Click to enlarge

Mobile ads might consist of only a tiny portion of digital advertising - but their potential looms large. Analysts such as Morgan Stanley are adopting bullish assumptions about mobile computing's growing reach.

The industry is not there yet, however. Ad platforms are still very fragmented, making it cumbersome to place ads across multiple devices or OS. Also the mobile ad technology itself is only advancing in fits and starts.

But progress is being made. Following are five important signs that mobile computing is not far away from becoming a dominant access point to the internet, according to JiWire.

Consumer Mobility

Consumers on-the-go lifestyles is having a transformative effect on the media and advertising market, as both traditional and digital media adapt to an increasingly mobile audience that consumes media on a progressively broad range of portable, personal devices such as laptops, smartphones, kindles, gaming devices, netbooks, and so forth.

"Digital media has proliferated through peoples' lives in ever-growing ways, and is expanding rapidly into the mobile space," Dave Courtney, CEO of JiWire. "The continuing surge in smartphone penetration and the rush of new devices into the mobile market is completely changing the rules of engagement between marketers and consumers. The audience has moved, and brands will rethink their approach and change their strategies for reaching these dynamic new consumers."

Audiences Will Replace Channels

As technology enables increasing consumer utility and "connectedness", legacy media distribution channels become less relevant to marketers than audience segmentation. Media channels that reach mobile audiences are mirroring each other to a great extent. Out-of-home advertising is going through drastic changes by becoming more digital and much more interactive. Mobile device-based marketing campaigns have become far more like traditional online campaigns. Digital, mobile, and digital-out-of-home channels will increasingly converge, and keeping these channels separate for ad buying purposes will be more difficult and increasingly irrelevant.

Mobile Evolves Beyond Devices

As mobile marketing matures, it will become less about the device and more about the audience. Mobile advertising is following a development path similar to internet advertising: in the early days of the internet, marketers included haphazard online purchases in their marketing mix. While the medium wasn't understood at the time, it had great potential and marketers made purchases with little direction. Now Internet ad buying is based on audience, much like traditional media purchase, and has become much more effective. In 2010, mobile advertising buys will start to look more like online buys.

Contextual Location Emerges

"Location-based advertising will become more mainstream for brands in digital and mobile marketing," said Courtney, "but it will not be focused solely on 'where' with regards to a pinpoint on a map. Rather, location will be seen as another form of context. It will be a filter that will indicate a tremendous amount of information about an audience based on the type of place a person is in at that point in time. Location will become a form of interest and intent, equally as relevant, if not more, than content is today."

Engagement as a Metric

For years the advertising industry has lamented low click-through-rate (CTR) performance, and argued that CTRs are not the best measurement of digital advertising's impact. In the same light, brands can no longer speak to their audience only through having consumers see their ads. Brands will need to emphasize ways for people to engage with their products as part of the advertising experience. While CTR will not go away, cost per engagement will emerge as an increasingly important metric for success.