According to The Wall Street Journal (subscription only), both Verizon and Sprint Nextel are running trial sets of banner advertisements on their wireless information and entertainment services, in what The Journal sees as an effort to supplement declining revenues from cheaper and cheaper voice calls and pressure from media companies that have invested in entertainment, news videos and sports on cell phones to get a bigger return from low sales. With the exploding Internet ad market helping to create real profitability for a large number of websites, putting ads on cell phones seems like the next logical step, but what will that mean to the rest of us?

Well, as obnoxious and intrusive as advertising can be, done properly it's not too much of a distraction and can lead to something everyone wants: lower prices. If cell phone advertising takes off and the service providers position it in such a fashion that it's not just supplementing a market of diminishing returns (like all of these videos seem to be), it could lead to lower costs for consumers, first on those supplemental pieces of entertainment (games, videos, News Feeds) and then cheaper calling plans and maybe even cheaper phones.

Via CNN Money