MediaPost “Online Spin” columnist and President of Social Vibe Joe Marchese had this to say about the bright year ahead for mobile marketing:

“This is it.  2010 will be the year mobile marketing begins to realize the promise marketers have imagined for so long.  What’s different in 2010?  The phones are smarter, the networks are faster, an open development ecosystem is leading to faster innovation, and specialty mobile agencies have built up a solid knowledge base of what works.”

He is right that the tools for making mobile marketing real are in mass production.  You can count me as voting in favor of mobile in 2010, but the platform’s capabilities will shine a light on features that could be a drag on marketing — privacy and permission.  Just because someone downloaded an app doesn’t mean they knew all it did and weeks or months down the road they will likely remember even less.  Just look at the recent Sears settlement.

And being aware that our devices know where we are is not the same as permission to tell people.  I mean, we grant Google the right to read our email, but getting an ad tied too tightly to the conversation we are having at the moment can be creepy.  The reign of “notice and choice” has given online consumers little of either.  Advertisers are looking at notice in context and choice at the point of real decision.

Even the most zealous pro-mobile-advocates appreciate the concern/problem/speed bump.

A MobileMarketer column looking at the major trends for mobile in 2010 adds this to the list of those you have heard before:

“Mobile will be called to task on privacy in 2010. Reputable mobile ad networks will follow guidelines set by industry trade associations and standard bodies.  Offering opt-out capabilities to protect personal identification information will be an imperative and will propel the roll-out of more contextual and behavioral consumer ad targeting via mobile.”

Opt-in and opt-out, though, are so desktop.  There is a chance, though, in 2010 for this last hurdle to be cleared is new ways.  Our “persistent contact” with our smart phones, the speed of their browsers and advertisers use of short codes and 2-D barcodes stand to remake privacy and permission in real-time.

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