With all the inflated figures and outrageous claims surrounding the growth of mobile marketing, it’s interesting to come across anyone who doesn’t have an overly enthusiastic opinion about the subject.
Such is the case with Jeff Lindsay of Bernstein Research who recently released a report titled “The Long View: How Will The Wireless Internet Impact Online Advertising. Lindsay’s take on mobile advertising includes the opinions that the mobile ad market will remain active, but small in the near-to-medium term- and that the larger players (Google, Yahoo, etc.) will take most of the ad spend over the next five years.
With all the meaningless projections: eMarketer predicting $3 billion by 2013, Juniper predicting $6 billion by 2014, and even JP Morgan predicting $3 billion by as early as 2010, it’s nice to see a realistic perception of where mobile marketing is right now and where it will likely go in the near future.
The report cited several reasons for Lindsay’s realistic assumptions- primarily the fact that Internet viewing habits are fundamentally different between mobile and PCs, meaning mobile users spend less time surfing the internet, performing random searches and clicking on ads. In addition, Yahoo and Google will account for about 50 percent of mobile advertising by 2013. The reason for this, according to Bernstein, is the fact that most advertisers – when testing the mobile waters – will go to one of the major players with “legacy agency relationships” versus smaller, newer entities.
I agree that while mobile is the “hot” topic in regards to advertising, it’s still not growing as quickly as it should- given the proliferation of smartphone devices and the mobile broadband networks they run on. Education about the subject remains the hurdle to overcome, and it’s going to take a while before the mainstream becomes comfortable with the medium.