• by Ben Frederick  @mp_benfred, December 23, 2015

Everyone expects more money will be spent on mobile advertising next year than this past year as users spend more and more time on their devices. Looking ahead, marketers and brands alike still are unsure where that spend will go -- and it may not even be totally clear until this time next year.

Katherine Hays, CEO of Vivoom, believes there still is no effective model for mobile marketing and advertising, although cord-cutting is pushing video inventory to mobile devices. Her company focuses on brand-safe user-generated content, and she sees social influencers playing a major role in the future of mobile advertising. 

“The influencers will be the starting point of collaboration between brands and consumers, rather than the end point,” Hays says. She contends that mobile’s power lies in its personal appeal, and that brands should not be afraid to collaborate with their consumers.

Omri Barnes, VP of strategic partnerships at StartApp, said in an email that marketing to intent is one of mobile’s strengths. The more marketers can capitalize on intent next year, the more consumers will be willing to engage with brands. Barnes says that data and testing should be the primary concern of advertisers and marketers, and creatives should be secondary to data. 

Noah Jessop, head of data at Liquid, the tech arm of Publisher’s Clearing House, says: “The biggest thing that I am seeing happen so viscerally in all the organizations we’re working with is that you used to have two divisions: people that are looking for new customers, and people that are in charge of CRM and messaging. As programmatic ad targeting becomes more ubiquitous the wall between new customers, paid media, and CRM is being broken down.”

More money in mobile means more attention will be focused on the various challenges and advantages of the medium in the next year.