Mobile provides the "next frontier" for growth in the digital marketing space, driven by the explosive penetration of smartphones & tablets, particularly within the United States. Today, the US consumer spends 82 minutes of their day on mobile devices (up from 34 minutes in 2010). That's more than double the time spent on traditional Print mediums, and roughly equal to the amount of time consumers spend listening to the Radio.
Despite this explosive growth in mobile usage, there is an ongoing dilemma for companies & individuals looking to profit from this major shift in consumer behavior--marketers are hesitant to spend a significant sum of money behind mobile advertising. Based on consumer usage, mobile advertising should command ~12% of a marketer's media budget, but in reality mobile represents less than 2% of total ad spending.
There are many reasons behind this mismatch between share of usage and share of ad spend, but I will share the big two. The first and most likely is simply the fact that no large company likes to be the first to move into uncharted, unproven, risky territory. And because large companies tend to control the vast majority of Ad spending, it is no surprise that the vast majority of spending is still very much locked in tried-and-true advertising mediums such as TV, Print, Radio (and increasingly Online--but even Online suffers from the mismatch between share of usage and share of ad spend). The second reason behind the mismatch is the (im)practicality of using traditional advertising tactics--i.e. display ads/homepage takeovers/etc. on a mobile device. The prospect of having an intrusive oversized banner ad cover up a good portion of an already limited viewing screen, is likely to result in upset consumers and is likely not what marketers want.
Until marketers begin to see documented case studies of wins made by mobile marketing, and until mobile marketing methods begin to tailor themselves to the realities of a mobile device (and not just take a bite out of traditional advertising playbooks), we will continue to see this great discrepancy between time spent by consumers and dollars spent by marketers.
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