While it's easy to write off fraud as a rare occurrence and simply focus on accuracy when selling to media buyers, mobile ad providers that do so are at a disadvantage. When examining mobile ad inventory, two questions need to be answered: Are the requests authentic? If so, is the location of the request accurate? Although the question of accuracy relies on the existence or absence of fraud, accuracy of location data is often determined apart from the filtration of fraud. This is problematic when you consider that roughly 16% of requests are fraudulent. And that's just the beginning.

The pre-launch Apple rumor mill worked overtime this Labor Day weekend pumping out stories about the iPhone maker's impending entry into mobile wallets and m-payments. Let's hope they make a more persuasive case than years of m-payment slapstick that have preceded them.

The console gaming industry had its ass handed to it by mobile. One EA exec recently admitted that game companies asked for too much money and attention from their customers. This may be true of media aside from gaming.

The world of location-based data demands application performance and speed at scale, especially if such marketing initiatives want to ensure the right data is delivered to the right place at the right time, even over unreliable network connections. By incorporating intelligent data distribution technology, location-based marketing apps can perform at scale, offering only relevant information to an end-user's actual location.

It's no surprise that most marketing and advertising utilizes visuals to leverage emotion and create a brand experience. Messaging should aim to do the same. Most consumers would prefer to receive some sort of visualization rather than to read a text message from a company. The better experience a potential consumer has, the more likely he or she is to complete the purchase journey.

The digital customer experience now encompasses interaction across devices at various points along the path to purchase, and the journey often begins on one channel and is completed on another. To effectively reach today's mobile-focused customer, marketers must adapt to these changing preferences, or face missed opportunities and even diminished brand loyalty from customers who feel under-served.

Marketers "gamify" their apps using some of the simplest elements: reward, achievement, challenge. They miss where gaming is really innovating: controlling mood, tone, pace, sound stage and re-imagining the 2D plane.

Adoption of mobile coupons seems to have doubled in the last few years, and it is clear that brands and consumers benefit from the transition from print to mobile. I am not so sure it has been as easy on the cashiers.

New technologies can now pair the large and diverse reach of terrestrial broadcast radio with mobile engagement to create interactive radio campaigns. Now when a consumer is listening to the radio over-the-air and hears a call to action for an advertiser's offer, they can use their mobile device to engage with the digital content related to that CTA in real-time. This not only quantifies the reach of a particular local radio campaign, but also generates results that traditional radio-only campaigns have never been able to produce.

Beacons are easy and cheap to deploy. Yet in order for beacons to deliver on their promise, brands need to consider carefully how they are used to drive mobile user engagement as part of an overall marketing strategy. Here are three best practices to bring your usage of beacon technology beyond the buzz.