There’s no question that mobile marketing and advertising is the hottest area of digital marketing at the moment. Big consumer brands are seemingly tripping over themselves to launch the fanciest mobile app.

We’ve written a lot recently about the foibles of mobile marketing campaigns that don’t have a direct lead generation or sales component tied into them. Heck, it’s for this reason that we launched MediaWhiz Mobile, our new mobile performance marketing service. Advertisers and publishers consistently tell us there is a big need to help them more profitably engage, acquire and retain customers and generate mobile-specific traffic.

And yet a number of leading advertisers complain that all of their mobile spending doesn’t improve their most important marketing metric: sales.

Mobile certainly captures a lot of eyeballs but its ability to produce a consumer action — leads, sales, downloads, etc. — is often lacking.

That may be starting to change, though. A recent eMarketer report shined some light on how mobile branding and marketing campaigns are starting to translate to sales and brand lift. And, most crucially for advertising, mobile marketing spending is beginning to make a serious dent in consumers’ purchase intent.

The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), in partnership with IHS Global Insight, studied U.S. mobile marketing expenditures and their impact on sales for the “Mobile Marketing Impact Study,” released in May. The study found that this year spending on mobile marketing — including mobile advertising, mobile customer-relationship management and mobile direct-response marketing on non-mobile media — will reach $10.46 billion. By 2015, spending on the channel will approach $20 billion.

All of that sounds great, but what it does it mean for actual sales and leads generated? Well, quite a lot actually.

InsightExpress found that in 2013, mobile and tablet advertising got strong results across brand health metrics, raising ad awareness, purchase intent and brand favorability. Tablets performed particularly well.

The below chart breaks down how mobile marketing performs across several critical brand metrics.

While there is still quite a ways to go before mobile marketing becomes a true customer-acquisition channel, the key metrics are moving in the right direction. For performance marketers, where consumer purchase intent is crucial, this is a welcomed sign.

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With the world becoming more mobile friendly, the number of mobile users continues to rise. Instead of searching for a brand on their desktop and purchasing through a traditional website, many consumers are making quick searches via their smartphones and making instant purchase decisions on mobile sites and apps.

Smartphones, however, are no longer the top source of mobile traffic. In February tablet traffic in the U.S. surpassed mobile smartphone traffic for the first time.

The era of t-commerce has officially arrived. And it brings with it massive opportunities – and challenges – for digital marketers.

The Growth of the Tablet Market

Tablet traffic has played a strong role in the growth of mobile commerce and it is consistently growing. In one report tablet click-through rates were 65% higher when compared to desktops. In another report click-through rates on tablets outperformed smartphones by 250%.

Although smartphones currently generate approximately double the revenue ($16.4 billion) with mobile apps when compared to tablets ($8.8 billion), if tablet usage continues to increase it is likely that tablets will generate more revenue in mobile apps in the near future.

Globally tablet usage is on the rise as well. Germany is expected to have 13.4 million tablet users in 2013 and by 2016 the EU is expected to have an estimated 97 million tablet users. With this global growth it is important that advertisers and marketers take note. Tablet optimization will be key to sustained mobile success over the next few years.

The Role of Content In T-Commerce

In our new eBook, “Content Marketing like a Pro,” Marc Purtell, MediaWhiz’s director of SEO, discusses how vital it is understand your audience when building a content marketing strategy. If a large portion of your mobile audience is coming from tablets, it’s best to build a content strategy that will enhance their experience on those devices, rather than making them conform to your preferred mobile site design.

The number marketers really need to focus on is $24 billion. It is predicted that by the end of 2013 $24 billion will be spent on shopping through tablet devices. By the end of 2014 this number will double.

Growing from a $24 billion market to a $48 billion market in less than a year should have marketers prepped and ready for a huge increase in tablet traffic.

Adobe conducted a study recently that showed out of 100 billion visits to 1,000 websites 8% came from tablets, while slightly more than 7% came from smartphones. With a more enhanced Web experience compared to mobile and better portability compared to laptops, a successful mobile strategy must incorporate tablet users and their experiences.

