Mobile apps are big business these days.  Even though 2009 ushered in a wave of excitement and a rush of development for mobile applications, 2010 is set to be a breakout year in terms of marketers realizing the potential and overall usage by consumers.

A new report from DM2PRO and Quattro Wireless indicate mobile app investment should grow significantly this year, while spending on social apps, however, will grow stagnate even though more marketers have already developed the applications.

The study indicated that many marketers took a “wait and see” approach in 2009 in terms of a mobile app strategy, stating fewer than one-half of marketers created either a mobile or social app in 2009.  Most of those surveyed plan to invest in a mobile app this year, however, with the iPhone being the platform of choice, followed by Android.

In terms of social compared to mobile in regards to a favorable platform for branded apps, Facebook took a demanding lead — with 79.8% of respondents utilizing the platform over others — with the iPhone a close second at 62.1%.  Surprisingly, Android and Palm tied with 9.5% of respondents favoring the new OSs.

End-user engagement was the dominating cause for a brand’s interest in using social or mobile platforms for its apps, but social sites were perceived as better for many top goals- including engagement, audience targeting, branding potential and overall reach.  Mobile scored higher on both creative control and persistence however.

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Advertising in general is a data-driven ecosystem.  Without the appropriate metrics to utilize, any campaign is all but useless.  Such is the problem facing many mobile advertisers- various metrics are in place, yet they come from a variety of sources with no clear-cut form of organization and centralization.  Fragmentation of information is a major hurdle the mobile advertising industry in general must overcome, but how?

The problem stems from the fact that as a mobile advertiser, you’re utilizing an endless variety of ad networks, agencies, SaaS platforms and more to promote your mobile site, mobile app or any other product or service.  While each ad network, platform, etc. provides you with various metrics and data surrounding your campaigns, it’s hard to bring everything together to end up with a centralized mound of data to then analyze and utilize to make your campaigns better.

The basic metrics are in place- your site analytics can tell you where traffic is coming from, and the various ad networks can tell you what your spend was for the traffic sent, but you end up in a situation where it’s difficult to track the spend on ads and conversions on your site for each and every campaign you run without a lot of manual intervention.

Patrick Lord, founder of mobile-ad optimization tool Adremixer, wrote a great post on mobile data fragmentation over at GoMo News offering suggestions on how to solve the problem.  In it, he details two factors prohibiting mobile metric centralization:

1. You have to aggregate ad performance data from multiple ad networks, agencies, platforms, etc. and do so in a manner that’s meaningful to the advertiser.  While APIs to extract this data from ad networks are slowly making themselves known, they’re far and few between and provide less-than-stellar interfaces to manually extract data.
2. To get full conversion tracking via ad networks you have to integrate tracking codes, manually, into your site or app to see full CPA performance data for each ad running on the various networks.  While it works, it still involves a lot of unnecessary legwork depending on how many ad networks you’re working with.

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When a leading wireless provider sets out to launch a widespread SMS campaign with one of the most respected brands in the world, it’s common sense that the campaign will meet the most basic of SMS compliance regulations right? Nope.

Vodafone Hutchinson, parent company to Vodafone Australia teamed with Coca-Cola last October to launch an SMS-based campaign comprised of 100,000 text messages with the simple message “Take a hint from your PC and reboot. You’ll work faster. Reclaim your lunch hour with a friend. Escape with a Coca-Cola lunch break.”

The only problem was that Vodafone, Coca-Cola and the two mobile marketing providers responsible for the campaign; New Dialogue and Big Mobile all forgot the all-important unsubscribe link and a means to contact the sender in every SMS message sent.

The exclusion clearly violated Australia’s anti-spam laws that were put in place over six years ago, and the government slapped Vodafone with a $110,000 fine.  The manager of the regulator’s anti-spam team said the $110,000 payment, the largest through an enforceable undertaking under spam laws, was a further sign that the Government had toughened its approach to unsolicited email and text messages.  ”The law has been around for more than five years, so we really aren’t in the early stages of compliance,” Julia Cornwell McKean said.

That’s what’s so surprising to me about all this.  Not only should Vodafone be very well aware of any and all anti-spam and SMS regulatory issues – being a large wireless telco, but to have its two mobile marketing service providers (New Dialogue and Big Mobile) clearly violate the most basic of user-privacy and anti-spam laws is downright embarrassing to all parties involved.

