Mobile advertising awareness increased 33 percent in nine months even while cellphone usage decreased 6 percent, concludes a third-quarter report by
mobile social network Limbo and GfK Technology, a market research agency.

The numbers suggest that advertising dollars have increasingly moved to mobile formats in the first nine months of the year.

"In economic slowdowns, advertisers typically divert budgets from branding media to direct marketing channels and it appears that mobile media is benefiting from this in 2008," Limbo CEO Jonathon Linner said.

The report found that nearly four out of 10 Americans recalled seeing advertising on their cellphones between July and September of this year.

Text-message-based ads were the most commonly recalled form of mobile advertising. In nine months, the rate of recalling this format increased 42 percent, with 60 million consumers reporting that they recalled seeing these ads on their devices. Mobile web advertising trailed behind text messaging ads with 31 million people recalling this format, or about half the effect of text messaging ads.