mocoNews has posted a recently released study by ABI Research that digs deeper on the emerging trends in mobile advertising and marketing. ABI projects the market to reach $3 billion by end 2007 and expand to $19 billion in 2011.

"Mobile advertising and marketing is a risky, albeit enticing business Unlike the PC, a mobile device offers a uniquely personalized communications channel. Carriers worldwide have quite a bit of information about their end-users: name, sex, age, geographical location. And depending on the handset and plan their users have purchased, the carriers probably also know something about their economic status and credit record. But they don't like to release this information to third parties because they want to protect and control their customers,"

However, early-adopting brands in the US are still in the process of testing the water. They don't typically allocate a set percentage of their annual budgets to mobile. In turn, major ad agencies are still relatively inexperienced with mobile marketing campaigns, and reluctant to utilize location-based services and technologies such as MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) and mobile search that are still in the early stages of deployment.

What caught my attention in this new study is the reluctance of major ad agencies to maximize mobile advertising as part of their campaigns. They must rethink the way they do business considering the current market landscape composed of people who are dependent, to a point addicted, on their mobile phones for daily survival. Otherwise, the biggest winners will be those emerging specialized companies and agencies.

To underscore the increasing importance of mobile marketing and advertising, many companies like iLoop Mobile are now into development of interactive, SMS-based mobile marketing, mobile enterprise solutions and mobile content distribution.

Via mocoNews