Mobile Devices...An Emerging Form of Advertising

While conducting research for my final project I came across an article that I just couldn't wait to talk about.  I have known about the effects of the internet on advertising, but never thought about how mobile devices particularly have a huge impact on advertising.  Marketers are afraid to spend too much of their money and resources into mobile advertising until they have concrete proof that it would be the route to take.  I believe that marketers need to emerge themselves into this newer way of advertising because it will just increase the sales of the products.  The usage of the Smartphone is increasing and is speculated to keep increasing (see picture below) as well as tablets.  Mobile advertising includes smartphones and tablets, when putting these two devices together the usage by far overrides the amount people use laptop/desktop computers.  When advertisers immersed themselves in online advertising the products sold (both online and offline) increased dramatically; there was a positive correlation between the two.  Marketers began advertising online due to the trend of society using the web for their everyday tasks.  Now that the trend has switched over to mobile devices, marketers must follow in these footsteps and begin spending more money in mobile advertising.  It is known that marketers follow consumer trends later because they do not want to rush into a new phase too quickly; they first want proof of the medium's effectiveness before making a dramatic change.