For a decade or so, someone has proclaimed every year as the “year of mobile advertising”.

The promise of marketing directly to a device in someone’s hand, material tailored and targeted to their individual needs, has been a long-awaited nirvana.

But a combination of small screens, a fragmented media market and concerns that mobiles may be just too personal for advertising held back the explosion.

However, after the aggressive entries into the market of Google and Apple in 2010 and with smartphones taking almost half the market in the US and Europe, last year finally saw a turning point.

“2011 was the first real year of mobile,” says Brian Wieser of Pivotal Research, an independent equity analyst firm. “After many years of expectation, mobile at last arrived as a relatively mainstream marketing channel.”

A barrage of big numbers explains why the technology has finally broken through. The mobile internet now has a scale of audience that has demanded brands’ attention.

A study by Nielsen and NM Incite, the market researcher’s joint venture with McKinsey, found there are nearly as many mobile internet users today as there were internet users in 2000, with 44 per cent of US mobile subscribers using a smartphone.

ComScore found that by the end of 2011, 127.6m mobile users in the US and 108m users in Europe were regularly consuming some kind of mobile media, whether through apps or the browser – a 30 per cent rise on the previous year.

Google announced its mobile revenues hit $2.5bn during 2011, including searches on tablets such as the iPad, and Facebook announced it has 425m mobile users.

Blyk, a mobile media network that works with operators in India and the UK, said the number of people opting in to view ads leapt from 1m to 4m during 2011, with response rates among its subscribers of between 20 and 65 per cent, a level unheard of with traditional online marketing.

Mobile adspend in the UK is estimated to have more than doubled in 2011, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau. An IAB study last year found smartphone owners go online an average of 18 times a day.

Despite the slow build-up, many companies have been caught off-guard by the arrival of mobile as a serious media and marketing channel.

Only 15 per cent of FTSE 100 companies have a mobile-formatted homepage, says the IAB. Many have leapt with gusto into app development, which tallies with consumers’ greater preference for consuming content in that format.

However, maintaining a mobile web presence is important for simple but often overlooked tasks such as email or search queries. As a result, the “bounce rate” for visitors who leave a site on mobile after viewing a single page is almost nine in 10.

However, despite Google and Apple lowering the upfront costs of their display advertising in February to encourage more into the market, price has not been the main barrier to brands’ use of mobile.

Nielsen found that ads shown on mobile ranked lowest among any kind of media when judged by consumers’ trust. Just 26 per cent trusted text-message ads and 27 per cent mobile display ads, lower even than regular banners on the web (29 per cent) and well below adverts in search results (36 per cent) or on TV (46 per cent).

Similarly, a poll of more than 4,000 adults in the UK and US by YouGov on behalf of Upstream found that two-thirds would find it unacceptable to receive “unwanted advertising” on their mobiles.

“The main problem is that ads on such an intimate device are perceived differently from when seen on a TV screen or outdoor advertising screen,” says Christophe Cauvy, European head of digital and innovation at JWT, a WPP agency. “The screen size does not allow much nice, non-intrusive advertising.”

So, as more brands move into mobile marketing, retailers face perhaps the greatest challenge.

Armed with smartphone cameras and barcode-scanning apps such as Ebay’s Red Laser, shoppers are comparing prices in-store but buying online instead. “We are now seeing one item purchased every second via mobile devices in Britain, double the rate we saw at the beginning of last year,” says Angus McCarey, UK retail director at Ebay. “Apps such as Red Laser are blurring the lines between online and offline shopping.”

ComScore found more than half of US smartphone owners used their mobile for purchasing in a shop, with one in five scanning a barcode and one in 10 searching for online discounts.

ComScore, a supplier of digital marketing intelligence, says: “The retail industry, which experienced an upheaval with the advent of online shopping, is poised for further disruption, as smartphones enter bricks-and-mortar stores, bring­ing the internet right on to retailers’ home turf and further complicating consumer conversion.”

It notes: “Smartphones have become consumers’ most valued shopping companion.”

In such a situation, retailers are being strong-armed into the mobile world whether they like it or not.

However, despite the significant growth of the past 18 months, one element of mobile marketing remains largely out of reach: the holy grail of location-based targeting.

Facebook’s attempt to harness “check-ins” to specific spots via its smartphone app for localised deals did not generate enough revenue to warrant a mention in its filing to go public.

Other check-in apps such as Gowalla and Rummble failed to break through to the mainstream and folded, and though their last remaining big rival Foursquare has notched up some 15m users globally, it remains a specialist rather than a mass-market proposition.

As such, Mr Wieser of Pivotal Research believes that “geo-targeting remains ahead of its time”.

“While some marketers will place value on information associated with location, we believe that most large marketers are not organised in a manner that affords effective management of campaigns targeted on the basis of a narrow geographic location,” he says.

“Narrow geo-targeting will be generally inefficient in terms of costs and benefits for most brands.”

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