Mobile marketing and advertising seem to have been growing rapidly in the past few years in terms of technical capabilities, creative ideas, and user acceptance.

Now new information from the IAB UK shows that advertising budgets are also making a major shift towards mobile, with 15% of 2014’s digital spend expected to go to mobile activities.


The information comes from a survey of over 300 media agency employees from a dozen agencies including some of the world’s biggest such as MEC, Starcom Mediavest, Havas, Mediacom and Manning Gottlieb OMD.

In addition, almost 40% said that new, incremental budgets were being allocated for mobile, a sign of increasing importance of this channel.

Beyond looking at just spending expectations for 2014, the survey also explored attitudes towards mobile within the big agencies. Some key findings:

• 64% of the people in the agencies felt that they had a good understanding of mobile. This represents a huge gain in an area that has historically been a major problem. In fact this figure jumped up 28% since last year.
• Nearly 40% of media agency employees claimed that mobile is now a regular part of client proposals
• Lack of mobile experience and understanding in client organizations is still seen as a big impediment according to almost two thirds of the respondents, although levels of client understanding are increasing.

One somewhat worrying result was that almost half the people interviewed had no experience with the issue of mobile privacy. Given how important privacy in all forms will be over the coming years, clearly this is an area of training that should be addressed.

Finally, regarding the future of mobile advertising, the three topics cited to be the most exciting for 2014 were “NFC”, “native advertising”, and “targeting”.