When will bigger budgets emerge for apps and mobile advertising overall? The perennial question. It's a bit of a conundrum because more funding requires standard metrics in mobile to prove its
efficacy in terms of brand awareness or purchase intent or any other traditional brand measure. But there aren't such mobile metrics yet to show results, according to Tara Scarlett, Senior Manager,
CRM and Precision Marketing at Coca-Cola. She emphasized the importance of maintaining an innovation budget to keep refining new marketing techniques including mobile to get to the point where
standard metrics eventually evolve and the value of mobile efforts becomes clearer.
But maybe there should more realism about how big a part of ad budgets mobile will ever be--mobile is an
extension of digital advertising, so it's always going to be seen as a portion of that. A small portion. A recent study by Coda Research predicts U.S. mobile spending will hit only $2.2 billion in
five years--37% annual growth, but about what online spending was 10 years ago.
