How Does Mobile Marketing Change the Spend on Paid?

If we were to revisit paid, owned and earned media and the impact on mobile marketing.

Most marketers are now building custom mobile applications (owned) for Android / iOs and will soon start to build them for Win Phone 7. Most are already ignoring the Symbian and Blackberry RIM.

During the days of television, print and radio paid was the choice of campaign spend, whereas earned was relatively small (less than 10%). Meaning, you paid for advertising alone and worked on your PR strategy to get your message out alternatively without paying for placement.

The days of the web changed that mix from only paid and earned to spending on your website (owned) which I think reduced the percentage of paid to 70% (from 90%) with 15% being spent on owned and earned slightly increasing to remaining constant.

With mobile applications being developed by marketers and social media engagement the owned portion of marketing spend is increasing even more to close to 25% of marketing budgets, and PR at a constant 15%, the spend towards paid media has further dropped to 65%.

The challenge with every marketer trying to develop their “owned” media channels is that they need

a) more resources (social media analysts & marketers and app developers) instead of campaign spend and

b) more “viral” techniques are being adopted to promote the owned properties.

Lets assume the viral techniques are getting more ineffective as more people try them.

Marketing budgets are increasing at a pace of about 5-7% annually for large companies and more marketers are being asked to spend more money on “owned media”.

What impact does this have on the future of marketing and more specifically mobile marketing?

1. I see the mobile advertising (both display and search) largely being used for promoting marketers “owned” applications – the main reason for that is the instant gratification that comes with an ad to download an application that possibly helps you more than just an ad for branding purposes. It is a lot more measurable.

2. I see many marketers being asked to “get more technical” and start building more “owned” properties since in the long run they are cost effective, easier to control and provide measurable value to the company.

3. Mobile ad networks such as inMobi, Google Admob, etc. will start to focus on helping marketers build, deliver and then promote these owned “applications and properties” since its in their best interest to get marketers to spend more money and make it a lot more accountable.

Update: Nick Burcher has written a book on this topic, and the except is available to review.