Book review: Mobile Marketing

Books on mobile marketing are extremely rare, therefore I was very curious when Elsevier sent me a copy of “Mobile Marketing: Achieving Competitive Advantage Through Wireless Technology“.
It’s a sort of handbook, so I read it pretty fast, also skipping, I must admit, a few parts dedicated to the explanation of mobile technologies (e.g. chapter 12, Applications environments). As you know, I tend to have a very critic and/but pragmatic approach to everything I’m asked to evaluate, so forgive me if my judgement is brief and straightforward.
If you’re new to mobile marketing, then this book is a good option to start understanding the potentials of marketing via cell phones. When I say marketing, I mean “marketing”, and not just advertising or promotion, since the authors also tell us something about mobile content and m-commerce. I enjoyed the chapter dedicated to the wireless advertising models, and I appreciated the fact that also delicate issues such as planning & budgeting and the measurement of the results receive some attention.

I would have expected a more variegated range of case studies (the authors only talk about what their company has done) and I was disappointed (and a very annoyed) by the fact that the bibliography is missing. I understand I might have a scholar approach, but I believe you cannot write a marketing book totally out of scratch, without reading nor using materials and studies developed by other authors.
In general, Mobile Marketing: Achieving Competitive Advantage Through Wireless Technology it’s a good manual to move the first steps, but if you’re really interested in taking your knowledge a step further, you need to go somewhere else. Look, for example, at the books of Tomi Ahonen which are a little bit older (M-profits: Making Money from 3G Services or to the more recent 3G Marketing: Communities and Strategic Partnerships), but actually provide you with much more precise tools to generate revenue out of 3G services.