“Mobile is the future — and it always will be.” For the past decade, that has pretty much summed up both the potential value of running campaigns directly to users’ handsets, and the seemingly endless stumbling blocks that kept mobile marketing from being more than an interesting side-project that advertisers might fund if they had any budget left over.
No one’s saying that mobile’s moment is now, but the size of the reachable audience keeps getting bigger all the time. What we can say is that mobile marketing in its various forms — text campaigns, mobile search, display ads on mobile Web pages and applications built for the iPhone and other smartphones — is getting increasing funding from marketers, particularly in segments that value reaching mobile users more than average.
The exact level of that funding is hard to pinpoint. Budgets are still trial-sized compared to other media; ad buys are limited in scope; and after all, the low cost of execution is what makes SMS campaigns so attractive in the first place. Marketing research firm eMarketer predicts that U.S. mobile advertising spending for 2009 will reach $416 million, a 30% increase over the $320 million spent last year, and that mobile spending by marketers in this country could reach $1.6 billion by 2013. Forrester Research expects to see similar spending this year ($391 million), but a small budget of $1.1 billion for mobile marketing in 2013.
At the moment, text-messaging campaigns get the lion’s share of the mobile marketing budget: 55% according to eMarketer’s estimate, compared to 25% for mobile display and 20% for mobile search. But the agency predicts that SMS proportion will drop gradually over the next four years, as growing numbers of users access the Web from smartphones and are able to be reached by the same tactics, search and display, that now reach them on the desktop. By 2013, eMarketer predicts, only 28% of the money U.S. marketers allocate for mobile will go to text message campaigns — a smaller slice than either mobile search (37%) or mobile display (35%).
Users of Apple’s iPhone devices now make up the largest portion of traffic to the mobile Web: 38% in August 2009 according to metrics firm StatCounter. By comparison, BlackBerry’s smartphones directed only 16.9% of the mobile Web traffic for the month — smaller that the traffic from Apple’s other Web device, the iTouch.
Marketers who want to reach that relatively affluent, highly mobile-savvy iPhone crowd will put money into developing branded applications, sticky software programs that let them present the user with something useful (like Pizza Hut’s iPhone ordering app) or fun (the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show app, meant to build buzz for the Dec. 1 broadcast program with behind the scenes images and videos).
Volkswagen is relying on both fun and utility to promote its 2010 GTI. Eschewing traditional media and even standard online marketing, the company is relying on a free iPhone racing app, Real Racing GTI, to give its young target customer a first test drive of the car. The campaign included an online leader board and a contest that drew weekly from the pool of registered players to award one of six customized real GTIs.
“Launching the all-new 2010 GTI via [iPhone app] allows us to connect with this savvy GTI consumer within his or her everyday life in a way that no 30-second spot ever could,” VW marketing vice president Tim Ellis said in unveiling the app last October. The game also lets players send messages to their friends on mobile Twitter and to grab video of their best race laps and post them to the game’s YouTube channel.
who’s hitting the streets?
| Travel and Hospitality | $1.4 million |
| Media and Entertainment | $1.2 million |
| Financial Services | $0.75 million |
| Consumer Goods | $0.5 million |
| High-tech and Manufacturing | $0.3 million |
| Retail and Wholesale | $0.25 million |
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