The bottom line: This is sort of a chicken-and-egg situation. Does the fact that roughly a fifth of tweets come from mobile users make location information slightly irrelevant, or will the availability of the location info drive more mobile usage? We’ll take the glass-half-full view: getting 20 percent of tweets from mobile devices is a solid amount, and giving users the chance to leverage their location should increase it further.

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MOBILE AD BUDGETS BUCK THE WIDER DOWNWARD TREND, and will hit $5.7 billion by 2014, says Juniper Research in a new report. While overall ad spending is being hit by budget cutbacks, mobile is set to grow, as it offers engagement with the consumer and a more quantifiable ROI than other mediums.

Still, that $5.7 billion will only account for 1.5 percent of the total global ad spend in 2014, with many advertisers as yet unconvinced that mobile has a big enough reach to justify higher spending. Source

The bottom line: Mobile advertising’s characteristics – quantifiable ROI, direct engagement with consumers – mean that it’s more than just a fad, and will be a valuable tool for marketers. Still, questions persist about reach, even if they show a slight misunderstanding of mobile, because it’s not particularly a broadcast medium. Where mobile will succeed is in getting advertisers connected to the right individuals directly, rather than by the broadcast, shotgun approach.

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US MOBILE MUSIC CONSUMPTION DOUBLES, BUT REMAINS LOW, according to new research from Forrester. The firm says that 10 percent of US adults listen to music on their mobile devices at least once a month, compared to a quarter of people in the UK and a staggering 70 percent of Chinese citydwellers.

Revenues remain low, though, and are projected to hit just 866 million euros in Europe and $263 million in the US in 2013, with almost two-thirds of US people surveyed saying they had no interest in buying songs on their phones. Source

The bottom line: Mobile isn’t immune from the malaise in the wider music business, with consumers reluctant to pay for songs on their handsets. This shouldn’t be at all surprising: there’s really nothing about mobile that makes it much different than any other platform, since consumers haven’t shown a lot of interest in buying songs over the air. Streaming and radio-like services look like they might enjoy more success on mobile.

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SMARTPHONES GRAB THE HEADLINES, BUT FEATURE PHONES GRAB THE SALES, says NPD Group in a new report. In the second quarter, feature phones accounted for 72 percent of all handset sales in the US, though this is down five points from the previous year. Smartphones accounted for the other 28 percent, although they saw almost 50 percent growth from the previous period. Overall, NPD says that unit sales were up 14 percent in the US in Q2 from the previous year, with the ASP up 4 percent to $87. Source

The bottom line: It pays to keep in mind that while the likes of the iPhone dominate media coverage, the vast majority of users are still on feature phones – so developers, marketers and content producers need to keep them in mind.

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SMARTPHONE APP STORES TO DELIVER 6.67 BILLION DOWNLOADS IN 2014 in the US alone, says Frost & Sullivan. The firm appears to believe that much of this will come from free applications, but doesn’t offer any guidance on revenues. Source

The bottom line: It doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to see lots of app downloads coming as more and more app stores come online from handset vendors, OS providers and operators. But if most of these apps are going to be free to download, where are the revenues going to come from? Paid sponsorship by brands or in-app ads?

This has been widely heralded as Vodafone’s venture into the app store market.  Only after the APIs are released to developers will it be any easier to tell if Vodafone has a good chance of emulating the success of Apple’s original. (Source)

The bottom line: Betavine, Vodafone’s open source developer community will also need to play a key role in feeding out information and supporting developers.

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VODAFONE MOBILE AD RESULTS: Vodafone announced on Wednesday that it had fulfilled its ambition to open up mobile advertising services to 18 operating company markets in the last 18 months. It reports strong revenue growth from mobile advertising services was experienced during 2008/9, and plans to continue the roll out, expanding the type of mobile advertising services and their reach.

Over the last year, Vodafone Marketing Solutions has run over 2000 campaigns across its global footprint for hundreds of global brands. According to Vodafone, these brands are enjoying considerable success with mobile banner campaigns and newer mobile advertising formats such as branded content, sponsored alerts, opt-in push messaging and advertising on service based text messages.

Vodafone says it will continue to invest in its advertising offering over the coming year by adding to its global reach through affiliates and partners- “including operators such as mobilkom, Proximus, Vodacom, and China Mobile” – and by seeking to extend the number, type and effectiveness of its advertising service portfolio. (Source)

The bottom line: These developments in mobile advertising can only be good for a still nascent, yet evidently burgeoning market with many new technologies to explore. As the technologies and partnerships develop, together with mobile Internet usage and penetration of sophisticated handsets, so will the numbers exposed to mobile advertising.

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ORANGE TRAFFIC: Orange revealed record mobile Internet traffic levels. As a study by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) showed, the U.K. mobile ad market was worth GBP28.6 million in 2008.

The Orange World portal counted 3.25 million unique users between December and February 2009, a 26 percent increase on its previous Orange Digital Media Index (ODMI) study for the three months from July 2008.

Social networking continued to gain popularity, averaging more than 940,000 monthly unique visitors to sites such as Bebo and Facebook, each viewing an average of 397 pages a month. (Source)

The bottom line: This goes to show that mobile Internet traffic is strong outside the top two operators, with mobile Internet consumers increasingly happy to mimic their PC-browsing habits on the smaller screen. The statistics do seem generally skewed to a younger demographic.  It would be interesting to see increased demographic granularity on these browsing statistics, and discover where older age groups head to for their mobile internet content.

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IN-APP ADVERTISING:  In-application up-selling is set to exceed $14billion by 2014, according to the latest Juniper Research report. Juniper says the “fremium” business model, in which free-to-download applications are monetized through subsequent micropayments from within the application, will become increasingly prevalent.

The iPhone is set to support in-app billing later this year as part of its operating system v3.0 upgrade, and Juniper expects other app stores to follow suit. (Source)

The bottom line: It should be interesting to observe the support in-app billing receives and how it is adopted.  We are currently asked to pay to upgrade an application to the full advertising-free version, but this will ask us to pay to unlock new content such as the next level of a mobile game, or the most up-to-date video highlights of a match. Will it be an interruptive nuisance and create a negative user experience; or provide a compelling value added benefit to already appreciated applications?  Watch this space, and check out this post for more commentary.

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U.K. MOBILE AD SPEND:  The U.K. mobile advertising spend rose to GBP28.6 million ($44 million) in 2008, higher than expected, according to a study from the digital marketing trade body Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

• Spending doubled in size on a like for like basis in 2008, jumping 99.2 percent year on year
• Mobile ad spend was divided evenly between mobile display advertising (49.8 percent) and paid-for-search advertising on the mobile web 50.2 percent.
• Mobile display, including banners, text links, tenancies pre/post roll and in game ads, accounted for £14.2 million ($22 million) in 2008
• Paid-for search reached an estimated GBP14.4 million ($22 million).

The larger than anticipated spend was put down to several factors: A bigger audience, a better mobile user experience, increased mobile Internet usage – especially in social networking, better handsets, and growing mobile departments in U.K. media agencies. (Source)

Following a similar theme, comScore’s M:Metrics reported last Friday that 45 percent more U.K. advertisers ran mobile Internet banner campaigns in the six-month period ending March 2009, compared to the six months prior.

The bottom line: These statistics illustrate that far from being a neglected medium, U.K. brands are committing budget to targeted mobile advertising, which is reaching an ever-increasing audience. If many of these are only still trials and the total spends remain modest, then the figures produced when brands properly begin campaigns should make for compelling reading.