The world market for mobile marketing and advertising will be worth $3 billion this year and $19 billion in 2011, according to ABI Research. The figures include mobile search and video advertising. The company expects some of the highest levels of spending to come in the broadcast mobile video space.
By 2011, mobile advertising will surpass SMS as a source of mobile marketing spending, due in part to mobile broadcast networks’ presence in all major markets.
ABI Research expects spending for broadcast mobile video advertising alone to reach $9 billion in 2011.
However, for this market to reach its full potential, ABI says carriers, advertisers and marketing companies must use multiple technologies and business models to bring their messages to mobile consumers.
“Mobile advertising and marketing is a risky, albeit enticing business,” said ABI principal analyst Judith Rosall. “Unlike the PC, a mobile device offers a uniquely personalized communications channel. Carriers worldwide have quite a bit of information about their end-users: name, sex, age and geographical location. And depending on the handset and plan their users have purchased, the carriers probably also know something about their economic status and credit record. But they don’t like to release this information to third parties because they want to protect and control their customers.”
Mobile marketing and advertising is also at varying levels of maturity, depending on the market or country, Rosall said.
In Europe and Asia, mobile marketing is fairly well developed. However, early-adopting brands in the US are still in the process of testing the water. They don’t typically allocate a set percentage of their annual budgets to mobile.
In turn, major ad agencies are still relatively inexperienced with mobile marketing campaigns, and reluctant to utilize location-based services and technologies such as MMS and mobile search that are still in the early stages of deployment. Their slow pace in exploiting opportunities in mobile marketing and advertising, however, has opened the door for a number of specialized agencies, aggregators and other enablers.