The overwhelming popularity of mobile devices such as cellular phones has opened up the possibility of using mobile devices and related communication infrastructure as a media for providing what may be referred to as “mobile marketing” to potential consumers. Mobile marketing involves and relates to marketing and advertising via mobile devices, e.g., mobile phones, smart phones, and Personal Data Assistants (PDAs), or any other computer device configured to be able to receive or send data wirelessly, receiving advertising content, i.e., marketing and/or advertising content in the form of, e.g., text, audio, video or some combination thereof associated with a particular product, service or combination thereof.
Mobile marketing is considered by advertisers as the next new channel to directly reach potential consumers. Mobile marketing enables advertisers to directly reach individual consumers in a targeted way. This is because the nature of mobile media is personal, in that mobile devices are generally used by a particular individual rather than a group of individuals. Further, mobile media is, by definition, mobile, which offers a transportable mechanism for exposing potential consumers to advertising content. Moreover, because mobile media is “always on,” advertisers are not constrained by the need to make a connection in order to deliver advertising content to a user's device because a connection is always established with a user's mobile device (provided the mobile device is in range of an available communication network). As an additional benefit of mobile media as an advertising mechanism, mobile media enables groups of individuals to form wherein the group members communicate actively with each other. As a result, these characteristics combined with social networks—based marketing approach of the Internet may form a very powerful base to execute marketing strategies.
A conventional advertising approach in the field of Internet advertising is contextual advertising that utilizes a service branded as AdSense™ offered by Google™. AdSense™ enables adding relevant advertisements to web sites in such a way that advertising content is displayed such that there is some correlation between the content of the web site being displayed and advertising content displayed in advertising sections, e.g., banners, pop ups, etc., of a displayed page of the website. For example, if webpage content pertains to travel, the service may display advertising content pertinent to the area, e.g., hotels, attractions, etc.
Further, various conventional Internet services, e.g., readers such as Gmail.com, provide the ability to insert a tag or additional information when a user sends an electronic mail message based on the content of the e-mail.
Conventional mobile marketing techniques also involve identifying, also known as “tagging,” of message communication between particular users, i.e., point-to-point communication (see, for example, U.S. Patent Pub. 20060194595 and entitled “Messaging Service and System”). However, one problem in marketing via mobile communication is messages such as text messages are typically short, e.g., Short Message Service (SMS) messages. Additionally, such messages do not typically have previous messages as a part of a new message. As a result, it is challenging to effectively identify relevant advertising or marketing content to accompany a message to be sent or a message to be received.