A blog post by the Canadian Marketing Association (CMA), titled Mobile Ads in Video and Entertainment Solutions, points out several advantages of advertising on mobile phones and encourages businesses to advertise on mobile platforms. CMA believes that mobile advertising will be the reigning promoting tool in the future because of its flexibility and the growing popularity of the use of mobile phone. The graph below shows the upward trend in people choosing mobile phones to watch online videos. And that number is growing fast; mobile share of online video time watched, as shown below, almost doubled in the second quarter of 2012. Indeed, mobile advertising presents a formidable potential for marketers to promote their products as well as for companies, such as Facebook and Google, to generate revenue.

The effectiveness of mobile advertising can be illustrated through an example in this article:

“Scott Nordby, president of Innovative Real Estate Group in Colorado, said he pays online-real estate company Zillow Inc. about $340 a month to ensure his thumbnail photo and contact information show up on 10,000 Zillow-powered home listings in a single Denver Zip code. With a few taps on the smartphone screen, a would-be home buyer can call or email Mr. Nordby and his team. Mr. Nordby said he receives about 150 to 180 inquiries a month—or more than half his total referrals—from would-be home buyers who found him on Zillow. Roughly one in 10 referrals from Zillow come through calls from would-be buyers’ smartphones. He adds he’s “thrilled” with the results. Zillow Chief Executive Spencer Rascoff said people who use Zillow on mobile devices are three times more likely to contact agents like Mr. Nordby than people who surf Zillow on a traditional computer.”

Sometimes it’s easy for people to ignore the mobile ads since smartphone screens are typically small, but the average cost of mobile ads is only about 3-5% of advertising in a national newspaper, making mobile advertising still a very attractive opportunity.