What’s Next for E-Commerce In the Tablet Era

The future for mobile commerce is bright. In a short time tablets have become consumers’ preferred mobile commerce platform, surpassing smartphones in Web traffic. With tablet shipments expected to reach 350 million by 2017, this trend shows no signs of slowing down.

The t-commerce era of online marketing has arrived. Are you ready for the immense opportunities – and challenges – it offers?

How is your brand preparing for the t-commerce era? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section or on Twitter at @MediaWhizInc.

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Last week, we announced the launch of our new mobile performance marketing practice, MediaWhiz Mobile. While it doesn’t mark our first foray into mobile marketing, it does represent our most significant and dedicated focus on the immense online marketing and advertising opportunities of mobile.

What this launch means for MediaWhiz, however, is insignificant compared to the value we believe it offers our clients. MediaWhiz Mobile will help advertisers more profitably engage, acquire and retain customers across what has rapidly become the most relevant and important digital marketing channel: mobile.

Why the launch now? As I told A4U in announcing the new service, we absolutely believe that mobile lead generation is the future of online marketing.

Consumers are projected to spend $119 billion worldwide on goods and services from the mobile and tablet devices by 2015, according to ABI Research. And with upwards of 70% of online advertising spend in the United States going toward performance-based advertising, it’s clear that advertisers are hungry for performance-based mobile marketing services that do far more than branding. They want mobile marketing services that help their brands profitably engage, acquire and retain customers in the mobile space.

Increasingly, consumers are ditching their desktop computers in favor of their smartphones and tablets. The opportunities these devices offer brands and marketers to reach, connect with and influence the purchasing habits of consumers is beyond what many of us considered possible just five years ago. More importantly, mobile and tablet devices offer advertisers an immense opportunity to acquire customers instantly and to generate leads at the click of a button.

MediaWhiz Mobile is here to service those opportunities across a variety of online marketing channels, including affiliate marketing, display advertising, search, SEO, lead generation and email.

You can read more about the launch of MediaWhiz Mobile in A4U, Adotas and Revenue Performance magazine, among other publications. For this post, I wanted to focus on the two critical ways we think MediaWhiz Mobile will benefit advertisers and publishers.

Domestic or International, We Have You Covered

Whether you’re trying to acquire customers from Chicago to Cairo, or just launching a new affiliate offer in the middle of Iowa, we have you covered with MediaWhiz Mobile. For publishers with access to mobile traffic, MediaWhiz can provide both domestic and international mobile offers through our partnership with Matomy Media Group across multiple verticals. Clients can receive mobile traffic and new customers from several sources, including display, mobile search, social and affiliate marketing.

Best-in-Class Technology with RingRevenue

We also advertisers the ability to create click-to-call campaigns through our partnership with RingRevenue, the industry-leading provider of call performance marketing solutions. This creates a new, high-quality channel of lead generation for mobile campaigns. Publishers can track their mobile affiliate marketing campaign metrics run through MonetizeIt, the MediaWhiz affiliate network, and optimize those campaigns in real time.

Running mobile affiliate marketing campaigns enables us to offer clients and publishers a more diverse set of online marketing options. Having the click-to-call tracking capabilities of RingRevenue allows us to offer clients and publishers more robust and accountable metrics to demonstrate the performance of their mobile affiliate marketing campaigns.

Mobile isn’t just the future of marketing; it’s also the future of online lead generation and customer acquisition. MediaWhiz Mobile is our answer to this fascinating and growing field and we’re thrilled to be able to bring it to market.

Companies interested in utilizing MediaWhiz’s mobile performance marketing services should contact Daryl Colwell, vice president of business development, at +1 646.442.5513 or dcolwell@mediawhiz.com.

How is your brand utilizing mobile for its lead generation and customer acquisition campaigns? Let us know in the comments section.

