls mobile advertising " the next Internet gold rush." Unfortunately, the mother lode is in your pocket.

The chairman of the advertising company Publicis, Maurice Levy, recently told the Reuters news agency that a variety of factors would make mobile-phone advertising "very difficult to resist."

With increasingly high gas and food prices and an economic downturn, advertisers can look to mobile advertising to grow revenue, according to a recent poll from Harris Interactive.

Mobile advertising revenue is conservatively projected to grow by 10 times within five years.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt told a German magazine that "mobile will be a larger business than the PC-Web." Since Google's main business is "PC-Web" advertising, how hard do you think they're working on making money on ads for your mobile phone?

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Microsoft announced last month that it would add advertising to its mobile IM and e-mail tools.

Yahoo also announced last month that it would sell advertising "space" on text messages that users have signed up for to receive content like news, horoscopes, sports scores and weather.

Both Nielsen and ComScore added programs recently for measuring mobile advertising and audiences.

Like the rumbling of the ground on Santorini, these events should serve as harbingers of the disaster to come.

Who's to blame?

There's plenty of blame to go around for the impending disaster. But deserving more of their fair share of the blame is the coveted 18-24 year-old demographic who, according to research by BIGresearch, are roughly twice as likely as other age groups to reward mobile-phone advertising with purchases based on those ads. And the Harris Interactive report says that when it comes to mobile phone ads, " Teens will bite on nearly everything ." They say the young are our future, and in this case, that's a bad thing.

But even among the general population, there simply isn't enough resistance to mobile advertising. Research and Analysis of Media (RAM) conducted a survey that found mobile ads "more effective" than online ads -- about 20 per cent more effective.

Even though some users may assume their wireless carrier is a partner that will help them resist unwanted ads, carriers, in fact, are working hard on developing programs to facilitate advertising.

Even the handset makers want a piece of the action. Nokia this week launched its Nokia Advertising Alliance, which combines, according to the company press release, "leading mobile marketing solutions, including couponing, location-based targeting, image recognition, and other emerging technologies, to offer advertisers a simple way to increase consumer engagement."

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You can blame Apple, too. Not for selling you out, but for selling a phone that's ideal for advertising. One commentator says that video content is the fastest-growing segment in mobile advertising precisely because of the iPhone's big screen, high-quality video and popularity. The 3G version won't help matters.

You can count on Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to try to clobber each other in the mobile advertising space. In fact, to varying degrees, these giants are all betting the future of their companies on monetizing your mobile phone.

I'm not saying that companies are evil, or trying to do you harm. In fact, many are working hard to establish responsible, sane policies for how mobile advertising is conducted.

Harris Interactive advises that "consumers will accept mobile advertising if there is a pay-off/value proposition; the ads are relevant; [users] control what they get and how they are profiled; and they may share and be willing to receive ads." But this was the advice long ago about e-mail ads, and we know how that turned out. The difference this time is that mobile phone ads will actively interrupt you no matter where you are.

The Mobile Marketing Association publishes guidelines, which most reputable companies will adhere to. Disreputable companies from all over the world will ignore them. Regardless, the trickle will turn into a tidal wave.

The problem isn't that somebody out there is looking for innovative ways to leverage your mobile phone to sell you something. The problem is that everybody is doing it. The result will turn your mobile phone into an annoying, interrupting, commercial idiot box that combines all the worst qualities of TV, telemarketing and spam.

Like the Santorinians, we have nowhere to go. The disaster is coming, and there's not much any of us can do about it other than reward companies that don't engage in mobile phone advertising, punish those that do and hope for the best.