Report: Mobile Advertising Still Not Common

For people who want the mobile advertising market to grow, here’s the best news we can give: it isn’t shrinking.  Otherwise, a new study indicates that uptake of the technology is uneven and quite slow.

Time and time again, we return to the fact that people don’t want to see ads on their cell phones, and this is quite a hurdle.  Newspaper, magazine, TV, and online ads all somehow managed to catch on, though, so not all hope (from a supporter’s point of view) is lost.

Advertiser Perceptions interviewed over 2,000 ad executives about the types of mobile ad technologies they currently use, and also about what they expect to use in the future.  Roughly 51 percent of the execs feel they’ll be using banner ads in six months, as opposed to 46 percent at the present time.  Similarly, there may be a 6 percent growth in podcasts.

Search ads should increase by 9 percent, and video may expand by as much as 13 percent.  One overarching fact remains, however, and Joe Mandese states it nicely: "More than half of advertisers and agency media executives do not currently use and have no plans [to] utilize mobile advertising."

Again, it looks like supporters of mobile advertising will need to take good news wherever they can find it.