Mobile – Get With it Already

by Danielle Smith on 02/13/2009 at 12:41 pm in Commentary, Market Research & Data, Mobile Search, Performance Marketing

I heard this today in a meeting and was pretty impressed by it:

Apparently, out of the roughly 250MM cell phones in the US, 10%-12% of those are smartphones. Of those on a smartphone, 36% use this to access the web over a traditional PC.

Pretty impressive stats, by themselves, but I’m more interested in putting them in a different context. If you hopped into the Delorean (the flying one that runs on garbage, not the plutonium-fueled one that gets you chased by Libyans) and go back a decade or so, you’d probably read headlines about traditional media losing a chunk of its audience to digital. You can probably see where I’m going with this. Digital stands to lose a chunk of its audience to mobile. The monarch of Media Mountain is starting to lose some of its serfs.

Of course, it’s not like digital is dead (far from it),but if you’re one those brands who has a pretty big stake, say in something like search, you might want to start thinking about this – like right now. Mobile adoption by brands is still pretty low, which means you can actually get in and work out the channel’s intrinsic kinks at unbelievably low prices. Get in while the tickets are still cheap.