Big Picture for the Smallest Screen

Despite the anticipated growth in multimedia capable handsets, mobile phone will continue to be niche advertising medium, according to a new report.
Although digital PDAs and mobile phones are ubiquitous — popping up from handbags, jacket pockets and belt clips everywhere — they seem to be the one new media place advertising dollars are not going.

The small "fourth screen" may be looked at more often every day by consumers than movie, television and even computer screens, but a new report from Strategy Analytics, "Advertising on the Fourth Screen: Opt-In To Dominate Mobile Marketing Spend," expects mobile marketing to remain only a niche revenue opportunity, representing just 2% of the projected $47 billion online advertising spend in 2010.

Strategy Analytics said that mobile advertising will be constrained by "low consumer acceptance of advertising on their handsets, device fragmentation and negative sentiment from carriers towards marketing supported content models."

Marketers want to be close at hand, however. A recent report from Forrester Research showed that over half the US marketers surveyed were interested in advertising on mobile devices.




"Advertising over wireless is more complex than TV, radio, and the Internet, because of the fragmentation caused by handset diversity and the uncertainty of take-up rates of different mobile technologies like video and Java," said David Kerr, Vice President of Strategy Analytics. "We expect sponsored video and audio services to grow strongly over the next five years capturing 17% of total spend by 2010, while browser based advertising will claim the greatest share with 44%."



The situation will change, in time. Too many marketers see the value of being on the fourth screen — right in front of their targets' noses. As the report concludes, "Momentum is building, but many barriers remain before the muscle of mobile advertising and marketing can be fully flexed."
"Mobile marketing is ripe with promise and to some extent still surrounded by hype as well," said eMarketer Senior Analyst Noah Elkin. "But those looking to the wireless channel would do well to remember that it is still in an incipient phase. On the one hand, the staggering demographics of the global wireless market should not be discounted. On the other hand, the ways in which most people use their handsets continue to evolve, with voice still by far the most dominant application."

For more information on this subject, read eMarketer's Mobile Marketing and M-Commerce report.