Mobile Marketing: IT Spending On The Go

Don More, Updata Advisors

Mobile marketing is shaping up to be one of the most exciting Internet growth segments, creating significant investing and M&A opportunities in coming years while driving major changes in ad spending and campaign planning.  

The iPhone’s phenomenal success (iPhone users now drive more than one out of every thousand web page views) highlights mobile Internet’s growth potential, which until now has been held back by bandwidth and user interface limitations and not by lack of consumer interest. As a recent study by research firm iSuppli found, iPhone users spend only 47% of their time actually placing calls, compared to 71% for other cell phones. Data from Forrester Research shows that 20% of consumers describe their cell phone as a device that they could not live without. Uses include accessing the Internet, emailing, watching video, playing games, IMing with friends, and much more.

All this mobile activity has not been lost on advertisers. Online research firm eMarketer expects worldwide mobile marketing and advertising spend to reach $19 billion by 2012, which is about seven times its 2007 level. During this time, non-mobile paid online search spending will “only” about double.

The way the mobile advertising market is shaping up, the rise of promising new vendors and technologies is sure to follow. There is a multitude of companies to watch in this space. A few include mobile media delivery company 4INFO; ion interactive that, among other things, creates landing pages that are iPhone-optimized; and Cellit that offers both pre-packaged and custom mobile marketing solutions to both SMBs and large enterprises.