Mobile marketing can cover a variety of different initiatives, but it began with text and picture message marketing, the creation of mobile-friendly websites, and mobile banner advertising. Now marketers can place advertising within mobile games and mobile videos, and even within a mobile TV broadcast. More creative mobile marketers are also using full-screen interstices, which appear while a requested webpage is loading, in addition to location-based Bluetooth marketing and interactive mobile games and applications to entice their audiences.
Before you can understand the nuances of those types of marketing initiatives, you must understand the evolution of the mobile networks, handsets, operating systems, and mobile browsers. This chapter explains how those technologies have evolved and discusses how all the innovations come together to affect your marketing message.
Mobile phones are only as powerful as the network technology that runs them. A networks speed can have a huge impact on what types of mobile marketing will be successful with your demographic. Understanding how the different network technologies interact will help you make critical decisions about your mobile marketing campaign. Figure 2.1 shows the 15-year evolution of mobile networks. The following sections briefly explain each of the major mobile network technologies.
1G
The first generation of cellphone signals was based on a circuit-switching domain and relied on an analog radio signal transmitted by the phone and picked up by towers. Radio towers used digital signals to connect to other radio towers and then to the rest of the telephone network. Because Gl technology relied on analog instead of digital signals, they were less reliant on the callers proximity to a cellphone tower.
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