With the sales of smartphones now exceeding the sales of traditional mobile handsets, the dynamics of how businesses are contacting customers to inform them of their products is changing. As a society, the Brits are now more mobile-conscious than ever. For many, mobiles have not only become their first reference point for contacting friends and family, but also the first place they go to find out news and information. As such this reliance on the mobile phone has created a new niche market for businesses to contact potential customers; mobile advertising.

Mobile marketing is a quickly growing market; in 2008 spending on mobile advertising reached £28.6 million, a year later spending had increased to £46 million and such is the exponential rate of growth in the market that by 2015, experts are confidently predicting that mobile advertising spending will reach a staggering £419 million.

The reason for this rapid rate of growth for this fledgling industry is due to the way people are communicating and receiving communications from third parties. Until recently, people used to call each other via a home phone line and watch adverts on television, see them in newspapers and magazines.

The mobile revolution has altered this markedly. Nowadays, for many people their phone is their first port of call for all forms of communication, for retrieving information and for using the Internet, and this has left broad scope for advertising opportunity.

What makes mobile advertising so special, however, is the flexibility afforded by the system. Mobile marketing is not simply a blanket exposure to people in the hope that they may be interested. Instead, mobile campaigns use the power of the Internet to ensure that their campaigns are carefully targeted; meaning that people only receive the offers and information that is most likely to be of benefit to them. So, for example, if you have been looking for ways to get cheaper phone bills, you are likely to receive mobile advertisements from companies that offer precisely these (or similar).

Better still, mobile advertising is entirely scalable and can be an affordable solution for any size of company, from a local business seeking extra customers in the local area, to massive multi-national corporations seeking global markets for their products; mobile marketing is applicable to any size and any market.

For example, if you have a brand new application for an Apple product, you can target your mobile marketing to iPhone advertising to ensure that the people receiving your offer are those most likely to want it.

It is this innovative method of targeting potential customers, with no need for blanket coverage, mailings to people with no interest in your products or expensive TV and radio advertisements, which makes mobile advertising the fastest growing form of advertising at present.

Mobile technology has facilitated businesses being able to far better target the right customer and cut down massively on spending on advertising that is non-productive. Instead of blanket market saturation, the strategy for many businesses is for cost-effective key market penetration.

The greatest strengths of mobile advertising are its flexibility and relevance for the customer. For a business, it offers the most efficient and cost-effective way to contact customers and to ensure that adverts are being seen. For the customer, it offers them the products they are most likely to want and need and find useful to their own set of circumstances. It is a harmonious recipe and one which should produce a far more relevant and useful advertising service on any standard handset.