Over the years, companies have been advertising through various channels: newspapers, television, radio, online, outdoor. The latest innovation in the world of advertising is `Mobile Advertising'. Mobile phone is a very personalized medium having a great reach and options, in terms of the content of the advertisements. With more than 300 million mobile users, the Indian market presents lucrative opportunities for mobile advertising.

Globally, mobile advertising is a $1 bn industry, with around 3 billion mobile subscribers. With the Indian mobile phone subscriber base projected to be around 500 million by 2010, companies are concentrating on tapping this medium for advertising.

Mobile phone is a rapidly expanding phenomenon that has radically transformed the global telecommunications industry. Mobile phones offer a new experience to people desirous of keeping in touch with their `close ones'—anytime and anywhere. With the launch of the Short Message Services (SMS), mobile phones gradually have emerged as devices capable of working more than as just telephones. The Internet can also be used to send SMS, but only through SMS centers setup by the companies that own the mobile network in that particular region. In other forms of textual communication like paging and sending SMS, a person can immediately know whether a message has been delivered or not. SMS advertising can be defined as a combination of electronic and mobile commerce methods aimed at capitalizing on the exponential and global growth of the cell phone market, especially the sms service. Most of the SMS advertising tools being used, the world over, involve the integration of the World Wide Web.

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