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We hear a lot from so-called “industry experts” or analysts who make huge claims as to how mobile marketing is going to “take off” this year, or that this year “isn’t quite the year for mobile marketing” and so on.  Most of the time these claims are based purely on opinion and lack any real substance.

A new survey sponsored by a partnership between Millennial Media and DM2PRO decided to go directly to the source — meaning major brands and advertisers themselves– to see just how mobile marketing is working out for them, and to get an understanding as to how they plan on spending their marketing dollars using the mobile channel in the future.

100 leading agencies were surveyed to compile and in-depth analysis of mobile advertising performance and forecasts of future spending.  Dubbed “The State of the Industry,” the survey compiled data to provide a critical view on where the industry stands today, where the industry is and is not, and why agencies and publishers are planning to buy mobile in the future.

The survey indicated that 60 percent of non-mobile marketers are planning to employ some form of mobile advertising in 2010.  Subsequently, the increase in mobile spend was one of the more surprising aspects of the survey’s results.  Out of those surveyed; 31 percent of agency respondents stated they will invest between $100K and $249K next year, while more than 15 percent stated they plan on investing over $1 million.

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The iPhone is widely regarding as one of the most important smartphones in terms of mobile marketing potential.  While advertising engagment is usually very high on the iPhone, recent research suggests that one demographic in particular is far less likely to interact with the ads than others are.

Brand in Hand, a mobile marketing agency whose clients includes Procter & Gamble, General Mills and American Express, started to notice that the iPhone consistently performed the worst on measures of engagement when it comes to marketing to 19- to 49-year-old females.

The agency found, during several trials and more than 60 mobile campaigns it has run over the past two years, that female iPhone users are less engaged with mobile web advertising than their counterparts who use phones with conventional features.  Overall, users of conventional cellphones average 3 to 3.5 more post-click page views than iPhone users, who average 1.3 post-click page views.  Post-click page views refer to the actions users take after clicking through a banner ad, such as viewing a video.

Similarly, iPhone users leave a branded web page without taking additional action about 80% of the time, while only 12% of non-smartphone users, on the other hand, desert their destination.  The study measured users who were clicking through to those destinations from a mobile banner ad.

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Mobile marketing companies or “providers” have been popping up all over the place to get in on the ever-growing industry, and to get their own piece of the pie, so to speak.

The problem with most new firms is that they tend to focus on providing an “all-inclusive” approach to mobile marketing services and campaigns.  The phrase “jack off all trades, master of none” comes to mind.

The problem with this approach is the fact that many people not associated with mobile marketing still have no working knowledge or basic understanding of the techniques and methodology associated within.  In the end, you’re still confusing the potential customers by throwing everything from SMS to mobile display, search and other forms of marketing at them without focusing on their core needs as a mobile advertiser.

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At day two of the Mobile Marketing Association’s forum in New York City, some interesting industry stats were released that give us an insight into the growth and use of various forms of mobile marketing.

As usual, the growth rate for mobile marketing as a whole is expected to be around 26% this year- much lower than recent year’s projections, but still impressive nonetheless when compared to other forms of advertising.  It was estimated by the group that overall marketing expenditures will be down 7% this year, so any growth in mobile is more than welcomed.  

More research shows that brands are more comfortable with mobile than agencies- about half of agencies said they overall viewed mobile marketing as still being part of experimental expending, compared to 36% of brands.  Even more surprising, both brands and agencies reported having “average” success with mobile efforts compared to other marketing channels.

While that might not be the ringing endorsement the industry would like to hear, especially at an event dedicated to mobile marketing, MMA President and CEO Mike Wehrs said the increase in mobile spending despite the downturn shows that more dollars are shifting to the category from traditional media. “The benefits of mobile marketing are clear and they’re being proven out,” said Wehrs, in terms of metrics like ad response rates and brand lift found in MMA case studies.

The stats and information released at this year’s event seem to prove that the recession and reduced ad-spend overall are hitting the mobile channel just as hard, and being a new and largely un-tested form of marketing doesn’t help either.  Hopefully by this time next year, the numbers will be on the uptake once again.

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