Prepare for the coming storm: Cell phone spam

Cell phone spam is a "perfect storm" of annoying attributes. It audibly interrupts your life like telemarketing. It's cheap to mass-produce like e-mail spam. And it holds you hostage like TV ads. There will be more than 4 billion cell phones to target by the end of the year. Yet cell phone advertising represents just about 1 percent of the total money spent on advertising. eMarketer projects that the $421 million spent on cell phone ads in the United States in 2006 will grow to $4.7 billion by 2011 and exceed $6.5 billion in 2012.

Advertisers speak of an ominous sounding "paradigm shift" in mobile advertising, where more of the spam will be multimedia, targeted and tracked. One use for ads will be subsidized services. We may very soon see major carriers offering free wireless service in exchange for ads. Those ads will pop up in the middle of YouTube videos, or play at the beginning of phone calls.