Mobile Advertising - Groundhog day?

Mobile advertising is still in its infancy in terms of share of budgets relative to share of media consumption time, however there are aspects that make me feel like I'm back in the bad old days of early 2000. Remember those? Back when we didn't have third party adserving, when we had to dispatch multiple creative to multiple publishers, when there were ridiculous resource overheads from collating multiple media owner reports to present a single view to a client.


It seems that we've learnt nothing from the growing pains of the past few years and now that online is a proven media channel we're looking for another battlefield to forge.


So how can we accelerate mobile advertising growth? Looking backwards to look forwards is a good start.

We need true 3rd party adserving for mobile. Adserving, not click and impression tracking. Adserving provides targeting options and optimisation flexibility, and as any media planner knows, a centralised reporting structure with up to date data for all publishers is a mandatory for daily optimisation

What's the hold up? Obviously it's chicken and egg - without investment, publishers are loathe to incur further cost, however without technology, it's a harder sell for the media agencies.

Where to? Third party counter tags are a good start, so that we have up to and auditable data. However this doesn't allow for the smarts that we now take for granted in the online adserving space and I think the responsiblity has to be pushed back to the media owners to provide 3rd party adserving for mobile. Can I guarantee that they'll immediately see increased share of budgets? No. But it will remove one of the adoption barriers that currently exist.