• by Federico Pisani Massamormile , February 3, 2010

It's Monday morning. You're sitting on the subway on the way to work. Chances are you'll see lots of fellow commuters reading the news, or playing sudoku, or following the route on a map, or reviewing their friends' weekend photos -- all on their mobile phones. It's pretty hard to resist the conclusion that everything and everyone's on the mobile Web or using mobile data.

The growth of the mobile Web and mobile data usage in recent years has definitely been breathtaking. It has been spurred by the tremendous increase in smartphone usage -- iPhones, Android devices, Palm Pres and more. The Apple juggernaut has seen over 3 billion iPhone app downloads to date. Gartner Group estimates that global sales of smartphones will increase by 27% this year to 177 million units.

However, even with all this momentum, the exciting thing is that the mobile Web and data in 2010 are still in their early stages with a lot of opportunity for growth. If you want a glimpse at the future, look to Japan. There, in the first three months of 2009, the country's most popular social network, Mixi, had 65% of its pageviews on mobile phones and 35% on PCs (according to Morgan Stanley).

The great potential of mobile is spurring investment across the globe in new mobile devices, mobile apps, mobile-specific Web sites and new mobile advertising technologies. It's very much like the early days of the Internet. Through all this activity, a familiar paradigm is emerging. Much like the Internet, the growth of mobile data will be largely funded by advertising and mobile commerce.

Almost every time in modern history that a new form of media has emerged -- newspaper, radio, TV, Internet -- the emergence has been precipitated by two things -- first, a superb technological advance that delivered information to consumers in a form that they didn't even know they needed (yet soon couldn't live without); and second, the emergence of a supporting advertising industry committed to the medium. With sleek smartphones, the first condition for the mobile Web's explosion is clearly met. The second -- the emergence of a viable mobile advertising ecosystem -- is now in place and being utilized across the globe.

Hundreds of businesses -- from large, well-funded competitors to mobile specific players such as Millenial Media and Jumptap -- have for years been committing significant technology and business resources to the area, including over a dozen ad networks in the U.S. alone.

What is particularly exciting is that serious bets are being made on mobile advertising. This is the surest sign that mobile advertising has arrived. It's for this reason that the recent mobile advertising investments by Google (which is buying AdMob), Apple (which is buying Quattro Wireless) and others (such as Internet and software giants like AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft) are so incredibly positive for the mobile industry, and ultimately, for mobile users. I'm looking forward to watching them go head to head, like they do in mobile devices, PCs, office applications, mobile operating systems, browsers, online advertising and all the rest. Mobile users will be the winners from this competition.

The investments come at a timely moment. Mobile advertising is becoming a key topic on the minds of most CMOs today. According to a survey of advertisers and agencies by eMarketer, only 11% of advertisers have a separate line item in their budget for mobile advertising, and more than a third said that mobile advertising was not currently part of their advertising plans at all. In fact, in the U.S., eMarketer estimates that mobile ad spending reached only $416 million in 2009, compared with the nearly $24 billion on for online advertising, $51 billion on TV ads, and $38 billion on newspaper ads.

But the signs of significant future growth are there. Those savvy advertisers who are now experimenting with mobile ads are reaching users on the go with new formats, and many are getting great results. Mobile advertising is proving to be compelling for a whole swath of businesses looking to connect with consumers -- large brands looking to build awareness and purchase consideration; performance marketers seeking to drive traffic, downloads, phone calls or mobile commerce; and local businesses like local hair salons, restaurants or car dealers who want to reach customers on the go. Bernstein estimates that global mobile advertising spending will balloon to $17 billion by 2012. This may have seemed ambitious a few months ago. Now, with Google, Apple and the rest powering the ecosystem, it's eminently plausible.

This increased ad spending is great if you're a news site, a blogger, a social network or another type of content provider -- it will enable you to create mobile-specific Web sites and content. If you're a mobile developer and want to earn money to support a new app -- well, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and all the rest will soon "have an ad for that". The result for users is a much more expansive, exciting and engaging mobile Web.

All of this is perhaps a long way of saying that -- after all the talk of the last 5 years -- we're now really at a truly exciting stage of the industry's evolution. The incredible new mobile devices that seem to appear on a weekly basis have driven incredible mobile adoption, but it's advertising that will power the mobile ecosystem to the next level. I'm looking forward to a future in which online advertising enables great returns for marketers, better returns for publishers and developers, a richer mobile Web for all users and even more commuters engrossed in their online sudoku games.