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Google announced major changes yesterday to AdWords, rolling out what it is calling “enhanced campaigns.” The changes are designed to help marketers “more simply and smartly manager [their] ad campaigns in today’s multi-device world.”

There are two main parts marketers should consider regarding the impact the AdWords changes will have on their work and client campaigns.

First, the changes open up (or rather brings Google up to speed) with a new and improved revenue and ad distribution model, mostly focused around mobile.

Second, the changes bring the advertising and marketing industry one step closer to a comprehensive inter-connected attribution model of consumption. That’s the Holy Grail that marketers have been searching for since the dawn of modems.

Google AdWords Enhanced should help marketers by providing new bid adjustments, customizable ad formatting and simplified reporting. If you have been hesitant to push towards mobile ad distribution, fear no more. Google will help you adjust ads to fit almost all devices, and report back on performance. All of this, of course, should translate to more distribution, more bids, higher budgets and higher revenues (at higher margins) for both marketers and Google.

However, this new initiative does not fully resolve the quest for a holistic consumer behavior attribution model. There are still outstanding questions about tying mobile, desktop, tablet and offline behaviors into a coherent and complete model. There are also more specific questions about Enhanced’s visibility (tablets and desktops are grouped together, just as one peculiar example), which should be addressed by Google as this product matures.

There are certainly a lot of questions this latest Google update does not yet quite answer. It does, however, open the door to a new world of mobile distribution for many advertisers, and certainly does take us a step further in understanding, as an industry, how consumers make decisions, and what role do different devices have in that process.

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There’s no doubt that performance marketing is a significant force in online marketing, and will continue to grow. What will 2013 have in store for the performance marketing industry?  As I see it, there are four key trends that will influence performance marketers’ work in the new year:

1. More brands will invest in performance marketing. The 2012 IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report indicates that more than two-thirds of all marketing transactions will be paid for on a performance basis. Total U.S. spend on performance marketing will grow by almost $5 billion, to $25 billion in online advertising revenue, versus 2011 spend. This indicates that performance marketing will continue to dominate the online ad-spend model. Brands that consistently miss their online marketing ROI targets will comprise the majority of new spend on performance marketing campaigns, as they seek to take advantage of the industry’s guaranteed results. Traditional agencies will continue to focus on branding for their clients in the digital space, and farm out performance marketing budgets to trusted affiliate networks and marketers.

2.  Lead quality and compliance take center stage. As brands continue to invest their marketing dollars in performance marketing, they will place increasing pressure on performance marketers to achieve their investment goals. The SaaS and lead quality product market will blossom. These two dynamic sectors of online markets will help advertisers pay for only top-quality leads, enabling performance marketers to get paid appropriately for such quality. The government will continue to get involved in online marketing regulations, such as Do Not Track legislation, and more states will attempt to pass nexus tax laws. Efforts will likely be minimally intrusive, and the industry will push for self-regulation efforts as a means to limit involvement.

3. Mobile lead-gen has its moment in the sun. Mobile marketing will become a much larger piece of the advertising budget in 2013. eMarketer forecasts 138 million smartphone users in the U.S. next year, comprising 43% of the total population. It will be critical for advertisers to optimize websites and create shorter lead-generation forms with click-to-call for mobile devices. In our “always on” world, consumers need instant gratification from the brands they allow into their online world. Advertisers that provide consumers with access to immediate customer service will win their business.

4. Consolidation of media channels. A larger premium will be placed on internal media sources to provide quality and consistency. As such, the lead-generation industry will see a continued and more aggressive consolidation of affiliate networks. Many affiliates will merge with or acquire one or more of their affiliate media sources. Specifically, many mailers and media buyers will join forces with networks to increase margin, reduce compliance risk and deliver on allocated budget to survive and create a competitive advantage.

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To understand the impact of mobile on the lead-gen industry, and online marketing as a whole, one should head to Ghana. That’s right, Ghana.

Say bye-bye to your Madison Avenue office. Hail a taxi JFK bound and ask Siri to book a flight to the villages around Accra, where you will find some of the most advanced, sophisticated and interesting examples of how mobile can and will impact the lives of consumers and the advertising and marketing agencies who aim to influence their purchasing decisions.

