CHICAGO - A Draftfcb executive at the Results 2012: Mobile Marketing Day conference said that although mobile accounts for a large chunk of consumer time, the medium is still a grossly small portion of a marketer's spend.

During the ?How to Allocate Mobile Budgets? panel, mobile experts discussed how companies are slicing up their marketing budgets with a disproportionate amount of spend allocated to digital compared to traditional media. The executive also discussed how mobile measurement is being tackled by brands.

?No one ever got fired for making a television commercial because you cannot prove that it is not working,? said Patrick Moorhead, senior vice president of mobile at Draftfcb Chicago.

?A lack of measures creates a mushy place in budgets,? he said.

Digital divide
According to a report from Flurry Analytics, mobile is grabbing 23 percent of consumers? time. However, mobile receives approximately one percent of budget money, showing the deep divide between brands? marketing campaigns and user habits.

?Clients are saying how mobile is inevitable and how people are addicted to it, but they do not know how to pay for it,? Mr. Moorhead said.

Brands that have a mobile presence no longer have a first-mover advantage. Instead, brands that do not have mobile initiatives will eventually be left in the dust as marketing switches to a mobile-first mentality.

Mobile has a targeted, small niche that is beginning to put mass media in its place, per Mr. Moorhead.

Brands looking to divide up their budgets to accommodate mobile should take money from a channel that receives more revenue, such as print.

Then mobile budgets should be placed in two buckets ? services, which includes mobile sites, applications and SMS and media to help promote the services.

However, according to an executive from Digitas, smart brands know that mobile is not just part of a digital strategy.

Instead, mobile should be incorporated into every marketing channel in ways that target consumers in specific moments throughout a day.

Van Eiseman, vice president and group director of technology and mobile practice lead at Digitas, Boston, said that mobile should not be a separate portion of a digital budget.

Having a mobile-first mentality is the core to understanding digital marketing that has moved on from the PC and Web age.

With consumers spending a large majority of their time on their mobile devices, brands need to think of ways to include mobile into print, television and other marketing channels.

Fragmented audience
According to Gary Schwartz, president/CEO of Impact Mobile, Toronto, part of the problem with including mobile in marketing budgets is because the market is fragmented.

In order to buy mobile media, often brands have to use several media buyers.

Additionally, consumers are interacting with multiple screens, making it difficult for brands to know which media to invest in.

For example, a study recently found that consumers look at 27 different types of media per hour. Marketers need to think about which mobile channel makes the most sense for their audience and stick with it.

Test, test, test
Mobile is still a new, wishy-washy medium to many marketers and brands. Therefore it is necessary to show companies how to include mobile by incorporating it into specific campaigns that have already been laid out.

?To get a budget, give brands an example of a success to get people excited about it before they invest in an infrastructure,? said Marci Troutman, CEO of SiteMinis, Atlanta.

?There needs to be a real strategic thought process behind each campaign,? Ms. Troutman said.

According to Ms. Troutman, many agencies are approaching mobile the wrong way by not getting help from vendors and mobile experts.

Agencies need to look at exactly how a brand is allocating money for a specific campaign and set aside a portion for a mobile component.

For example, HBO recently used a multichannel campaign to promote its new show Lucky. Originally the company did not have a mobile component.

?Advertising, apps, Web and SMS are all part of a holistic mobile strategy,? said Jason Saroyan, director of business development at Trilibis Mobile, San Francisco.

?Part of the formula is education and walking some of the old-school CEOs through mobile,? he said.

Please click here to view Mr. Moorhead's slides on the gap between consumer time and ad spent

Final Take
Lauren Johnson is editorial assistant on Mobile Marketer, New York