LAS VEGAS - Mobile advertising will exceed $6 billion by 2014 and to reach this level, carriers are working together to address some of the challenges advertisers face when deciding where to spend their ad dollars.

According to a panel at International CTIA Wireless 2010, these challenges include the lack of sufficient, common metrics and reporting methods in mobile, the lack of common and consistent targeting data and the lack of consistent inventory across carriers. Collaboration among carriers is expected to accelerate mobile advertising to traditional advertising mediums such as print, TV and online.

?In a lot of countries we see tech leapfrogging and that?s certainly the case with mobile,? said Ken Papagan, CEO/cofounder of Rentrak, Portland, OR. ?I have lived through a number of generational changes in media.

?Cable TV was supposed to kill television, the Internet was supposed to kill publishing ? maybe it is ? new media is more additive and cannibalistic,? he said. ?If you think about how you use your mobile phone, you?re using it in places that you don?t have a mechanism that you would prefer.

?It?s an additive technology. The industry is good for advertisers and consumers because it?s more convenient.?

The panel also included Hans Fredericks, vice president of comScore, David Gill, vice president of Nielsen, Olivier Griot, cofounder and vice president of Umber Systems and Evan Neufeld, vice president of Ground Truth.

Measuring mobile
Companies are focusing on census-based measurements and seeing the click-through analysis of the data.

Rentrack measures entertainment and advertising on any platform. The company tracks every movie ticket sold on a global basis.

Additionally, in the home entertainment space, it tracks the sell-through and rental of DVDs and in the television space it tracks 100 percent census of all transactions in the top 23 cable operators.

?In the broadband space, we have a download service where we work with NBC Universal, that we track the video download that they sell,? Mr. Papagan said.
 
?As phones increasingly become smarter, video is going to become more and more important,? he said. ?We?re concentrating on the measurement on video and video advertisement.?

Mr. Griot on the other hand found that having basic core data is critical to consistency.

According to Umber Systems, there are a lot of ways to analyze data and many companies can use raw data and build on it.

?You need the accuracy, you need to slice and dice the data,? Mr. Griot said. ?[Many companies] don?t know who these consumers are, where they are coming from and what they are doing.?

?All of the dimensions of measuring mobile ? when you mix it all together, it?s a critical component of the package,? he said.

ComScore found that the data from its British solutions was shocking. The social media sites dominated the Internet and were huge on mobile. According to the company, the Facebook audiences in Britain were huge.

The panelists agreed that mobile data ranges from region to region.

Mr. Gill said that the biggest surprise has been the longevity of the market and SMS. With the rise of smartphones, the text message and SMS markets have remained consistent.

Mr. Neufeld, however, said that the United States data is going to be different than other regions because of a different carrier situation.

The panelists predicted that in the coming years, more consumers would use their mobile phones instead of their PCs.

Private data
Privacy is a stepping stone when it comes to census data. The stakes in a mobile phone are a lot higher given the nature of the information.

Mr. Fredericks said that it is all about limiting private information. Consumers trust banks with their information because it is done properly.

?I think that privacy is the biggest elephant in the room and it crosses every platform,? Mr. Papagan said. ?In the case of mobile, the tremendous advantage for advertisers is a completely targeted capability.

?All of the like-minded colleagues, all of our data is anonymized when we get it. This is something that the industry may need to lose,? he said. ?If marketers and advertisers miss use the info then it will blow up.

?I think that if the companies that are involved handle privacy in a complement way and a non-intrusive way ? we will see more and more liberation. If it?s misused and over marketed then we?re going to have some problems.?

Mobile location
Location is going to be an important issue for mobile advertising and there will be an opportunity for companies to market their products via location-based tools. 

?There are advertisers who are moving their budgets to mobile,? Mr. Neufeld said. ?There are always going to be those brands that are more comfortable with new environments.

?There are those that won?t put money down, until they see growth,? he said.