"Mobile is the hottest new marketing channel"

So reckons Edward T. Manzitti, vice president for research of the Direct Marketing Association, a trade group that recently released a study of mobile users’ responses to unsolicited offers (reports the New York Times).

Mr. Manzitti blames the fact that recipients often have to pay for text-message ads for much of the opposition to them. “If the carriers offered marketers a different type of pricing, where the marketer paid the cost rather than the consumer, you’d see a different type of response,” he said.

There’s a huge disconnect between real business and the mobile industry.

Real business people — like Mr Manzitti and his colleagues — are left dumbfounded, I’m sure, by the idiotic nonsense expounded by mobile operators.

How can you expect the medium of mobile to take off when it turns out that, in many cases, the people you’re targeting with your $20 annual subscription to the Jelly of the Month Club are actually being charged to receive your texts, because their mobile operator doesn’t live in this space-time-continuum?

We move on.

It’s a great new medium… but with teething problems galore.

(Thanks for the link, Jeremy).