Lacking infrastructure, entire regions in the developing world have leapfrogged the PC era. People in these regions rely on mobile technology to operate and streamline many aspects of everyday life, including business interactions, regardless of how large or small those businesses are. At the click of a button individuals can conduct their entire business cycle, including acquiring new customers and solidifying existing ones through mobile-optimized e-commerce and lead-gen platforms.

Implications for Lead Gen

For the lead-gen world, the implications are massive. As the U.S. transitions to the complete mobilization and personalization of both information and access, potential and existing consumers can now be reached at any time, in any place. This ongoing shift, which is only speeding up, is changing consumption patterns of information and purchasing right before our eyes. Marketers can gather more precise and relevant information to better tailor offers to behavioral and demographic profiles. Brands can pinpoint the exact moment at which a potential client is most receptive to signing up or converting.

Furthermore, with increasing resources going toward tailoring brands’ mobile presence and usability, consumers continually grow accustomed and now expect to be able to gather info, sign up and transact online. As a result, consumers are more receptive than ever to being targeted for intelligent, value-driven offers and opportunities on their mobile devices.

The future of PC usage in the US, or anywhere else for that matter is far from obsolete. However, it is certainly past the growth stages of its life cycle. Farmers in small villages in Ghana farmers operate entire economic ecosystems from their smartphones. Here we just now perfected using mobile to pay for our coffee at Starbucks, but we’ll get there.

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Welcome to The Friday Five, curated reads about marketing, advertising and digital media from the team at @MediaWhizLLC. Read previous Friday Five posts here. 

Pinterest Fosters Unique Shopping Behaviors | eMarketer
A new eMarketer report delves into the retail activity spurred by the latest social network to make headlines — Pinterest. The visually focused, aspirational site has grown tremendously, and it offers a lot of promise for retailers, assuming they can get users to link images with product offerings and purchases.

Mobile Payments Still Tiny, Set to Explode in Next Four Years | Advertising Age
The hype surrounding mobile payments seemingly knows no bounds. But the reality of consumer adoption of the emerging payments platform hasn’t quite caught up to the excitement, as our Daryl Colwell has noted before. Now, however, there is new research to suggest that mobile payments may finally be living up to their lofty hype as the ultimate bricks-and-mortar-meets-online-marketing platform. Research firm eMarketer estimates that the total transaction value for mobile payments in the U.S. will be $640 million this year, but that will grow to more than $62 billion in 2016 as a bigger segment of the population uses their phones to buy medium-ticket items, including fast-food restaurants.

Google Wants to Join the Party, Not Crash It | The New York Times

Have you ever hosted a party and found your guests wondering who stars in that new movie or play? Well, Google is here to help. It’s figuring out new, less intrusive ways to join the party — as varied as voice search, Internet-connected glasses and other wearable computers, or dining room tables outfitted with screens. What could these new innovations in real-time mean for the future of online advertising?

Advertising’s Bumpy Transition (And Why It Matters To You) | The Social CMO
Until advertisers start to value the focused, memorable, impactful opportunity they have in buying the right ads in the right place for the right audience, Web users are going to be stuck seeing a lot of irrelevant ads on sites that don’t respect their time and attention as much as they should.

E-mail is still going strong, studies show | Click Z
Social media and mobile may get more of marketers’ attention, but e-mail is still an important platform, studies show. More than 9 in 10 internet users have e-mail accounts, and 60% use them on a daily basis and e-mail can actually increase the effectiveness of other platforms, experts say. “For marketers trying to reach consumers, e-mail remains one of the best ways to find them,” this article notes.

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Welcome to The Friday Five, curated reads about marketing, advertising and digital media from the team at @MediaWhizLLC. Read previous Friday Five posts here. 

