Street Fight, a hyperlocal market research group, has an interesting piece from Michael Boland, a senior analyst for BIA/Kelsey. It is called “Mid-Year Analysis: The 5 Biggest Trends Driving Mobile, Local Media.”
He recounts a few mobile device predictions and offers some analysis on trends he’s seeing halfway through 2012. These are going to be part of a more formal BIA/Kelsey analysis later in the year. They result from observations and a couple mobile device/local conferences he’s been a part of.
The glaringly obvious tetratrend is that advertising spending on mobile devices is increasing and will continue to do so at a rapid rate. Related to that is that ads for local businesses comprise a large portion of those ads. He predicts that such ads will move from being half to being two-thirds of ads by 2016.
Building from that premise is a prediction that the ads will drive locally-oriented behavior. That is, they’ll encourage people to drill down further by seeking directions to businesses or explore the business more and the user will spend more time on the website.
In addition to spending more time on the website, additional activity will follow — e.g., purchasing something or completing payment loop. He thinks mobile payment schemes and “wallets” might finally get some traction.
And finally, he sees a significant increase in mobile-specific content. In other words, content will be created for mobile device use rather than simply resized from the Internet for the mobile screen.
