This year’s Glob­al Mobile Awards are a real sign of the times, with mobile plat­forms ever-increas­ing in use and pop­u­lar­i­ty and mobile adver­tis­ing com­pa­nies fac­ing explo­sive rates of growth.

The mar­ket of mobile adver­tis­ing is grow­ing extreme­ly quick­ly, with the US mobile ad indus­try expect­ed to increase by almost 100% in 2012 to $2.3 bil­lion and a glob­al growth of over 60% to $6.4 bil­lion (com­pare this with 2010’s glob­al spend of rough­ly $4 bil­lion). This rapid increase is a result of a num­ber of fac­tors, name­ly the strong US, Chi­nese and Japan­ese mobile mar­kets, the increas­ing num­ber of smart­phone users, con­sumers spend­ing more and more time with their mobile devices, larg­er net­work expo­sure and data ser­vices (3g, 4g) and the high pro­por­tion of mobile brows­er and mobile appli­ca­tion usage.

It is report­ed by Nielsen that 64% of time spent on mobile phones is on appli­ca­tions and 11% with browsers, and when we com­bine this with the hun­dreds of mil­lions of smart­phone users around today and the rapid con­ver­sion of non-smart­phone users, few mar­kets are cur­rent­ly hold­ing more poten­tial, more mon­ey to be made and more dig­i­tal media jobs to be offered, than the mobile mar­ket­ing sector.

The poten­tial is clear­ly there, but what is also clear is that mobile adver­tis­ing mod­els — and the agen­cies uti­liz­ing them – are in their infan­cy, and the indus­try still has much to learn. As mobile adver­tis­ing mod­els advance and as new tech­nolo­gies estab­lish bet­ter adver­tis­ing tech­niques, we can expect to see many new trends, but what trends are hot to watch right now? Let’s take a look.

Behav­ioral Advert­ing Targeting

Smart­phones are no-longer new, but mobile ad tar­get­ing is still very gen­er­al, with mod­els using devices and demo­graph­ics as the main cri­te­ria to decide which adver­tise­ment to dis­play. We can expect rapid advance­ment over the com­ing years in behav­ioral tar­get­ing, which will use user smart­phone behav­ior, loca­tion and demo­graph­ics to pro­vide high­ly spe­cial­ized and high­ly effec­tive mobile advertising.

Increas­ing Job Positions 

With the mobile app mar­ket­place set­tling down, new meth­ods of prof­it are com­ing to the fore­front, includ­ing new ad oper­a­tions and advanced as report­ing for mobile apps and games. Many pub­lish­ers are now estab­lish­ing and expand­ing ded­i­cat­ed in-house teams to focus espe­cial­ly on mobile apps, with a focus on rev­enue diversification.

Adver­tis­ing Stan­dard­iza­tion across Dif­fer­ent Mobile Platforms

In the very ear­ly days of mobile adver­tise­ment and up to the present, adver­tis­ers have had to deal with a con­fus­ing array of adver­tis­ing net­work plat­forms; major net­work plat­forms such as Apple iAds and Google AdMob, inde­pen­dent net­works such as InMo­bi and a num­ber of oth­er mobile demand plat­forms. In the inter­ests of clar­i­ty, we will like­ly see con­sol­i­da­tions, such as the con­sol­i­da­tion of demand-side adver­tis­ing plat­forms and tra­di­tion­al net­work plat­forms. This will make adver­tis­ing net­works more approach­able, and make things less com­pli­cat­ed and con­vo­lut­ed for adver­tis­ing and mar­ket­ing firms.

Real-time Mobile Adver­tise­ment Bidding

This will like­ly be a real game chang­er for the mobile adver­tis­ing mar­ket. Real-time bid­ding is an emerg­ing adver­tis­ing tech­nol­o­gy that applies the prin­ci­ples of free-mar­ket com­pe­ti­tion to ensure fair prices, bet­ter con­trol and bet­ter ad tar­get­ing. Adver­tis­ers will be able to see exact­ly what they are get­ting and for what cost (con­trolled by them­selves through bid­ding), and pub­lish­ers will find more sources of rev­enue from the com­pet­i­tive auc­tion of adver­tis­ing space.