The ‘Mobile-First’ Fallacy | Digiday

Everyone and their brother talks about “mobile first” being the brand and marketing strategy of the future. But what does it really mean, if anything? Publishers and marketers aren’t cutting back their investment in desktop experiences. Consumers’ love for TV remains strong and marketers are happy to oblige that love with lots of ads. As Digiday’s Jack Marshall reports, “mobile first” is little more than a marketing gimmick.

Attention Digital Agencies: You Need to Monitor These Regulatory Issues | DMNews

As the online marketing industry evolves, more money is entering the space, leading to greater regulatory and consumer scrutiny. Digital marketing agencies and brand marketers need to be aware of the various legal and regulatory restrictions explicit in the industry, as well as those implicit guidelines that ensure online marketing’s integrity and value.

Mobile Wallets or Fully Digital Wallets? | eMarketer

Consumers are finally adopting mobile payment systems and mobile wallets — if slowly. But what if they need something more: a seamless experience that takes their mobile wallet to their PC and back again?

Twitter: Huge Mobile Use Makes Us Ideal For Real-Time Marketing | CNET
Twitter president of revenue Adam Bain and sales marketing chief Shane Steele shared statistics and anecdotes demonstrating that the service is an ideal place for brands to achieve better and more efficient advertising and marketing results.

The Truth Behind Branding In The Digital Media Age | Six Pixels of Separation
The response to consumers being active with digital media has been to put more ads on the page, bigger ads, and page-blocking ads. This doesn’t make a better digital experience, it simply makes the ads more annoying. We have a ways to go in ensuring that digital advertising matches the user experience.

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For the week of Oct. 1-5, 2012, MediaWhiz experts were quoted or featured on a variety of digital media news and trends, including debunking the myth that proposed Do Not Track legislation will kill online advertising and what Bruce Springsteen can teach marketers about success brand marketing in the digital age. | Read previous MediaWhiz In the News posts. 

Do Not Buy the Do Not Track Hype

Digiday | Oct. 2, 2012 | Op-Ed by Peter Klein

Reality check: The proposed Do Not Track legislation won’t kill online advertising. It may hamper innovation and cause financial hardship for businesses that thrive on online consumer-data tracking, but it won’t kill a $31 billion industry.

Not all see it this way, of course. 33Across CMO Allie Kline recently called on marketers to “fight [the] anti-tracking forces.” It’s a call to action growing with increasing alarm in the digital media and online publishing industries. 

‘Do Not Track’ Won’t Kill Online Advertising

AdExchanger | Oct. 3, 2012 | Op-Ed by Peter Klein

It’s easy to take a prominent stance against proposed “Do Not Track” legislation. Like many online marketers I don’t yearn for regulation of the industry, believing it will stunt growth and hamper innovation. However, I also believe that anti-tracking legislation will not destroy online advertising.

Despite continuing pressure by public advocacy groups and members of Congress I don’t expect the United States to adopt anti-tracking legislation or regulations for several years — if ever.

The history of success of competition and regulations against certain forms of marketing and communications is mixed. The U.S. Postal Service has been around for almost 240 years and yet it is adapting (albeit slowly) to Web-based competition. And best of luck to those who try to “unsubscribe” from receiving targeted catalogs and direct mail, despite Federal unsubscribe regulations.

The passage of regulation meant to curb online behavioral marketing will require market adjustments. We’re already seeing that on a small scale after Microsoft introduced default DNT settings in the newest version of its Internet Explorer browser. Despite claims by some that anti-tracking legislation will mean the end of online advertising I wouldn’t start shuttering ad agency doors just yet. Read more …

What Bruce Springsteen Can Teach you About Building a Brand That Lasts

Advertising Age | Oct. 1, 2012 | Op-Ed by Steve Goldner  

It happens to all marketers. They hit a moment when something dramatic and unexpected, or, more often than not, banal, affects their company’s position in the marketplace, and they don’t know how to react. Often, they flounder in place, desperately trying to work out their brand’s next move.

