This book is about assessing the market opportunity and understanding its challenges and issues so as to make money and create long- term value with mobile advertising. We’re convinced there’s a market here but developing it to its full potential won’t be easy. It never is.

Mobile Advertising—Supercharge Your Brand in the Exploding Wireless Market is the first comprehensive book on the business of mobile advertising, and we hope it is useful to anyone involved in the Web or wireless industries, from either the technology or marketing/advertising side.

Because the market is nascent, we focus on the unique advertising capabilities of this emerging medium. And we evaluate the structural obstacles currently in the way of this potential and evaluate possible remedies and solutions.

Figuring out what mobile advertising means at this early stage and what you may want to do about it is best served by incorporating several distinct perspectives—the conceptual, the analytic, and the practical. This is why the three of us decided to collaborate on this initiative.

Because we all have a passionate interest in going from buzz to biz, we’ve interviewed many prominent and relevant thought leaders to round out our perspectives.

For the purposes of our discussion, we use the term mobile advertising broadly. By mobile advertising we mean any way to message a person while they’re mobile through any mobile device, so as to influence their behavior. This includes space advertising such as a mobile banner in an application, promotional treatments such as an SMS “ coupon,” or even a mobile search model.

Mobile technology has the opportunity to turn a lot of image advertising into direct response treatments. It can provide remarkably valuable targeting capabilities and the kind of interactivity required to get people’s attention. Because of these inherent capabilities, the traditional lines between marketing, direct response marketing, database marketing, and promotion converge in creative ways.