I tend to see such an argument as "fallacious" or at least part of my mobile advertising "myths".

When you step back and have a detailled look at how many of the 52M mobile phone owners regularly use their mobile phones for something else than voice, the audience of the mobile Internet and the number of opt'in customers...you tend to have a more cautious statement.

...See SFR's own answers at the bottom of this post

2) "According to e-Marketer, the global mobile advertising market will reach 14,000,000,000 euros in 2012. Given the French market is approximately 3% of the worldwide pie, it should be around 400M euros in 5 years' time".

=> We obviously look at what competitors communicate even though we try to avoid having those kind of worldwide top-down approaches since we prefer having a bottom-up approach for any local market, starting from consumers' usage patterns: number of monthly mobile Internet users * number of sessions * ad/session * cost of inventory...and so on, which we will release pretty soon.

As I already mentionned I am not a big fan of huge worldwide figures. Initially, I was aware of Informa's figures (11 bn $ in 2011) and of Strategy Analytics (14 bn $ in 2011). So I went to e-Marketer's website and found out that their own (I insit, insiders will understand) forecast were at 16.2 bn $ in 2011, so I guess they have increased that to over 20 bn $ in 2012 so that it can match with the quoted 14 bn euros. Waouah!

3) "What is sure is that the market will not only be divided between the 3 operators. There will be other players such as MSN, Nokia & co". ?! Operators want to leverage their key positioning in the value chain (knowledge of their customers: who they are, where they are, what they do...) but I doubt that advertising will become their core business. They should rather become enablers and partner with those who have the know-how and the relationships with advertisers. SFR has created its own ad server tool with Sofialys and has recruited a sales force to go directly to advertisers. Interestingly, Vodafone (which owns a 44% stake in SFR alongside Vivendi) has a very different approach in the UK (partnering with Yahoo!), in Germany (partnering with Gruner & Jahr) or in Italy (partnering with Dada).

We will see over time how quickly the market will develop and what will be the best of breed model. You know my personal answer.

SFR's mobile advertising in figures today (more info here):

- 800,000 opt'in SMS customers ~ 4% of installed base

- 4.2M monthly unique visitors on V-live portal ~23% of SFR's installed base. I would be curious to know how many visit the site on a weekly basis.

- 35M PAP (page impressions carrying an ad; 50M according to their website). Roughly 13% of total page impressions.

Those metrics per se are not bad and in line with that of other operators. I was even pretty impressed by the time spent : 50 minutes =average monthly connexion...

However, I actually believe there are tremendous opportunities and I do not want to appear negative or conservative. I just wanted to add some more reality checks in a hyped market...