Ads on cellphones, privacy concerns grow

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: Your cell phone is a potential gold mine for marketers: It can reveal where you are, whom you call and even what music you like. Considering the phone is usually no more than a few feet away, these are powerful clues for figuring out just the right moment to deliver the right coupon for the store just around the corner.

But first marketers will have to wrest the personal profiles from mobile carriers worried that annoyed subscribers might defect to rivals.

“It’s proceed with caution,” said Jarvis Coffin, CEO of advertising distributor Burst Media Corp. “Are consumers going to be spooked by the idea that suddenly their phone goes beep and it’s a Starbucks offer, and they are standing next to a Starbucks?”

Carriers are now guarding the data zealously, but many people believe it’s only a matter of time—over the next year or two—before marketers can routinely target ads to a potential customer’s location and actions.

Imagine getting pitches for rental cars and hotels the moment you land in San Francisco because an analysis of past calls suggests you tend to take weeklong trips there. Or if day trips to Boston are your thing, you might get an offer for cab service instead.

“My phone has a lot of very specific and detailed information about myself ... information that isn’t always going to be resident when I’m at a number of PC browsers,” said Rob Adler, CEO for mobile web company go2 Media.

The research firm eMarketer estimates that US spending in mobile ads, at about $900 million (euro611 million) in 2007, will grow more than fivefold to nearly $4.8 billion (euro3.26 billion) in 2011. By contrast, paid search and other online spending will only double, to about $42 billion (euro28.5 billion) in 2011.

Mobile ads today are mostly blasted at the mass audiences, with a few carriers offering limited targeting based on users’ age, gender, and other characteristics.