All who work assid­u­ous­ly in media jobs at U.S. mobile adver­tis­ing agen­cies can only pray that devel­op­ments in the UK will be repli­cat­ed state­side. Across the pond, the mobile adver­tis­ing mar­ket is poised to dou­ble in 2013, break­ing even last year’s record growth high-point.

Smart­phone explo­sion 

So says a new report from eMar­keter, which fore­casts that the UK’s 2012 peak of £526 mil­lion ($811.25 mil­lion) will vir­tu­al­ly dou­ble this year to £1 bil­lion ($1.54 bil­lion). Mobile phones adver­tis­ing in par­tic­u­lar appears to have accel­er­at­ed the growth – smart­phones are used more wide­ly in the UK than any­where else in the world.

The growth has been phe­nom­e­nal. Mobile adver­tis­ing spend in the UK was esti­mat­ed by the Inter­net Adver­tis­ing Bureau to be a rel­a­tive­ly mea­ger £203 mil­lion ($313 million).

eMarketer’s VP of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, Clark Fredrick­sen, said, “On a broad lev­el, British con­sumers are adapt­ing to smart­phones and tablets faster than expect­ed. As more con­sumers spend more time on their phones and increase the amount of mon­ey they spend on phones and tablets, that audi­ence becomes increas­ing­ly valu­able to adver­tis­ers. Com­pa­nies will invest in adver­tise­ments for mobile dis­play for­mats as con­sumers spend more time on their phones, with mobile expect­ed to over­take fixed inter­net by 2014, accord­ing to con­sul­tan­cy IDATE.”

He went on to observe that the entire adver­tis­ing eco-sys­tem was evolv­ing dra­mat­i­cal­ly in response to chang­ing con­sumer behav­ior, how­ev­er some busi­ness­es haven’t caught up with the mobile explo­sion, with many retail­ers not yet even hav­ing built a strong mobile website.

Part of the explo­sive suc­cess of mobile adver­tis­ing is undoubt­ed­ly down to tech­nol­o­gy Goliaths like Google, Face­book and Twit­ter, all of which have invest­ed big-time in enhanc­ing their mobile platforms.

Mobile ver­sa­til­i­ty 

Oli Rox­burgh, MD of the Mobile 5 agency, said that more and more inter­na­tion­al brands were turn­ing to mobile adver­tis­ing agen­cies for mobile-spe­cif­ic cre­ative, all of them attract­ed to the poten­tial of unique mobile tech­nolo­gies like the use of touch, GPS, and accelerom­e­ters in mobile adver­tis­ing campaigns.

eMar­keter fore­casts that gen­er­al dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing spend will leap in the UK by 12 per­cent in 2013 to hit £6.1 bil­lion ($9.4 bil­lion) and then again to £7 bil­lion ($10.8 bil­lion) by 2015. Pro­jec­tions for 2017 sug­gest that the spend will hit £8 bil­lion ($12.3 billion).

If trends like this take place state­side, we’ll be very happy.