• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, January 26, 2012

PQ Media CEO Patrick Quinn highlights the growth of mobile advertising and marketing, noting that spending has increased at 3.5X across the communications industry broadly in the last five years, and by 20 to 40 percentage points. Mobile marketing and advertising itself has grown eight- fold, while mobile content and access has tripled. But the latter is a much larger market -- about $39.5 billion last year compared to $3.3 billion for marketing and advertising. Within just paid advertising in mobile, in-game ads and search have been the top categories, while on the marketing side, location-based services, coupons and apps have been tops.

PQ Media expects 30% growth to $55B across moible content and access and marketing/adv. in 2012. There will be 50% growth in both marketing and advertising. Among the challenges Quinn highlights are the usual suspects like device/network fragmentation, the difficulty to buy mobile inventory at scale, and still relatively low penetration on new devices like tablets. Smartphone penetration has also been slowed by high access fees.