Marketers with ambitions to reach consumers with ads on cell phones rightly look to Europe, where their use is far more advanced. But they may not be particularly encouraged by what they learn.

Europeans, it appears, are more interested in watching TV on mobile phones than their American counterparts. That's a good sign.

What's not so good, a new survey reports, is that those same respondents have no interest in watching ads on their phones. They are willing to pay for mobile TV but the price does not include having their shows interrupted by commercials. They see such ads as spam.

The study, from Britain's Portio Research, was conducted in early 2006 and involved interviews by phone or email with 750 randomly selected mobile phone users across 10 European countries. It found that more than 50 percent were interested in mobile TV and, moreover, were willing to pay about $13 a month for the service.

But an even larger share of those surveyed, some 65 percent, said they had zero tolerance for any and all forms of mobile phone advertising, TV or otherwise.

“Our survey showed poor results for advertising on the mobile phone,” says John White, business development director at Portio. “Sixty-five percent basically said, ‘If you spam me on my mobile I will go to another provider.'"

Just 2 percent of those surveyed currently receive any type of mobile TV, which to say it is in the nascent stage, but White says the survey revealed a huge potential. If half who were interested were to subscribe to mobile TV, that would amount to 325 million across Europe.

No surprise, younger phone users are more interested in mobile TV than older ones. Some 80 percent of teens and youths were interested in mobile TV, but that percentage gradually drifts down as the age of the person surveyed went up. Of those aged 50 and above, only 30 percent expressed interest in mobile TV.

Similarly, when it comes to mobile phone ads, the young were more accepting, though not by that much. Just 50 percent expressed zero tolerance for mobile ads, versus 65 percent for all respondents. Among older users, the figure rose to 65 to 70 percent. Says White: “Younger generations were a bit more open minded about advertising on the mobile phones.”

Yet some people were somewhat accepting of mobile ads, some 35 percent of those surveyed:16 percent said the occasional ad was acceptable while 12 percent reported that they would accept the ads as long as they could unsubscribe. And 7 percent didn’t care how many ads they were exposed to.

Looking particularly at mobile TV ads, White thinks the reason so many are against them is that they imagined the ads would be done in a similar way to advertising on regular TV, with several minutes of commercials at a time. But White points out, as have others, that the format is not suited to mobile TV.

“People are doing TV snacking on the mobile, watching for 10 minutes while they are in a queue or five minutes on the bus. They are filling short periods of time,” he says, so they don’t want to be stuck in a long commercial break. “They are happy to pay for TV so as not to be hit with advertising.”