Mobile marketing reach is too small, too expensive

Link: Advertising Age – Digital – Video Report: Mobile Marketing Stymied by High CPMs, Small Audiences

Overly high cost-per-thousand expectations and audiences too small to matter are stymieing the development of the mobile phone advertising business, according to media buying executives at this week’s Mobile Marketing association Forum.

“Most of the brands for whom we do investment advisory are not going to buy $60, $70 or $80 CPMs, even if that’s what the market demand is right now,” Eric Bader, senior VP at MediaVest USA, the country’s fifth-largest media-buying agency, said about the cost of trying to reach a thousand people, a standard metric in ad sales.

Interesting. So what’s a good price? According to Eric Bader:

“When you start to look at how effective search and the yellow pages and directory services are, that’s who [mobile is] going to be competing against and those CPMs are down in the $8, $7, $4, $10 range.”