The barrier to mobile marketing is not infrastructure silly!

Steve Levy, president of Canadian Market Research, Ipsos Reid, presented highlights from a survey of marketing executives at Marketing Week today in Toronto. As stated in the afternoon daily, Steve indicated that only about 12% of marketers are actually incorporating mobile into their marketing mix.

The reason… apparently infrastructure barriers. Huh?

The only barriers are marketers and brands who haven’t yet educated themselves on where / how mobile fits into the marketing mix NOW.

With over 75% of Canadians actively using mobile phones and with numbers approaching 40 billion for SMS messages sent in 2009, I don’t know how anybody could say infrastructure is barrier to leveraging mobile.

Earlier this year I blogged about Rogers breathing rarified air with the introduction of their 7.2 mbps network. Since then they have nearly trippled those speeds to 21 mbps which has also since been matched by Bell and Telus with their new 3.5G national network.  High speed (nearly broadband) wireless is now truly available to most Canadians.

Having said all that, any marketer reading this post who has yet to incorporate mobile into their marketing mix should erase this post from their memory and go back to their usual ways.

Understanding how to use mobile in the marketing mix is one of our agency differentiators. The longer inaccurate messages are propagated about the mobile opportunity the better our competitive advantage will continue to be