US Mobile Marketing Spend Projected to Almost Double in the Next 2 Years

May 10, 2013

This article is included in these additional categories:

Digital | Financial Services | Mobile Phone | Retail & E-Commerce | Staffing | Uncategorized

MMA-Mobile-Marketing-Comm-Spending-US-2010-2015-May2013The mobile marketing ecosystem is demonstrating rapid growth, with $6.7 billion spent by client-side marketers and retailers in 2012, according to [download page] a study commissioned by the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) and conducted by researchers at Columbia University. That investment should grow to $10.5 billion this year before ballooning to $19.8 billion in 2015, with close to half of that ($9.2 billion) coming from mobile advertising alone. Last year, mobile became the third-largest online advertising format by share of revenues, owing to 111% year-over-year growth, according to a recent report from the IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Mobile ad spending won’t be the fastest-growing part of the mobile marketing ecosystem, though, according to the MMA report. Mobile direct response expenditures are expected to grow at a compound annual rate (CAGR) of 77.4% between 2010 and 2015, increasing from just $669 million last year to $2.9 billion in 2015. Mobile CRM expenditures, meanwhile, will grow more slowly, despite an impressive 43.8% CAGR.

Other Findings:

  • Finance, retail (excluding CPG) and manufacturing (excluding CPG) are the 3 biggest contributors to mobile marketing expenditures in the US, combining for $3 billion in spending last year, or about half of the total.
  • Mobile marketing sales impact has grown at similarly high rates. In fact, measuring mobile sales impact against marketing expenditure revealed that “spending more across mobile marketing platform does not decrease the impact rate.”
  • Overall, the mobile marketing ecosystem contributed $139 billion in incremental output to the US economy last year, up from $85.3 billion in 2011. (For comparison’s sake, a study by Harvard Researchers found that the ad-supported internet ecosystem contributed $742 billion to US GDP in 2011).
  • Incremental output from the mobile marketing ecosystem should roughly triple to surpass $400 billion in 2015, per the MMA study estimates.
  • The mobile marketing ecosystem supports more than a half-million jobs, and should support more than 1.5 million by 2015. If their projections hold true, the researchers estimate that each employee in a mobile marketing communications role would sustain 23 non-mobile occupations throughout the US.

About the Data: “MMA Mobile Marketing Economic Impact Study” measures both the size of mobile marketing spending in the U.S. as well as its resulting impact on sales and employment. Mobile marketing’s economic impact was calculated by classifying the US economy into 16 industry groups based on the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). From there, an econometric model was applied that compared these industries’ rates of expenditure on three major categories of mobile marketing across prominent mobile channels with their rates of investment. All these investments were then correlated with the rate of sales growth achieved by each industry to determine the share of each industry’s total sales and employment attributable to each category of investment, particularly mobile marketing.

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