By Michael Conn (@Conndor),  London Business School MBA graduate and marketing in-trepreneur

The mobile has been around for decades. 20 years ago, the ‘mobile’ phone was literally connected to a car battery. 10 years ago Motorola Razr V3 (remember? that super skinny phone?) had just been released. Today, the mobile category continues to grow, innovate and expand, with smartphones with more processing power than Apollo 11 and sales encroaching on the traditional PC and laptop markets.

Despite the longevity of the mobile category, the mobile marketing category is relatively new and its rise has come hand in hand with the proliferation of smartphones. In fact, it wasn’t until 2012 that the prestigious Cannes Lions creative communications awards recognised mobile as its own advertising media channel. But this isn’t the only way mobile can be defined. We can look at mobile both as a:

1. Vertical / Own category – A specialised channel to focus media spend and hero a campaign effort, or
2. Horizontal / Complementary tool – A supporting channel to back-up / action the campaign message from above the line channels.

However, no matter how you define it, marketers are lagging.

KPCB identified a $20 billion opportunity in mobile advertising in its well-known annual ‘Internet Trends’ report in May 2013. Media spend in mobile and internet (which is also accessible via mobile) is lagging behind consumers’ average time spent on these channels. This is whilst overinvestment occurs in non-data responsive print and the expensive TV medium. Given eMarketer, Gartner and Nielsen are predicting mobile media spend alone to grow to over $13B in 2014, it’s safe to say these companies are leaving a lot on the table when it comes to mobile.

Why is that? Where are the big corporations with their talented marketers? The answer is that most marketers are no longer questioning the “Why?” when it comes to mobile, but they are asking “What?” they should be doing. Even companies that have a huge mobile footprint, like The Guardian’s with 63% of its digital traffic through mobile, are struggling to find a way to implement mobile marketing as they are only just coming to terms with online and social media. This is a rapidly evolving landscape.

Perhaps corporate marketers can take cue from app developers, who are investing heavily in in context display ads in mobile apps. For example when you run out of lives in Candy Crush, an ad for another game encourages you to download and play as you wait to be revitalised. These entrepreneurial app developers are fast, innovative and locking in huge ROI on their marketing spend. Based on my networking, it seems they represent the vast majority of mobile display ad spend, meaning there is still opportunity for a corporate first mover to get in the game.

Fortunately, big businesses are slowly catching up, and there have been some amazing mobile driven content developed by those outside of the app developer realm. I’ve chosen a few personal favourites from the list of 2013 Cannes award winners:

• Chevy – Game Time: Taking the Super Bowl ad competition to a whole new level. They created a mobile game where players could win points and prizes (including a new Chevy), by answering trivia questions related to Chevy’s ad and what happened during the game. This kept consumers distracted from competitors’ ads and continuously engaged in Chevy’s. It also created personal social value by providing in context facts and insights throughout the game, ensuring users were the knowledgeable go to person at their Super Bowl party. They had over 21 million questions answered and at one point over 130,000 people responded to a question at the same time! It certainly helped extend the value of the $4 million Chevy paid for the Super Bowl ad time
• Auchan – The Selfscan report: A French retail group wanted to highlight their recent sustainability report. Taking it direct to their consumers via a scan code on their shopping receipt, consumers were directed to an interactive report which also engaged them with prompting questions (which were used to refine the report in real time and for the future). They reached over 1.5 million people (an unprecedented level for them) and used 99.73% less paper than their previous sustainability report’s campaign
•  Adidas Neo – Window Shopping: Putting window shopping on steroids by encouraging out-of-hours shoppers to visit Adidas’ eCommerce solution. An interactive window display and patented technique (no app!) pushes viewers to the online store via their 1st screen of choice – mobile. This concept also captured 90% of walker by’s attention, an important metric in street store performance and well above the industry average.

Taking things one step further, Mondelez in the US created Mobile Futures, a digital incubator, to collaborate with mobile startups to ‘transform consumer engagement and path to purchase’. Campaigns were developed and tested all within a 90 day period, a microsecond compared to the normal product development lifecycle in the consumer goods industry. Less than two years old, their first batch of startups has already seen results after launching their marketing efforts from mid-2013. This includes (but isn’t limited to):

• Sour Patch Kids teaming with kiip to serve the mobile advertising space on mobile app’s ‘in game achievements’ – a moment users have been driving for and pay close attention to. This has created an in context fun and engaging way to grow the Sour Patch Kids brand
• Oreo teaming with banjo to determine location based search and social discovery elements and feeding all their major social networks and channels into one efficient feed. This has supercharged Oreo’s social marketing, a key channel for them
• Halls teaming with dailybreak to use gaming mechanics to drive high participatory behaviour for new product launches. Every bit helps when developing new brands.

Fast, innovative, and cutting-edge are words that come to mind when considering the above. I hope that soon they will be the norm.

Mobile is definitely proving to be the next big thing beyond online and social – now it’s up to companies to find solid answers to their “What?” questions. I’d be interested for your thoughts on where mobile is going and how you plan to learn more and take advantage of this opportunity with your business today.