Marketing for Mobile and the MMA

The global economy took a severe hit in last year, however the online advertising market proved resistant to the recession. Unlike spending on all other major media, online advertising spending increased 2% to $55 billion, and measured-media advertising spending did better during the recession in Latin America than in any other region of the world.

This year brought a return to double-digit growth, with online ad spending tracking towards more than $60 billion worldwide in 2010. By 2014, the sending in online marketing could reach around $100 billion, growing around 12% a year. These rates will be unmatched by other media.

The recession has made online advertisers with limited budgets to make every dollar count. Even though Mobile Advertising is still only a few pro cent of the total advertising spending, resent global research point to the fact that marketeers worldwide are unsatisfied with the metrics that they get from Mobile Marketing, where figures show that the category is the lowest ranked together with Off-site Social Media. Both Google and Apple are very clear on a strategy for the future called "Mobile First", as also pointed out by Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the IFA show last month.

This is no different in Latin America, and the repositioning of the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), is an excellent platform for creating a common language and establishing an aligned and coordinated metrics in the regions with global standards, but with much higher quality than today.

My main aim as candidate to the board of director at MMA is to:

• Promote open and standardized interfaces to mobile marketing channels as efficient connections between agencies and publishers.
• Seek common agreement among all the players in the mobile marketing space to establish the metric by with we can define milestones and set goals for the development of our common business. The penetration of mobile phones in Latin America is tracking steadily towards 100% penetration, and the interest in the mobile handset as a media is increasing significantly. Therefore, we must make sure that the marketing space becomes open to all players in the value chain, and not overtaken by a few dominant Internet players.
• Use my well established network to open a constructive dialog with regulators about how we can improve the regulatory and legal framework for Mobile Advertising, while still protecting the end user.

Looking into the future, there are a lot of very interesting challenges to embrace. Social network advertising is getting renewed attention in 2010. Ad spending on social destinations in the US will cross the $2 billion mark in 2011. Mobile Facebook users are twice as active as their fixed broadband colleagues.

Twitter has finally launched its ad business earlier this year. And the potential for 2011 and beyond could be dramatic if it proves that its model of measuring advertising effectiveness works.

Finally, online social games and applications are becoming a more important part of the mix.
Teenagers are spending less time talking and more time playing on their phones.

All of this will spell a very interesting next season for the MMA.

You can also read more on the Top 5 five Mobile Marketing Trends to watch on Mashable.

Growth in the VAS business

It is very interesting to note the growth in the VAS revenue as part of the total for the North American market, where VAS has gone up from about 6% of total revenue in 2005 to 32% in 2010. The developed Asian countries have been high in this measure ever since the i-mode days in Japan. The North American mobile operators have apparently had much more success on finding their place in the data centric mobile universe compared to the mobile infrastructure suppliers from both USA and Canada, which has nearly all disappeared in the same period. Take a look for your self.