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Will 2011 be the year mobile display advertising takes off and if so what makes 2011 different to previous years?

• Every year we hear next year will be the year mobile display advertising will take off. Mobile advertising is again predicted to take off next year and yet each year this prediction is made it doesn't happen. The question is more specifically about mobile display advertising. Despite the huge numbers of mobile users and the increasing number of smartphone users mobile display advertising seems to be largely where online display advertising was five years ago with a disorganized and inefficient market ecosystem and lack of transparency. The real question is whether the market ecosystem for buying mobile display advertising needs to be fixed before mobile display advertising can really take off or can is it possible without the market ecosystem being fixed? If the market ecosystem needs to be fixed first what will the fix look like i.e. what needs to be done by whom so advertisers and agencies become far less wary of mobile display advertising?

• Answer:

  I think that 2011 will be huge for mobile. The reason that everyone has always said that "next year is going to be the year for mobile" is because there are a few problems that mobile always faced that everyone thought would be solved in the next year: Lack of a consistent platform: One of the issues so far with mobile has been the lack of a consistent platform. Each carrier had different phones with different OS's. This makes it difficult to build advertising campaigns that are scalable. Lack of the speed to distribute advertising: Up until the last year and a half, connection speeds on mobile phones crawled. But no more! 4G is FAST and the speeds at which we will be able to download will only get faster. This allows brands to do more within the space. Screen Size: Historically mobile banners were not that good. They were small jpegs embedded on the mobile versions of websites. Now, however, we are seeing screens get larger and more user friendly. In addition to all of the above, the budgets just typically aren't there. When you have advertisers dumping 100-200k a month into display network buys and only 10-20k a quarter into mobile, its hard for media companies to justify heavy innovation in the space. So alongside of the technology issues that the industry has been facing, digital marketers for some reasons still see mobile as something extra and not a core part of their strategy. Regardless, over the last year or so, there has been a huge explosion in mobile innovation. The droid and iphone have reached a critical mass.  We (ad folks) finally will see connection speeds and screen sizes that will allow us to dristribute some great experience. So I think that the next few years are going to be extremely exciting.