Perhaps they should take a lesson in crisis management from “The Boss” — Bruce Springsteen. The future of the E Street Band was in question when band memberDanny Federici died in 2008, and more recently, the passing of “The Big Man,” Clarence Clemons. Springsteen’s initial comments following their loss were unequivocal: the band would continue.

He laid to rest any questions over the sincerity of his commitment during the band’s opening concert of its Wrecking Ball Tour. Staged at the iconic Apollo Theater in Harlem on March 9, Springsteen’s words that night, and his unequivocal actions to help the band heal from its loss and move forward, reveal two important marketing lessons. Read more …

MediaWhiz Announces Two Promotions

ClickZ | Oct. 1, 2012 | Featuring Adam Riff and Steve La Peruta

Integrated digital media agency MediaWhiz announced the promotion of Adam Riff to SVP of digital strategy and Steve La Peruta to SVP of information technology. Riff will oversee MediaWhiz’s integrated digital media division, which includes search marketing, social media, and display. La Peruta will oversee the company’s IT operations, engineering, and database services.

Search’s Social Exploration

MediaPost | Oct. 1, 2012 | Featuring Adam Riff

… The engines pull data sources from across the Web, but Adam Riff, senior vice president at digital marketing agency MediaWhiz, agrees the industry will need cloud storage and faster bandwidth speeds to support connections.

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Editor’s note: The following post was originally published in MediaPost.

Mobile marketing is all the rage at the moment. It seems that every day another startup emerges with the word “mob” or “mobi” in its name.

While I firmly believe that mobile marketing is the immediate future of digital media, the landscape for marketers and brands is exceptionally challenging. Recent data from eMarketer indicate that 115 million people in the United States — 43% of the total population — own a smartphone. That number is projected to reach 200 million users, or 60% penetration, by 2016.

Marketers who aren’t building mobile-friendly website or landing pages will soon find themselves missing out on revenue opportunities from almost two-thirds of American Internet users.

The explosive growth of smartphones has presented a number of perplexing challenges for performance marketers. There is a lack of scalable mobile lead-gen programs. Few brands have a clear definition of their mobile user or a coherent mobile strategy. Advertisers aren’t always equipped to manage the mobile traffic channel. And quality is often no better than co-reg.

These issues are leading to inefficient mobile lead-gen traffic that further complicates an already messy formula for consistent return on investment in mobile marketing campaigns.

Effective mobile lead-gen programs require that advertisers and marketers take the following into consideration:

1.     Define your mobile strategy. This is critical to define upfront, as there are many mobile marketing options to consider. Marketers can generate leads or conduct branding efforts across mobile sites via banner advertising, build and distribute apps for e-commerce generation or CRM efforts, or simply convert desktop websites to mobile-friendly versions optimized for smartphones and tablets. Marketers need to plan their mobile development efforts strategically, as each requires proper resource planning and effort. 

2.     Separate and manage the channel. Allocate a reasonable budget — such as $10,000 — for testing a campaign. Then recognize that mobile affords brands the power and luxury of having a real-time audience to engage as soon as they visit a site. Code the mobile site URL differently from its desktop version, so mobile traffic can be parsed appropriately and routed to the company’s call center or CRM team. Mobile lead-gen requires agility in order to capitalize on consumers’ fleeting and sporadic searches via smartphones. These users require immediate follow-up by the brand to maximize the chances of converting them to customers.

3.     Price quality appropriately. Mobile traffic can often be high volume and low quality, but like traditional online lead-gen, there is always a right price. Consider paying more for a full-form, or much less for a short-form lead-gen program with dedicated call-center verification. Be especially careful on pay-per-click campaigns since the “fat finger effect” leads many smartphone users to accidentally click on a banner ad.

Performance marketers are particularly adept at taking advantage of the immense opportunities offered by mobile marketing. Our entrepreneurial style needs to be applied to deliver real results and profits, as the mobile space is experiencing far less ROI certainty than traditional online advertising.

Digital marketers have a responsibility to make mobile marketing work for both advertisers and consumers. Frankly, we don’t have a choice in an increasingly portable world.

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