SIZE MAT
BY NICOLE URSO REED
The exponential growth of mobile consumers and the amount of time they spend on these devices has dramatically outpaced the amount of mobile advertising. The latest “Internet Trends” slide deck from vaunted mobile expert Mary Meeker, a former Wall Street analyst and
current Kleiner Perkins venture capital partner, articulates how dramatically mo-
bile connectivity has revolutionized consumer behavior and how much catching
up marketers have to do in order take advantage of this growing audience.
According to the report, almost half of mobile
phone subscribers in the U.S. are on smartphones,
and mobile devices drive at least 13 percent of all
Internet traffic. However, when looking at mobile
usage versus advertising, the report shows that
consumers spend 10 percent of their time on mobile devices, but only 1 percent of ad budgets are
invested in mobile marketing.
As marketers figure out ways to integrate
mobile offers into the media mix, the landscape
becomes even more complex as M-commerce
fragments into smartphones, tablets and the latest
onslaught of smaller tablets, such as the iPad mini,
and large smartphones, like the Samsung Galaxy
Note II.
Leaps and Bounds
There’s a lot of that proverbial low-hanging
fruit just begging to be picked, and while no one
will dispute the enormous opportunities that mo-
bile technology created, everyone has different
opinions on how to capitalize on it. Smartphones,
E-readers, tablets and now mini tablets — the iPad
Mini was a top item on many wish lists this past
holiday season — enable on-the-go connectivity,
but how consumers engage with the devices, access
information and use various features is different
from one device to another.
