When I look at the share of ad spend in Mobile right now, I'm struck by how undervalued mobile media is, especially when you consider how important it is to the Customer Journey. It plays a role at almost every stage, but because the 'industry' way of attributing sales relies so heavily on cookie data, most companies don't understand just how important mobile – and in fact, all of digital – is to their business' overall sales and revenue.

The current framework keeps digital small – and it keeps Mobile, the smallest part of digital with the most room for growth, even smaller. The way most brands and marketers value digital as a whole makes for small conversations about media, instead of boardroom-level discussions about how digital can impact the entire business. Most dashboards and analytics tools provide a heap of complexity at the low level – at the media level. They're focused on media metrics instead of business impact, making digital a conversation about efficiency.

Mobile is undervalued. Lots of people say this but it's even more undervalued than you think because it's part of a larger problem, which is that our entire framework for measuring digital is wrong. In order to grow digital as a whole and Mobile specifically, we need to elevate the conversation from efficiency to growth.

These are the types of conversations I've been having for the last 15 years, and I'm looking forwarding to presenting this work at the upcoming Mobile Marketing Association Conference in New York next month.

Saw this slide not long ago, and it reminded me of a similar slide I saw a few years back, reporting almost exactly the same thing. Which begs the question, if the rate and volume of smartphone adoption and usage continues to grow, why aren't brands valuing the media more?

I would say it boils down to a broken Allocation and Attribution framework. Most marketers and agencies are using broken attribution models based on cookies or data isolated by channel. Thus, the value of various media skews higher or lower than it should.

From a common-sense standpoint, we know that Mobile contributes more than this (above) to the bottom line, but most brands don't have the framework in place to prove that.
 

Looking at 2 of the 5 big trends in the Mobile ad space I'm dismayed to think that marketing's answer to more people engaging on more devices is more discrete targeting and tracking.

While I love the idea of location-based targeting for stores, I hate that advertisers want to concentrate on behavioral targeting based on mobile activity. Mobile users are using their phones for more than last-minute store lookups. So, shouldn't we be focused on understanding who the target customer is, and basing media decisions on what they're interested in? Behavioral targeting will artificially limit customer reach to only those in the later stages of customer engagement. 

Great for efficiencies, not so great for growth.