BII MOBILE INSIGHTS: Business Is Stuck In The 90s When It Comes To Mobile

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Business Seems Stuck In The 90s When It Comes To Mobile (Daniel Backhaus)
Attend any digital marketing conference and you quickly realize who the belle of the ball is these days. Everyone is obsessed with mobile. Everyone except business, that is. While mobile currently makes up around 16% of total internet traffic, and its rapid growth promises to fundamentally change the web, its share of advertising spending and overall investment is significantly lower. This indicates that business may, once again, be late to recognize a major shift. Here are the most common failures:

Not offering a mobile optimized experience at all
Failure to correctly identify mobile users
Not considering a connected, multi-device world
Unsuitable back-end systems and data structures
Failure to truly optimize for the mobile use case

The sooner digital marketers and e-commerce leaders accept that mobile users are not inherently different from desktop users, but that they do have different needs dictated by their devices, the sooner they will adjust and refocus their investment in the mobile Internet to reflect the reality of its rapid growth.

Mobile Will Extend Your Business Model Faster Than The Web Did (Forbes)
That’s a bold statement when many companies face a mobile monetization gap and when most successful companies generate only dozens of millions of dollars of direct mobile transactions. The web extended most business models and created only a small number of truly successful new ones. Mobile will follow the same path. However, mobile has the potential to be more disruptive than the web. The mobile revolution will inevitably transform your business in the next decade, too. Not because mobile will generate massive direct revenues, but because it will trigger a more radical transformation toward systems of engagement. Mobile engagement empowers people to take the next most likely action in their immediate context and in their moments of need. And this transformation will happen more quickly with mobile than it did with the web a decade ago because mobile has unique realities that will help close the monetization gap.

How To Solve Mobile Advertising's "Monetization Problem" (BI Intelligence)
Despite its potential, legitimate questions surround the widespread assumption that mobile ad spend will skyrocket to meet engagement. Mobile faces a big gap in advertising dollars vs. consumer "eyeball time," and eCPMS are sometimes as low as 20% of their desktop counterparts. U.S. Ad Spending vs. Consumers Time Spent

In this report on the mobile advertising ecosystem, we explore the "monetization problem" in mobile, give an overview of the mobile advertising industry's size, and examine the mobile platform wars' impact on advertising, as well as the potential industry split between smartphones and tablets. Here are a few issues contributing to the "monetization problem" that need to be addressed:

Targeting needs to be improved
Cracking the local advertising opportunity is essential
Enhanced ad delivery and advertising analytics could fuel growth
Fraudulent clicks need to be addressed

The report is full of charts and data that can be downloaded.

Mobile Is Taking Over Our Computing Load (GigaOM)
Although mobile has been coming on strong as a primary means of computing, it still lags overall desktop internet usage. But for some publishers who started on the web, there are already moments during the week when mobile drives the majority of traffic or sales. The Guardian’s Anthony Sullivan says that mobile now contributes about 35% of traffic overall. That’s up from 10% at the start of 2011, when it was primarily smartphone traffic. Online design store Fab.com sees 33% of its sales from mobile devices. The numbers underscore why mobile is so powerful. And it highlights the continuous nature of computing these days. The reality is today we are constantly on some type of computer throughout the day, moving back and forth between devices for different tasks and different settings. Mobile devices fill in the times when reaching for a laptop or desktop is more difficult, including early mornings, during lunch, as we settle in for the night and during the weekends.

Plans For Thanksgiving Day Mobile Shopping Almost Double (Digitas via AdWeek)
When evening comes on Thursday, November 22, forget the turkey. Grab your gadget and get ready to buy. In fact, 28% of adult smartphone and tablet owners plan to shop using those mobile devices on Thanksgiving Day, according to a new study conducted by Harris Interactive for Digitas. That's almost double the 15% of U.S. adults age 18 and older who made the same claim in 2011. "The fact that it’s just about a 100% year-over-year increase shows the big behavioral change that mobile devices are causing," said Chia Chen, mobile lead at Digitas. "Mobile is not just a channel—it’s really about this kind of technology-driven cultural change." Is that a good thing? "It’s definitely an opportunity. It’s not a good thing if you’re a physical retailer and you don’t happen to have a mobile commerce presence." Good point.

Mobile Plays A Growing Role In Cyber Monday (Read Write Mobile)
Check out this HSN infographic on the history of Cyber Monday and how mobile usage has increased since its founding in 2005:

The History Of Cyber Monday