At around this time of year Esteemed Media Pundits have been predicting “Next year is the year of the mobile” for at least 5 years.

I was on a panel recently at the Mobile Advertising World Conference. My co-panellist Simon Andrews upped the game. He’s calling it the “Decade of the mobile”.

Well he might be right, although the particular device you connect to the web with will continue to diversify, and of course what you call it might change.

There used to be a regular annual prediction about convergence, so that you would use one device for all entertainment, calls, web etc. That hasn’t happened. I didn’t think I’d have a use for an iPad as well as a Blackberry and an Android phone but I seem to need to carry all three around with me.

And last time I watched TV with my kids,  daughter 1 was on her iPhone, daughter 2 was bbming and I was looking at Zeebox.

The best remark came not from anyone on the panel but from Hugh Fletcher, National Digital Manager from Audi (who was there to speak about the fantastic Audi app which was the only one pre loaded onto my iPad when I was given it as a birthday present in the summer). He wondered why mobile media men were making it all so complicated, and how we can expect senior marketers who know and understand the power of TV, print, outdoor etc to know or care about a whole new set of jargon.

If it is to be the year (decade) of the mobile next year we’d better keep it simple.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 9th, 2011 at 11:13 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.