Mobile - Katz Marketing Solutions | Radio Advertising | Media Agency

The blip says a lot about the state of mobile advertising. Advertisersare spending more money on mobile marketing, but the tracking andmeasurement tools are still immature. Smaller screens also arechallenging marketers to come up with creative and innovative waysto reach consumers without annoying them with tiny banner ads.So far, the powerful promise of mobile, offering the opportunity topop relevant deals onscreen at the moment consumers are in the timeand place to spend, has gone largely unrealized. Technologycompanies like Google Inc., marketers and advertising firms havetested advances such as geolocation, but adoption has been limited."Mobile advertising is in a really weird place right now," said MelissaParrish, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, the technologyresearch firm. "Is it online paid advertising made little? That's theway it's largely been approached. But in 2013, I hope (advertisers)start to move beyond that thinking. Mobile is special."The highest concentration of smartphone users is the 25 to 34 agegroup, one of the most coveted demographics for advertisers. Overall,45 percent of American adults have a smartphone, according to thePew Research Center.The rapid penetration of smartphones -- Apple introduced the iPhonejust five years ago -- has created a new medium that marketers havescrambled to learn. One research firm estimates that in 2012 mobilead spending will nearly triple what was spent last year, topping $4billion. Despite the explosive growth, businesses are devoting arelatively small piece of their total advertising dollars to mobile ads --2.4 percent this year, according to eMarketer, which tracks display,search and messaged-based ads.But eMarketer predicts mobile will grow 77 percent next year andreach an 11 percent share of total U.S. ad spending by 2016,overtaking radio and newspapers and making up more than one-thirdof all digital advertising."Mobile has seemingly always been in test mode," said Kurt Unkel,president of the VivaKi Nerve Center, a research and developmentarm within the Publicis Groupe, a French advertising firm. "But theredoes seem to be momentum based on volume and key companiesfocused on mobile."Those companies include the tech giants familiar to everyone: Googleand Facebook. A lot of the growth this year in mobile advertising hasbeen fueled by Facebook, which reported $152 million in mobile ad125