A new report published by Screen Digest predicts that mobile media ad spending in the US will increase from $88 million in 2008 to $700 million over the next 4 years. The report, titled “Mobile Media Advertising Opportunities: The Market for Advertising on TV, Video and Games“, also predicts that more developed mobile markets, such as Japan and South Korea, would have higher ad revenues than the US for mobile TV, gaming, UGC and VoD services.

“Data pricing structures, handset and mobile web usability, content quality and the lack of audience metrics to measure effectiveness are preventing mobile advertising from reaching its market potential,” said Julien Theys, who wrote the report for Screen Digest.

To put this in context, one can also look at other forecasts for the US market from eMarketer. These divide mobile advertising according to “messaging”, “display”, and “search”. The mobile media figures represent a portion of the display category.

The report also asked US advertising executives if they were planning to switch some of their online advertising spend onto mobile, 62% of them said not in 2008. Another interesting fact from the report was that only 15% of these advertising executives had already used mobile advertising.

“There remain clear growing pains ahead for mobile advertising,” said John du Pre Gauntt, senior analyst at eMarketer. “There are sticky disagreements concerning mobile customer information among mobile operators, Web portals, brands and agencies. All agree that better contextual targeting (for example, location, time, history) is a prerequisite for mobile advertising to succeed. But how to get there in the short-term remains an open question.”

See the article in eMarketer here.