• by Joe Marchese , August 3, 2010

Every year in recent memory has been the "year of mobile" -- and yet mobile has eluded most marketers. The mobile screen presents many challenges to marketers, especially overcoming the incredibly high bar for relevance and utility required for marketing to not offend consumers on their mobile phone. There are two major tactics marketers can take to reach consumers in mobile: build applications with enough utility to attract consumers, or pay to place ads (or some other brand integration) in applications that have built a critical mass of users. But as mobile enters its next phase, it's interesting to look at the parallels between where marketers are today with mobile and how social network marketing has evolved.

Over the past few years, social media has offered marketers a very similar choice: build a branded social application and hope to attract consumers, or market through social applications that already attract consumers. While there are notable examples of "branded applications" attracting enough consumers to justify their development, more often than not, those applications are the exception, not the rule.

The number of branded applications that are simply gathering dust has pushed marketers to look for other ways to engage consumers in social media. My prediction is that the route mobile takes will be similar. The number of apps consumers will add and regularly use on their mobile device will be limited, and the bar for entertainment and utility will be high. Therefore, the only brands that will succeed by taking the "branded application" route in mobile, will be those that can offer a significant utility, especially for current customers (banking is a great example). However, reaching and engaging consumers at scale in mobile will require borrowing the utility created by the most successful application to engage consumers.

The difficulty is that the form factor of advertising in mobile is far from standardized; in order to get the most of advertising in any medium, you want to take advantage of all the attributes of the medium. For mobile, this would mean planning for a smaller screen, touch screen interface, geo-location-enabling and access to Web/phone. These are a lot of things to consider, for marketers to avoid delivering banners in mobile that will be even less wel- received by consumers than banners on their PCs.

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