Bridging the mobile gap by Paul Berney

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Paul Berney, CMO of Mobile Marketing Association, says that job of the mobile industry is to bridge the gap between time spent on mobiles and media spend.

“How will you know if you have been successful?” was the blunt question I was posed by journalist recently after reeling off the Mobile Marketing Association’s plans for 2012. “I mean give me a simple measure that everyone can understand” he continued.

It is actually a question I have been asking myself for some time and I think there is a simple answer. Recent studies by eMarketer and others have shown that on average US consumers spend 10% of their time on mobile but that only 1% of marketing spend is allocated towards the channel.

US consumers are not so different from others in developed economies, so it is easy to imagine the same divide exists. Indeed the BBC has published details of a survey which showed that children are increasingly turning away from TV and switching their time to mobile devices with over 60% of 7-16 year olds having a phone with internet access where they spend an average of 1.6 hours a day.

This conveniently presents me with a measure that both describes the scale of the challenge and the opportunity and hints at the potential growth to come of both. The job of the mobile industry (hopefully lead by the MMA) is to bridge the gap between time spent and media spent.

There seems no doubt that consumers have gone mobile and those research figures suggest that marketers have yet to catch up.

On the plus side in nearly four years of working in this role the question asked of me by marketers has switched from ‘why?’ to ‘how and what?’