Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

While at Google’s offices recently, I had the pleasure to hear a Google Product Manager present the company’s view of how information retrieval has changed with the rise of mobile and smartphone adoption.

They are calling it “micro-moments,” the premise being that as smartphone adoption and use continues to skyrocket, consumers increasingly have small bursts of interaction with their phones across search, social, video and email, as opposed to prolonged periods in front of a desktop.

This viewpoint represents a shift from the linear “sit, search and act” desktop mentality that characterized the early days of the internet, in which research and action were typically performed in one sitting while in front of a connected internet device.

These days, according to Google, more searches are done on mobile than on desktop in many countries, including the United States, Japan and United Kingdom.

Google’s micro-moment perspective posits that discovery and action are decoupled as discovery comes in multi-session bursts, across channels, on a mobile device, while action (conversion/purchase) often takes place later on a larger screen, a laptop or tablet device....

When we speak of mobile advertising trends we usually think as far as a couple of months to a year from the present. That’s all well, but what’s more interesting is what will happen three to five years from now.

According to eMarketer, mobile internet ad spending will grow to $94 billion worldwide by 2018. Furthermore, Ericsson reports that there will be 10 times the amount of mobile data traffic by 2019. All signs point to mobile advertising growing more than we can imagine, and as with anything, it has to evolve if it wants to stand the test of time.

With that said, here are five mobile advertising trends you can expect to see by the year 2020...

The 2015 holiday shopping season already is shaping up to be a gift for U.S. online retailers, based on IBM’s eighth annual Online Retail Readiness Report just out.

As the final tally of 2014 holiday shopping, online retail sales increased 13% from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday with the average order value reaching $125.

Mobile accounted for 21% of sales during last year’s holiday shopping season and IBM projects it will account for 26% this year.

Mobile traffic to U.S. retail websites reached 47% in March of this year, a rather huge increase from the 29% just two years ago.

Mobile traffic is projected to top 55% of all traffic to retail websites by the end of this year, according to IBM.

And along with traffic, mobile sales are up.

Mobile sales accounted for 24% of all online retail sales in March of this year, nearly double the 13% from two years ago....

No one can deny the rapid rate in which Mobile Commerce is growing.

A recent report from comScore showed that online retail spending had grown by 14% last year, while total consumer retail spending had only grown by single digits. At the moment, most online spending is still happening over desktop and laptop computers, but that is expected to change, and soon, according to recent data from the U.S. Census and other sources.

Mobile Online Spending is the Way of the Future.People might still be using their computers to buy online, but they won’t be for much longer. According to Digiday, commerce is one of the industries that will be most affected by growing mobile platforms. According to a forecast by Goldman Sachs, global e-commerce is expected to grow to $638 billion by 2018. Goldman also asserts that it will be tablets rather than smart phones that will be the primary source of online spending....