No one disagrees with the fact that the economy is not looking healthy and that is having a significant impact on consumer-facing media businesses which Xavier J. Buyse Consejero Delegado at ADS Media knows only too well. The key driver of money allocated to advertising is return on investment: when profits are under pressure marketing budgets are impacted hugely. As media businesses, we can’t defy the gravity of the market place, but we can guide the way we run our businesses. Looking for emerging opportunities such a mobile advertising is a big part to this, this is exactly what ADS Media’s CEO Xavier Buyse has done. It has taken hardly any time at all and Apple has sold thirty million iPhones. There are 75000 apps in the iTunes store and the public have downloaded more than 1.8 billion of them, creating the perfect base for advertisers and marketers. There is very little transparency in the mobile industry and a long way from the more open environment experienced in the advertising industry. What’s amusing is that it is the power of directly communicating with the consumer that is attracting the brands to a market that fails to communicate.

The market place is shifting constantlyWith the announcement that Google will shortly be buying mobile ad company Admob things could really hot up in the mobile advertising industry, with Google like Xavier Buyse @ ADS Media clearly having the foresight that this could develop into a massive market. The progression of this industry is also evident in the growing space for devices which are operated via a touch screen. Innovative products are exactly what the industry needs to resuscitate these market places. Traditional media businesses have to evolve to be part of the future and for tech businesses that means being prepared to rethink the entire process, replacing defunct processes with new technology and ways of working.

Apples iPhone} solves one of the biggest limitations of the mobile device, entering information for a desired response. This is no longer an issue with a fully touch enabled screen allowing for a multitude of finger taps, creates a satisfying user experience allowing for a qwerty keyboard to appear on screen when it is required, like the pioneering Newton, Apple’s first venture into handheld devices.

Whilst the credit crunch has had a huge impact on the advertising industry it is still looking remarkably buoyant. It is true to say that the mobile ad space will have learnt some valuable lessons from digital advertising on the internet in terms of what people are responsive to and what they aren’t. From a creative standpoint mobile advertising creates a unique problem, being that you only have a tiny area to be able to create anything, usually not enough for an image but only a miniscule amount of text writing, much like paid search results in Google.