Any­one look­ing for media jobs in adver­tis­ing will have lit­tle option but to con­tend as cre­ative­ly as pos­si­ble with the great mobile dis­rup­tion, accord­ing to a vet­er­an adver­tis­ing and dig­i­tal media executive.

Quentin George recent­ly told the Lon­don Finan­cial Times news­pa­per, “Peo­ple were con­cerned with the tran­si­tion from print to dig­i­tal and TV to dig­i­tal. Get ready, it’s going to get a whole lot worse.”

The elu­sive mobile rev­enue yield

The chal­lenge remains how to gen­er­ate rev­enue in a field which is a logis­ti­cal night­mare. Ads have got to look good across thou­sands of dif­fer­ent devices with count­less variations.

The prob­lem for any­one hold­ing com­mer­cial media jobs in mobile adver­tis­ing is, blunt­ly, this: mobile ad spend­ing is grow­ing faster than any oth­er media cat­e­go­ry, but the glob­al rev­enue yield remains minus­cule at $6.5 bil­lion. That’s a pal­try 1.3 per cent of all ad revenues.

So what’s the answer? Maybe the search for “an” answer is flawed in the first place. Mul­ti-track cre­ativ­i­ty seems to be called for instead. We do know what doesn’t work. Plant­i­ng a dis­play ad inside an app or on a web page’s bor­der just flops – it’s not only dull, it’s infu­ri­at­ing­ly small and stands more chance of antag­o­niz­ing a prospec­tive cos­tumer than entic­ing her.  Trans­pos­ing con­cepts that were born in print onto mobile is usu­al­ly a bad move.

Phuc Truong, MD of the Havas-owned mobile ad agency Mobext, says, “You have these old-world media play­ers that are try­ing to use what worked for them in the past and slap­ping it on mobile. It is not the same thing at all. It is not even close.”

Want­ed: new mar­ket­ing models

This is where a new gen­er­a­tion of cre­ative tal­ent seiz­ing media jobs in mobile adver­tis­ing may come into their own. And they’re already fac­ing fierce com­pe­ti­tion: mobile ad star­tups and inno­v­a­tive media com­pa­nies are furi­ous­ly at work devel­op­ing new mar­ket­ing mod­els for mobile.

An emerg­ing front run­ner is mobile video adver­tis­ing, which has suc­ceed­ed in per­suad­ing some adver­tis­ers to pay up to $25 to reach 1,000 view­ers – a com­par­a­tive­ly high price in the field. And Face­book saw ad sales rise on its net­work after intro­duc­ing ads into the news­feed for mobile gadgets.

One thing is cer­tain: if you’re look­ing for media jobs in mobile, your prin­ci­pal attribute will be your creativity.