While mobile advertising is a growing opportunity, many marketers still view it as a challenge because of the complexity of the ecosystem. 

?People are trying right now and struggling with the concept of cross screen,? said Kate Reinmiller, vice president of client operations at Mixpo, Seattle, WA.

?They are comfortable running campaigns on desktop where everything has been standardized but now what they are trying to do is expand those into mobile and those standards are just coming to fruition,? she said.

?Over the past year, adoption of MRAID has grown tremendously. Even then, some publishers and especially networks are just now implementing that standard and it still takes a while for it to be applicable across their different properties.?

Mobile user insights
Google is also address the cross-screen challenge with its new Enhanced Campaigns, which are designed to run across multiple screens.

From a cross-screen perspective, marketers need to make sure they are running creative that is compatible on mobile so that in all instances their campaign is running seamlessly.

Further adding to the complexity in mobile is the numerous different techniques available to marketers such as applications, mobile Web sites and SMS and more.

As a result, marketers are often focusing on isolated approaches in mobile that are not connected and make it difficult to gain insights into mobile users.

?If I could offer up one piece of advice, it would be to always focus on getting the right content to the right people at the right time,? said Dash Lavine, director of mobile analytics and partner integrations at Webtrends, Portland, OR.

?Different people will always have different behaviors so make sure you focus on the individual person as opposed to an individual channel,? he said.

Mobile, social convergence
One strategy for addressing the complexity of mobile is to narrow in the focus on a single widely used platform, such as Facebook.

"Mobile continues to suffer from attribution and targeting problems which makes it hard to integrate it smoothly into data-driven desktop advertising plans,? said Sebastian Gard, senior vice president and social media director and strategist at Arnold Worldwide, Boston.

?Many advertisers could avoid these problems by using their mobile budget as an amplification of their Facebook advertising strategy,? he said.

?Facebook is, by far, the most used app on smartphones ? both in terms of number of users as well as time spent, so there is no lack of scale, and you get the added benefits of unified targeting tools and reporting that come from the Facebook platform."

The customer journey
While it is true that mobile is complex, marketers are hurting themselves by not focusing enough on mobile to ensure that their strategy is a success.

Many marketers view as an untested channel and, as a result, do not take the time to define what success should look like prior to the launch of their mobile campaigns or measure to understand the impact of these efforts.

?While the technology that enables marketers to manage and measure their mobile and cross-channel campaigns is constantly evolving, which in turn makes that process easier over time, it is imperative that marketers treat mobile as a key piece of the value chain and begin to utilize a number of the campaign strategies that have been used for quite some time across other channels,? Webtrends? Mr. Lavine said.

?Note that I say cross-channel as far too many people are treating mobile as a silo, which will only undermine their efforts,? he said. ?The smartest organizations are looking to identify and understand the customer journey of each individual across all of their channels, which then allows them to utilize that data to make smarter and smarter decisions over time.?

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Marketer, New York