The rapid increase in the usage of mobile phones and other mobile devices by Indian consumers has created a new channel for marketing. The use of Short Messaging Service (SMS) to access customers through handheld devices is gaining popularity, making the mobile phone a new medium for one-to-one marketing. The present research investigates consumers' attitude towards mobile advertising and tests whether there is a significant difference between the attitudes of four types of consumers chosen for this study, with respect to various factors affecting mobile advertising dimensions. An instrument for measuring the attitudes towards mobile advertising is also developed. A research framework is constructed to extract relevant factors affecting consumers' attitudes towards SMS-based advertisements, relationships among attitudes, intention to view mobile advertisements, and users' actual behavior. The results of this survey indicated that the attitudes of consumers towards mobile advertising are reflected in terms of seven extracted factors derived from the analysis of the study. The results of the research also revealed that there is no significant difference between various consumers' groups (respondents) considered for the present research within the three select Indian cities with respect to mobile advertising. The results further demonstrated that there is no substantial difference between the attitudes of male and female respondents with respect to mobile advertising as well.

The speedy penetration of mobile companies into the Indian communications market, resulted in an increased use of handheld cellular devices and this has implications for Indian marketers. Since mobile phone is a very personal device that allows an individual to be accessed virtually any time and anywhere, mobile advertising is increasingly becoming a personalized marketing effort and may take different forms. On account of this, a new trend of advertising has arisen, by which advertisements for products and services are sent as short textual messages through Short Messaging Service (SMS) by various companies in the Indian marketing context. The rising popularity of SMS has created a new channel for advertising, known as mobile advertising. There is an increasing body of research, revealing that the use of mobile information services and SMS has increased dramatically since 2001 [1]. It is also observed that Asian consumers are emerging as the largest group of mobile users. Research studies indicate that more than half of the 19-34 age groups in Taiwan use SMS at least once a day. The number of mobile phone users in China has hit 250 million by the end of 2004 [2]. Chinese mobile companies signed up 29 million mobile customers in the first three months of 2005. In South Korea, the number of mobile phone owners is 29 million (64% of the population), and there are more than 18 million mobile Internet subscribers (39% of the population). India, presently, has 50.7 million mobile users and is inching towards 100 million by 2007. Nearly 1.6 million people signed up for mobile services in India in the month of January 2005 alone [3]. Research studies also revealed that on an average more than 100 billion SMS messages are being sent worldwide every year [4]. This has implications for Indian mobile consumers in general and companies in particular.