NEW YORK, NY — There’s no shortage of negative blowback about marketing messages delivered to mobile phones. After all, the cellular medium is one of the few that requires consumers to pay for receiving advertising messages they may not have wanted in the first place. “Stealth advertising” to mobile phones can create enormous ill will for any product or company and may be illegal in some places. Even if consumers do want the advertising message, most research has indicated they don’t want to pay to receive it.A new survey by ABI Research, however, indicates consumers are much more willing to receive mobile advertising on their cell phones if the messages include incentives. Approximately 37-percent of the consumers ABI interviewed said they would be more likely to respond positively to a text-based marketing message if the message offered a “bonus” like a retail discount or a free download. Only 11-percent indicated incentives would have no effect on their response to mobile marketing messages.

“We think that in general, advertisers and operators must tread carefully when delivering marketing messages to a consumer’s mobile handset, especially given that many subscribers believe they are paying a significant amount of money for their mobile services,” ABI Research Director Michael Wolf said. “However, we believe that marketing and advertising messaging that is properly crafted and that utilizes incentives could enjoy more acceptance on the part of the consumer.”

Incentives that received the most positive response in the ABI study were real-world discounts and coupons for retail storefronts. In fact, more than 60 percent of those who were either neutral or open to potential text-message marketing nominated a discount coupon at a local retailer as the incentive to which they would most likely respond. The next most popular incentives were free ringtones and songs.

In the adult industry, appropriate incentives might include discounted site memberships or video-on-demand coupons, or offers of free content that could be downloaded directly to phones.

“As more content and applications move through both messaging systems and browsers, advertisers are going to need to consider how best to package advertising,” said Wolf. “We believe that most consumers ultimately will be amenable to limited marketing on their mobile phones, particularly that which is non-intrusive, targeted, and that can bring them some kind of value in the form of both real-world and digital-media-based incentives.”