Last week the md of Google UK called for UK companies to not be left behind by mobile. He claimed that only 3% of companies are ready to “harvest its potential” ( http://www.brandrepublic.com/news/1028382/Marketers-need-experiment-mobile-says-Google-UK-chief).

The statistics obviously speak for themselves, everyone you know probably has a mobile phone and an increasing number of them are using smart phones every day.

My kids now both have blackberries (thanks to generous grandparents at birthdays) and the laptop, which only a year ago was fought over daily, is today gathering dust. BBM and Facebook are accessed constantly (meal times, whilst watching TV, even when hanging out with their friends) and via their hand held phones rather than via a desk bound pc.

My phone comes courtesy of Matt Brittin himself and his team (thank you Matt). Google handed out Android phones at their Zeitgeist conference earlier this year. It took me a while to get used to it admittedly. But now I am the one who gets her phone out when conversations with friends hit one of those queries that none of you can remember the answer to (a recent one was the different make-up of Pimms Cups) and searches online for the answer.

Personally I am not a great app user – apart from Ocado – but I am using the internet via my phone much more now – for news stories, for weather forecasts and for recipes. And when I do go to the news pages of say the Guardian there are obviously display ads. Which are small of course (stating the obvious). Despite the size and despite the different way in which I navigate the page, those ads do sometimes cut through to me. But once again we need to understand the value of those ads relative to other display activity both on and off line.

This is the moment our industry needs to learn from history. We must not make the mistake some made with the internet initially by failing to integrate it into marketing and communications on a comparable basis with other channels.

Consumer habits are changing as far as mobile is concerned around us every day. You only need to sit in a café and observe people. The industry needs to stop playing catch up and start anticipating the mobile revolution. With an understanding of mobile advertising, apps, mobile search, direct, social. We must ensure mobile is as mainstream for marketing as it is for the consumer.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 23rd, 2010 at 10:22 am and is filed under MediaComment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.