It was only in 1996 that the first mobile phone with internet access was available on the market.
Even though the mobile phone actually began in April 1973 by Martin Cooper, a senior engineer at Motorola. He made the worlds first telephone call to a rival telecommunications company and informed them he was speaking via a mobile phone.
However, mobile advertising didn’t actually kick in until over 20 years later in 1997, when the first ever SMS ad message was sent. This was sent by a Finnish news provider who was offering out free headlines sponsored by ads.
Appia has pulled together an infographic showing how mobile advertising has grown over the years.
In 2000, the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) was founded, a global non-profit trade association representing all players in the mobile marketing value chain. Seven years later the iPhone was released giving advertisers an ideal platform to show off what they could do with a smartphone.
A few months later Android was released in 2007, making mobile a seriously solid space to advertise with high hopes for decent ROI.
Further down the line, App store launched in July 2008 with only 552 applications and now it has over a million applications. Currently games account for 75% of App Store revenue and 90% of Google Play revenue.
We have barely seen the full potential of advertising on a mobile device but take a look at Appia’s info graphic to reminisce, as well as get some predictions of the future…
