Ok class. What's the most important word in the title of this post? What's that? I can't hear you? The word is predicted. We then turn to our training in the world of market research and look at the source, which in this case is the Mobile Marketing Association, and then draw our conclusions. Please note that I am by no means saying that this study that MediaPost brings us isn't correct. I hope it is. We need good news and if there is a segment of new media marketing that is poised to take off it's mobile (well, at least we have been hearing that for the past few years so it has to happen at some point right?)
So the MMA is taking heart that despite overall marketing spend being off 7% for the same period (which is another prediction so it could be higher or lower in the end when all the rubble is cleared away) there is a 26% bump in mobile marketing spend anticipated. It goes on to say
While mobile is bucking the downward spending trend resulting from the recession, the emerging medium is still only a small fraction of total marketing budgets, at 1.8%. The MMA projects that mobile ad spending will grow from $1.7 billion this year to $2.16 billion in 2010
Of the brands and agencies polled about half report doing some mobile work
with SMS text campaigns being the most common at 66%, followed by having a mobile Web site (53%), and mobile email marketing (33%)
Not everything has the rosy glow of optimism in it, however.
About half of agencies said they overall viewed mobile marketing as still being part of experimental expending, compared to 36% of brands. Both brands and agencies reported having "average" success with mobile efforts compared to other marketing channels.
There is a lot of room for improvement obviously. As we discussed recently maybe they just need to market to the cool kids with the iPhones (there's my iPhone envy again, sorry). The mobile industry leaders are touting the tracking and targeting capabilities of mobile as the reason why spend is looking to increase despite the horrific advertising environment we are currently in.
One particularly interesting piece of data was the following
Not surprisingly, the study also showed that the Internet is the medium that advertisers are most often integrating mobile efforts with, at 70%. Less expected is that trade shows and other promotional events would be the next most popular type of marketing effort tied into mobile, at 36%.
Special event marketing and the mobile tie-ins that are available make good sense due to the captive audience and the ability to push users toward the offering at the event. This practically ensures a higher response and it will be interesting to see how that develops.
So it looks like mobile is the new hot thing but haven't we heard that in the past? Maybe we should wait until 2010 and look back on how 2009 did before we say anything else. Just a thought.
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