Wireless Advertising Association Poised to Put Ads on Your Cell and PDA

I can understand some forms of advertising. You can watch network TV for free after buying the tube because companies pay for the programs by subjecting you to ads. Web adverts have their place too. While some sites don't take advertising and some do, you get your choice of which sites to visit. If you think it's worth visiting revenue-generating sites that pay people to develop content, that's where you go. If not, it's your decision. Sometimes, though, it seems like you're paying to see advertisements and that's where I start to get bugged. Cable TV used to be touted as a medium where you paid for what you watched instead of seeing commercials. Now, you're paying, the advertisers are paying, and I doubt the guy on Jackass really gets his share of the revenue. Now, it looks like an organization called the Wireless Advertising Association wants to send you ads on your cell phone and PDA. The org turned loose a set of proposed standards for WAP, SMS, and PDA advertising last month to a crowd of more than 100 of the industry's top wireless companies. As the press release says "Through unanimous support of WAA member companies, those proposals for SMS, WAP and PDA advertising today became industry standards." Not to come off as a conspiracy theorist, but why isn't anyone asking the public if they want to be subjected to ads on their cell phones? Going with the network television idea, it seems like if we have to view ads, the service should be free. Here's another quote from the press release: "The standards being accepted today create a common set of formats and sizes so that ad creative executions and inventory will be interchangeable. Just as in print, television, and the Internet, an ad agency will write copy or create a graphic in the standardized formats that device manufacturers will build hardware to accept. That creative can then run over any ad network, or with any publisher, since they will have designed their content to leave `holes' for ads in those formats. Advertisers can relax knowing that every consumer will get the same message, regardless of which mobile carrier they use or what device is in their pocket." Take a look at the list of the organization's more than 80 members here . And you thought spam was bad.